Cinema Body/Cinema Mind

On Albert Serra's horrifically mesmerising Afternoons of Solitude:

Dario Llinares (@dariollinares) I’ve just finished Albert Serra’s 2024 documentary Afternoons of Solitude, which follows the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. As I’m currently deep into research on various concepts of criticism, the film made me reflect on what the critic is actually asked to do when confronted with suc...

I’m launching a new six-session live course on Cinema Body / Cinema Mind:

**Becoming a Better Film Critic: Exploring Six Problems in How We Write About Cinema**

The course begins from a simple but surprisingly difficult question: what is film criticism actually for?

Not just whether a film is “good” or “bad”. Not just whether we liked it. Not just whether we can produce a clever take quickly enough to keep up with the endless churn of online opinion. But what criticism does when it is working properly — how it turns response into argument, experience into language, and looking into a form of thought.

Across the six sessions, I’ll be thinking through some of the core problems that shape film writing now: taste and judgement; authorship and genre; form, style and close analysis; ideology and aesthetics; subjectivity and memory; and the changing place of criticism in the online age.

This is not a course about learning the “correct” way to write about film. Mercifully. I’m much more interested in criticism as a practice: something provisional, argumentative, situated, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes irritating, occasionally wrong, but always trying to make sense of what cinema does to us and what we do with cinema afterwards.

The internet has opened up film criticism to an extraordinary range of voices, forms and communities. That is something to celebrate. But it has also changed the conditions of criticism: speed, platforms, algorithms, fandoms, instant consensus, the pressure to have a position before the experience has properly settled. So part of the course is about asking how we might recover depth, attention and nuance without pretending we can return to some lost golden age of criticism.

My role will not be to dispense rules from on high, but to curate debates, introduce useful frameworks, and think alongside those who attend. I’ll bring in film theory, philosophy, criticism, examples, writing strategies and practical questions — but the live discussion will be central to the course.

The first session is:

What Is Film Criticism For? From Taste to Argument
Wednesday 17 June
4:00pm BST / 8:00am PDT / 11:00am EDT

Live online for paying subscribers, with time for discussion afterwards.

https://dariollinares.substack.com/p/becoming-a-better-film-critic-exploring?r=1phduq

Serena

My next Cinema Body/Cinema Mind livestreamed podcast is tomorrow. I'll be talking to independent filmmaker Amanda Sweikow about her work which focuses on the female experience in

Got out of the old smoke for a couple of days this weekend, for a bit of brain decompression.

Very useful.

https://open.substack.com/pub/dariollinares/p/lessons-from-a-cine-autodidact-with?r=1phduq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

I’ve wanted to talk to filmmaker, video essayist and writer Thomas Flight for a few years now. I first came across his work when I was teaching film full-time at university and trying to reckon with the existential implications of the internet for institutionalised education. Not simply because YouTube has become a place where anyone can acquire practical filmmaking skills, but because Thomas exemplified the possibility that a self-curated education in cinema could be rigorous, expansive, engaging and genuinely public.

His work implicitly, and at times explicitly, asks questions that continue to preoccupy me as I still work within an institutional framework while also trying to build an critical/educational platform here on Substack. Indeed, his approach to the exploration and explanation of film made me rethink questions of accessibility and the ways academic modes of presentation often seem to fall into two camps: either simplistically rote or unnecessarily complex.

The context for this element of the conversation is that Thomas did not attend film school; he is a cinematic autodidact in the fullest sense. Although he later studied communications, his work occupies a space between criticism, fandom, cinephilia and education.

His video essays are not just “content”; they are lessons in how films work. His criticism emerges from practice, not the other way around. We talk about how his approach largely runs counter to prevailing critical obsessions with ideology or discourse, instead focusing primarily on form: pacing, editing, shots, rhythm, performance, sound, and many other elements of cinematic language.

In this 90 minute conversation we cover a host of subjects including:

The internet as a chaotic landscape of attention with a need for navigating noise

The significance of self-awareness and intentionality in online content creation

How video essays serve as educational tools and personal expressions

The importance of formal analysis in understanding filmmaking techniques

The balance between popular appeal and artistic integrity in content strategies

The opportunities and challenges of independent criticisms beyond traditional institutions

The potential revival of theatrical screenings through curated and repertory programming

The influence of media ecology and the need to redefine cinema in the modern era

Lessons from a Cine-Autodidact with Thomas Flight Thomas Flight is one of YouTube's most successful cinema-focused video essayists and has now shifted across to Substack.

My street right now

A quick post to draw your attention to a live edition of my podcast Cinema Body/Cinema Mind taking place on Substack tomorrow at 3pm (BST). I will be talking to one of the foremost online film critics, video essayists and content creators on cinema: Thomas Flight.

Thomas has been creating video essays on YouTube since 2016 and currently has 1.28 million subscribers. His audio-visual work focuses on the technical artistry of filmmaking and the language of the media that surrounds us through a media ecology lens.

He has recently expanded his culture and film writing over to Substack entitled Seeing Through Film.

I'll be talking to Thomas about all of the above, along with exploring his cinematic origin story, how he works in the noise of online culture, film criticism in today's digital ecosystem, online film education, how he decides what to cover, audience building, algorithmic uncertainty and much more.

Here is a link to the event - it is free, but you will need to subscribe to my Substack for access:

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/217149?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

Feel free to share.

LIVE SOON: Cinema Body Cinema Mind - Dario Llinares with Thomas Flight Starting May 29 at 10:00 AM EDT

Morning at the beach.

The final episode of The Cinematologists Podcast is out.

Yes, after 10 years, it comes to an end here.

The episode is our look back over 2025, the cinematic year. But we also reflect on the podcast and what it has meant for us.

Thanks to everyone who has listened and supported us, and of course, the many guests who have appeared on the show.

Best films of 2025 and our final podcast. In our final episode of the Cinematologists Podcast, we look back at the year in film and also reflect on our 10-year cinematic odyssey.