Mike Leigh – This Had Oscar Buzz

2026 TIFF Recap!!

We’re back home from our latest trip to the Toronto International Film Festival! And as always, we’re offering you a buffet of our reactions from a week’s worth of movies that will be coming soon to a theatre near you! We talk about the newest People’s Choice Award winner La Bola Negra, along with the International People’s Choice Award winner (and Best Actor contender for Andrew Scott) Elsinore. Topics also include Julianne Moore earning huge crowd reaction in The Debut, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine underwhelming us both, our collective favorite of the fest Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, the TIFF preroll ads, injuries, festival flops, and more!!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

THOB Returns to TIFF!

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is tiff24-thob-1024x512.png

We’re back from our annual trip to TIFF and we’re giving you another exhaustive episode on all the films we saw! Topics include the newly minted People’s Choice winner The Life of Chuck, Oscar nominations we are anticipating from the lineup, the muted-mixed response to Saturday Night, Nicole Kidman back in full force in Babygirl, the rapturous response to world premiere Hard Truths, and our differing thoughts on this year’s Palme d’Or winner Anora.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

305 – Peterloo (with Fran Hoepfner)

With the upcoming return of Mike Leigh to cinemas with Hard Truths, we invited writer and Fran Mag creator Fran Hoepfner to join us to talk about his last theatrical effort, 2019’s Peterloo. The film tells the story of the buildup to the Peterloo massacre, in which years of political movement to get parliamentary representation for the people of Manchester resulted in bloodshed. Told with the attention to detail that has long been Leigh’s trademark, the film had a cold fall festival response in 2018, which led American distributor Amazon to punt the film to an unceremonious 2019 release.

This week, we dive into the film’s underrated and underexamined merits and what contributed to its unfair reception. We also talk about our anticipation for Hard Truths, this film’s lack of marquee Leigh players, and some of Leigh’s other undervalued films.

Topics also include the film’s political timeliness, Amy Raphael’s Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, and Leigh on the THR Director Roundtable.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS