The Cinematologists Podcast

Welcome friends.
As always, our final episode of a calendar year is a look back at our cinematic highlights, structured around Neil’s and my top ten films lists. We always try to put this in something of a broader context, suggesting the always subjective criteria of judgement that go into our selections and the sense of incompleteness, compromise and general fallibility of ranking one’s artistic pleasure and admiration. But Neil is right when he comments on the show that lists are a way of organising thought amid the incessant noise of cultural overload.
That question of structure becomes a recurring preoccupation across the conversation. Neil mentions that, when assembling his ten, he found himself instinctively pairing films; spotting “cousins” that echo each other in tone, narrative, or thematic focus.
This is something of a recognition that cinematic appreciation often works through a clustering: films that don’t merely share “topics” (capitalism, community, violence, grief), but share strategies for coping with a world that increasingly refuses coherence.
For me, an undeniable feature of 2025 in cinema has been the many narratives that reflect a feeling of senselessness—stories that don’t “resolve” so much as metabolise disorder. We keep circling filmmakers who can register the insanity of the present without converting it into a tidy thesis. Radu Jude is the obvious touchstone here: we talk about how his filmmaking avoids the temptation of big declarative statements, holding sincerity and cynicism, humour and despair, in the same hand.
Kontinental 25, as much as any other film this year, explores the granular experience of politics as a kind of moral nausea, digital immediacy of its form aping the doom-scroll logic of being pulled from one sickening little story to the next.
We keep returning to the sense that many “state of the nation” films this year (especially in the American context) operated as overt statements—almost insistently discursive—while, at the same time, we explored quieter, more contemplative works that approached personal and social crisis through subtler uses of form, tone, and time.
Many films this year, implicitly and explicitly, explored the tensions of capitalism as a kind of lived texture: bureaucracy, managerialism, the violence of systems that call themselves neutral. From the handheld realism of Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine) right through to the expansive mythos and genre pleasures of Sinners (Ryan Coogler), the political economy of history and identity becomes a driving force.
Indeed, Neil looks beyond the reductive “folk horror” label attached to Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, reading it instead as a study of collective life, of a community’s ethical capacity being tested by difference. Yet, in the end, capitalism arrives not as an abstract system but as an administrative colonisation that annihilates any sense of physical and cultural grounding.
Political critique, meanwhile, was often built into formal aesthetics and narrative structure, delivered through inventive reworkings of familiar genres. Sinners, along with Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, were, of course, operating within the métier of horror. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk (the only film in my top ten I didn’t see at the cinema) is a brutal, unrelenting take on the speculative-dystopian trope of lethal competition, one that reads as a symbolic portrait of social psychopathy.
Alongside these political currents sits another, quieter one: the insistence that time, how it’s felt, withheld, folded, or weaponised, might be cinema’s most underappreciated tool. Neil’s mini-rant about people calling Reichardt “slow” is really about the poverty of contemporary attention. The film knows it’s slow; it’s inviting you to spend time, to register the “felt time” of what happened before the film even begins. Elsewhere, we keep noticing films that structure revelation itself as an ethical question: when do we learn things, and how do we learn them?
It’s why Nickel Boys becomes such a touchstone film for me, one that is criminally under-discussed. RaMell Ross’s attunement to memory and subjectivity, rather than objective historical biography, is realised through an innovative use of the POV shot—retooling it as an “aesthetics of alignment with empathy,” an apparatus through which we’re offered a multi-layered window into psycho-social trauma.
I don’t want to reveal all the films we discuss—particularly our top choices—which, if you’ve followed The Cinematologists podcast, might strike you as paradoxically both as you might expect and somewhat contrary to expectations.
At the end of the show, we spend a little time reflecting on The Cinematologists. We talk about the show’s ten-year run as a fitting “bracketing,” and hope it stands as a testament to a valuable, collaborative body of work. We discuss the different stages of the podcast, how it has evolved over time, and why, for various reasons in our work and personal lives, this feels like the right moment to stop.
We’re no longer “young academics,” no longer driven by the same imperative to fill a gap in the culture. And we’ve always said that if the podcast ever became a chore—or, worse, if it looked like it might compromise our friendship—it would be time to draw things to a close.
