Eavesdropping at the Movies

About Eavesdropping at the Movies

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo. "I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.

Publisher

Jose Arroyo and Michael Glass

Category

tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

22 Aug 2017

Latest episode

3 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

484 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   3 Sept 2026

   482 - Coyote vs. Acme

   In 2023, Warner Bros. announced the completion of Coyote vs. Acme, a family film in which Looney Tunes' Wile E. Coyote, still desperately and valiantly chasing the Road Runner, sues the Acme Corporation for selling defective products. They also announced that the film would not be released, preferring to claim a tax loss of some $30 million against it. Those who'd seen the film described how good it was and that it deserved a release, and there was opposition to its cancellation both publicly and within the industry. In response, Warner Bros. decided to shop it out to other distributors, with Ketchup Entertainment eventually buying and releasing it. Now that we've finally seen it, the question remains: was Coyote vs. Acme worth rescuing? Recorded on 29th August 2026.

2. 

   30 Aug 2026

   481 - Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

   Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinematic deconstructions. It tells the story of a young, queer, indie filmmaker hired to resurrect a problematic slasher series of yesteryear, the Camp Miasma films, which feature a box-headed villain who periodically emerges from a lake to murder teens who are drinking too much and forcing themselves on each other. Attempting to decide what she wants her reboot to be, she revisits the first film and meets its reclusive star, the enigmatic look in whose eye, in that first film, she's desperate to understand. Mike gets on with Teenage Sex and Death; José does not. What José finds cutesy and aimless, Mike sees originality and charm in. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is keen to have their cake and eat it, building in criticism of Gen Z-esque reevaluations of old media by modern standards while engaging in them all the same. This is a film loaded with irony - but its love of its subject matter is obvious. It's easy to argue that Teenage Sex and Death is at odds with itself when its former final girl (a delightfully drawling, glamorous Gillian Anderson) encourages the visiting filmmaker to cast off her intellectual pretensions and simply enjoy the "flesh and fluids", but it's a film that has plenty of room for ambiguity and blurring of the lines between points of view, and reality, media and fantasy. To some, the ambiguities will be approached as a problem to solve - just what is reality and what isn't, at the end of the day? - but for Mike, they're Schoenbrun's way of following Anderson's advice. It's not a perfect film and there will be those to whom it fails to speak at all (one of them is on this podcast), but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is at the very least interesting, and an eager addition to the groaning shelves of self-referential horror media. Recorded on 23rd August 2026.

3. 

   23 Aug 2026

   480 - Cabaret

   Half a century since its 1972 release, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret remains startlingly sexy, funny and politically unsettling. We admire Liza Minnelli’s extraordinary star-making performance, the film’s distinctive choreography and cinematography, and how the Kit Kat Klub, and the numbers performed within, chart the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Berlin. We also consider its unusually liberated treatment of sexuality, and how its rejection of rigid binaries and hierarchies offers a counterpoint to the certainties of fascism. Recorded on 16th August 2026.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

285,765

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.0 / 5

8 ratings

Spotify

4.8 / 5

20 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 83 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

98

Social presence

0

YouTube

82

Engagement

90

Contact Eavesdropping at the Movies

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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