Cinema Body/Cinema Mind

05/09/2026

A clip from the first session of Becoming a Better Film Critic, in which I look at the emergence of film theory and the analytical apparatus it gave us for thinking about cinema.

One of the ideas running through the whole series is that theory is most useful when it changes what we notice. It shouldn’t be a set of intellectual labels applied to a film after the event, nor a way of arriving at the “correct” interpretation. At its best, it gives us new questions, new distinctions and new ways of looking.

How did ideas about authorship, ideology, spectatorship, genre, form or the apparatus of cinema itself alter what critics thought they were doing when they watched a film? And what, from that history, remains useful to us now?

That is really the broader purpose of Becoming a Better Film Critic: not to tell you what to think about films, but to expand the resources with which you can think about them for yourself. To move from reaction towards observation, interpretation and argument without losing the pleasure, uncertainty or strangeness of the original encounter.

I’m now up to Session 4, with four more sessions to come.

If cinema is something you want not simply to watch, but to think with, this series is very much for you.

Click here for more information: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/becoming-a-better-film-critic-online

05/09/2026

I’ve written about The Death of Robin Hood, Michael Sarnoski’s strange, brutal and often startlingly beautiful reworking of the legend.

What interested me most was not simply the violence, but what the film does to the idea of heroism and mythology. Robin Hood is one of our most durable cultural myths: outlaw, redistributor of wealth, folk hero, symbol of resistance. But what happens when the mythology begins to peel away from the man? And what does it mean to revisit that figure at a moment when popular cinema seems increasingly unsure about what masculine heroism is supposed to look like?

Alongside that, I write about the baroque beauty of its visual texture and Hugh Jackman’s remarkable performance as an ageing Robin whose body seems to carry the accumulated weight of violence, myth and mortality.

04/09/2026

From the start, I was deeply embedded in the experience of this film. I felt the impact of its use of violence, the excessiveness of which seemed a deliberate rupture in our desensitisation. Its core conceit offers a way into thinking about how the construction of myths is necessarily selective. Unlike various critics I have subsequently read, I actually think the shift to the meditative second half works.

Read at dariollinares.substack.com

02/09/2026

I wrote this piece last year asking a question that feels even more urgent now:

Should cinemas embrace a greater responsibility for film education?

At the time, I was thinking about my own experience of studying Film Studies and the important relationship between university teaching, specialist cinemas and the development of a serious film culture.

Since then, the context has become considerably more stark.

Across UK higher education, humanities provision continues to contract. The British Academy is now warning of worsening geographical “cold spots” in access to humanities subjects, while thousands of academic posts have disappeared and universities continue to close or consolidate courses under financial pressure.

Film and Media Studies sit within that wider ecosystem. And when courses disappear, what is lost is not simply another degree option. It is access to histories of cinema, critical traditions, close analysis, theoretical frameworks and, perhaps most importantly, environments in which people learn how to look at films carefully and talk about them seriously.

Yet the appetite for that kind of engagement clearly hasn’t disappeared.

Cinephilia is thriving online. Film clubs are proliferating. Letterboxd has created an enormous culture of self-directed film discussion. Independent cinemas increasingly operate as cultural hubs rather than simply places in which films are projected.

So I keep coming back to the question I posed here:

Could cinemas become more deliberately educational institutions as well as exhibition spaces?

Not by turning every screening into a lecture, or recreating the university seminar in the auditorium, but through talks, contextual introductions, reading groups, short courses, programmed seasons, partnerships with critics and academics, and opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of film form, history and culture.

There is also a pragmatic argument here. If cinemas want committed audiences in twenty years’ time, then helping people become curious, knowledgeable and adventurous filmgoers now is not simply cultural altruism.

It is audience development in its deepest sense.

With Film Studies becoming less institutionally accessible, I think the question of where that knowledge goes next has become increasingly important.

30/08/2026

Sunday musings:

27/08/2026

https://dariollinares.substack.com/p/psycho-sexual-representation-in-camp?r=1phduq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

A new episode of Cinema Body / Cinema Mind is now up, featuring a conversation with psychoanalytic writer and lecturer Mary Wild about Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage S*x and Death at Camp Miasma.