For me, I know I’ll reflect more in depth, in time, on what The Cinematologists has meant: the defining anchor of my cultural life, and a way of orienting my thoughts around the artform I love. I do need a little space, though, to adequately reckon with how much I’ve gained, the hard and soft skills that have made me a better writer, speaker, and thinker. Most importantly, producing the show with Neil for over a decade has taught me so much about the nature of collaboration, a commitment to practice, and what it means to be a friend.
And, of course, thank you so much to everyone who has listened and come with us on this journey.
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For the full Cinematologists archive, head to: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/the-cinematologists-newsletter-archive
For more bonus content: www.patreon.com/cinematologists
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Music Credits:
‘Theme from The Cinematologists’
Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

The final regular episode of the podcast, not just for the season, but yes, for good, is a doozy. Writer Violet Lucca returns to the podcast for the first time since 2017 and for her first full, solo conversation, to discuss her incredible book on David Cronenberg, Clinical Trials (2024, Abrams). I talk to Violet about her process of writing the book, wit in criticism, sex and identity, and the politics of the time the films were made and what they say now, the emotional impact of rewatching films and the transformative power of writing about cinema, amongst other topics. And of course we explore specific titles in the Cronenburg filmography, in particular Crash (1996), Existenz (1999) and his most recent release The Shrouds (2024).
After my conversation with Violet, we delve into the complexities of Cronenberg’s work, particularly regarding sexuality and identity, and wrap up with a few thoughts looking ahead to the final episode of the pod.
Other topics in the episode include reflections on the writing of year-end film lists ahead of our final, upcoming episode, the importance of micro cinemas to film exhibition culture, and highlight former guest Pat Kelman’s crowdfunding campaign to aid film distribution in Cornwall, and for Cornish filmmakers in particular. Following (NF)
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Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists
For the full podcast archive: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/the-cinematologists-newsletter-archive
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Music Credits:
‘Theme from The Cinematologists’
Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome, friends.
I have to admit that I’ve experienced a questionable amount of pleasure in researching for this latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. When I say “research”, I basically mean that every evening for the past two weeks I’ve been guiltlessly revelling in the violence, glamour and moral ambiguity of the cinema’s greatest hitmen (and women), assassins, and lone killers.
It’s the question of these pleasures - of watching such characters move silently through the modern milieu we share: restaurants, banks, hotels, airports - and of their status as avatars for the commodity fetishism we’re socialised to desire, whether it’s clothes, cars, exotic locations or, indeed, guns, that we take as the starting point.
These pleasures are aesthetic, to be sure, and a core line of our conversation explores the visual and sonic mechanisms filmmakers use to make the lone killer look impossibly cool.
But on a deeper level, there are myriad symbolic pleasures to unpack, primarily derived from the assassin’s fundamental essence as a professional arbiter of death. By “symbolic pleasures” I mean the fantasies we get to borrow and try on at a safe distance. Cinema has always trafficked in these kinds of projected desires and anxieties, that’s what genres, stars and archetypes are for. But the lone killer amplifies this function, condensing into a single figure our contradictory longing for total freedom and autonomy, yet within the familiar framework of modernist culture, politics, and economics.
We outline the dimensions of these symbolic pleasures. Total agency without negotiation or compromise, for instance. The killer embodies absolute decision-making and self-determination. In a culture of soft coercions, bureaucracy, b******t meetings, and interminable incompetence, the killer taps into a dark form of detached liberation. Although this notion is itself confounded to comic effect in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly (2012).
The lone killer also exudes the romance of the outsider. The shadowy loner, an anti-citizen manipulating the system from the margins, carries a sense of mystery that endures, particularly in a time when sharing every aspect of our lives has become something of a default performative practice. Indeed, it’s fascinating to consider the lone killer as a symbol of alienation. They’re what a certain kind of loneliness looks like when it becomes active rather than depressive: isolation turned into method, detachment honed into a way of being in the world.
For some killers, sexual desire is absolutely central to the mythos. Bond is the clearest prototype here, because scholarship has long framed him as a figure where violence is packaged with aspirational consumption and sexual charisma, all intertwined. And then there’s the sexual charge, which often isn’t “romance” so much as mobility: sex as another form of non-attachment, a proof that the killer can pass through bodies and spaces without being pinned down by them. Yet Bond films (and to an extent the character himself) have been read through a queer lens – breaking down the heteromasculine fantasy the films seem to promote (an aspect we discuss in some depth on this episode of the podcast: License to Queer).