I went into the film with fairly ambivalent expectations and came out fascinated by how much it was doing at once: slasher parody, q***r desire, cinephilia, spectatorship, trans representation, nostalgia and the unstable boundary between fantasy and lived experience.
Mary brings a particularly rich psychoanalytic perspective to the discussion, drawing on ideas from her book Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema and, especially, the Lacanian concept of feminine jouissance.

That becomes the route into one of the episode’s central questions: does the film imagine sexual awakening as a form of embodiment and liberation, or does it risk reproducing a kind of dissociation — asking its characters to experience desire from an external point of view?
From there, the conversation opens out into the pleasures and politics of looking, horror’s long relationship with gender variance, Eros and Thanatos, the Final Girl, cinephilia as fetishism, and the strange way films can become part of the material through which we construct our identities.

Listen/watch via Cinema Body / Cinema Mind on Substack:

Teenage S*x and Death at Camp Miasma is one of my films of the year. It’s theme’s also offered the perfect chance to speak once again with psychoanalytic theorist and author Mary Wild.

25/08/2026

The recording of Session 4 of Becoming a Better Film Critic is now up.

This feels like something of a turning point in the series, because I finally grasp the nettle of a subject that is arguably as relevant as any to understanding contemporary film criticism: the relationship between ideology and aesthetics in critical judgement.

The central question is not whether politics belongs in film criticism. Of course it does. Ideological criticism has been fundamental to the development of Film and Cultural Studies, and I spend part of the session tracing some of that intellectual history through Marxist theory, the Frankfurt School, Barthes, feminist film theory and the work of thinkers such as Laura Mulvey, Douglas Kellner, Michael Ryan and Slavoj Žižek.

The more difficult question is what happens when political interpretation becomes political evaluation: when a film’s perceived ideological position begins to determine its artistic worth before questions of form, style, performance, narrative or cinematic experience have really been addressed.

That tension feels particularly important in the digital era, where criticism increasingly circulates through platforms that reward certainty, polemic and rapid judgement. Films can become vehicles for signalling political or moral positions, and the film artefact itself can sometimes disappear beneath the discourse surrounding it.

In the second half of the session, I use the critical reception of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight as a case study. Looking back at the arguments surrounding the film, particularly the controversy around Camilla Long’s review, provides a useful example of the point at which debate about a film can shift into debate about what one is supposed to think about it—and what disagreement might supposedly reveal about the critic.

For me, the broader issue is one that runs through the whole Becoming a Better Film Critic series: how do we remain politically and culturally alert while still allowing films to surprise us, trouble our assumptions and complicate our existing positions?

The subscription is still £5 per month, which gives you access to all the sessions in this series, as well as all my writing and podcasting.

If film criticism, cultural analysis and the changing conditions of critical practice are your thing, you can find the full recording on my Substack.

Session 4 of Becoming a Better Film Critic, Session Four

19/08/2026

My second dispatch from the Edinburgh International Film Festival is now up.

This one moves from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new science-fiction film Sheep in the Box and it's curious mix of AI, grief, memory and artificial children, to an afternoon listening to Ken Burns reflect on history, documentary and what he calls “emotional archaeology”.

There is also a Fringe show in which Top Gun is recreated with paper aeroplanes on selfie sticks, a couple of films I walk out of, some wandering around Edinburgh, and an unexpected festival discovery: Thom Lunshof’s remarkable flooded-world dystopia First Zone.

It’s part film criticism, part festival diary, and part reflection on how cinema keeps leading us back to questions of memory, identity and what remains when the familiar disappears.

A second batch of reflections from Edinburgh featuring Kore-eda’s Sci-Fi, Ken Burns in conversation, Fringe Top Gun Parody, and Dutch dystopia First Zone

18/08/2026

Part 1 of a two-part reflection on work I've seen from the Edinburgh Film Festival and on being in the city during the Fringe.

17/08/2026

dariollinares.substack.com

Part 1 of my Edinburgh Film Festival coverage is up.

There are reflections on Sea of Glass, The State of Us and Bodyhackers along with a couple of Fringe events.

lesser batch of film reviews and more of stream of consciousness travel - if any of the floats your boat.