The real hook, though, is the fantasy of having no responsibilities to other humans. Or, more accurately, the fantasy of choosing your responsibilities. These protagonists often keep one small “human” attachment in a sealed container while everyone else becomes abstraction: targets, obstacles, and collateral damage. That compartmentalisation is the emotional technology that allows the lifestyle to function.
Sexuality reads differently, of course, when the lone killer is a woman. The adoption of the femme fatale persona becomes both a weapon and a trap: seduction as tactical performance, but also as a ready-made framework through which her violence is contained, coded and often punished. The female lone killer frequently has to navigate the double bind of being hyper-visible as an object of desire while trying to claim the same cool detachment and professional focus afforded to her male counterparts.
Then there’s competence as seduction. So many of these films function as “craft porn”: extended sequences of planning, surveillance, weapon prep, logistics, timing. We’re invited to admire mastery long before we’re asked to consider the consequences. That emphasis on hyper-competence often feeds into another recurring strand of lone-killer characterisation: a kind of obsessive, compulsive pathology. There is frequently an implicit, and sometimes explicit, suggestion that the killer is an outsider not just because of what they do, but because of how they are wired – uncomfortable with ordinary social interaction, more at home with systems and routines than with people. Being “out of sync” with the social world is then reframed as the superpower that underwrites their cold precision and attention to detail. It’s a trope that, to put it mildly, comes with its own problems around how neurodivergence and emotional detachment are conflated and aestheticised.
Perhaps most importantly of all, though, the hitman/assassin symbolises the pleasure of circumventing – even actively challenging – the contradictions of the moral frameworks we’re all supposedly compelled by. On one level, it’s straightforward: breaking the laws of modern society to “get the job done” is stylised into an art form. But for many of these characters, especially those who aren’t simply nihilistic or coldly driven by money, there’s also a kind of ersatz morality at play. They possess a code, an ethos that operates as a moral alibi. Their relativist ethics become a way to expose the contingency, compromise, and hypocrisy of our broader systems of justice and citizenship. In watching them, we get to flirt with the fantasy of stepping outside that contradiction altogether.
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The notion of the cinematic is an oft-floated term: a kind of critical get-out clause for when a writer (or speaker) wants to register approval without getting pinned down. It lets you gesture beyond the prosaic, narrative, structure, even aesthetics (too easily reduced to “mere beauty”), towards something supposedly larger and more complex to define.
Ci…

Gwenno, on the set of her short film, Tresor (2022) [Copyright: Bosena / Alex Fish]
We have the perfect theme song for our podcast, courtesy of the musician, artist and writer Gwenno. In Bristol in September, for the Encounters film festival, Neil took some time to chat to Gwenno at length about culture, social media, memory, capitalism and community, to put on [tape] some shared thoughts about life and art, before the podcast winds down.
Even before writing and recording the theme tune to the Cinematologists - available to purchase and stream here - Gwenno was a friend of the show, and Neil wanted to give listeners the chance to hear from someone whose ideas and approaches to the making and absorbing of art have come to inspire and challenge his own. He also just really likes talking to her, and wanted podcast listeners to experience that pleasure also.
Around that central conversation, inspired by it, Neil and Dario get into it about intersections of art and culture as they frequently do, plus challenges faced by contemporary youth, the critical engagement of students with the film industry, the quest for artistic authenticity, and the evolving nature of countercultures in the digital age. The conversation also touches on the impact of technology on creativity, the role of education in fostering cultural exploration, and reflections on historical subcultures like rave culture.
Thanks to Maddie at Watershed in Bristol for providing a space to record during the Encounters Film Festival.
Gwenno is currently touring and if she’s near you, you should go and see her, she’s an incredible live performer. This episode also features her songs ‘Tresor’, from the album and film of the same name, from 2022, and available to buy here, and ‘St Ives New School’, from this year’s brilliant record Utopia, which you can buy here.
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Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists
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You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.
We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.
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Music Credits:
‘Theme from The Cinematologists’
Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing.




This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe