New Podcast Will Feature In-Depth Conversations With Film Critics

There are a lot of movie podcasts on the Internet. Like a lot a lot. Like I recently polled people on Twitter to find out what movie podcasts they listened to and got back over fifty different shows in response. Fifty. Five-oh. And those were just the ones people felt passionate enough about to mention on Twitter. In other words, the cinema is pretty well covered, sonically speaking.

But while there are plenty of podcasts that feature film critics, there aren’t too many about film critics, so even in a very crowded marketplace, The Cinephiliacs sounds interesting. On each episode, host Peter Labuza invites a different cinephile — from festival programmers, to distributors, to professors, to, yes, critics — to chat about what sparked their passion for the medium. He describes it as WTF With Marc Maron for cinemania, which is certainly a niche audience — but it’s my niche audience, so that’s great.

On the debut episode, which is embedded below, film critic Glenn Kenny, formerly of Premiere Magazine and currently of MSN Movies, talks about what it was like growing up an aspiring film lover in suburban New Jersey (spoiler alert: It wasn’t easy), the first film (and rock) critics he read regularly, the difference between assessment and examination in criticism, and the movies he feels like he’s been waiting his whole life to see. Afterwards, the pair take a look at Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.”

At least to my ear, the editing makes the conversation sound a bit one-sided — less a discussion than a very long monologue — but if you’re interested in criticism, even if you listen to fifty other podcasts, it’s worth a listen.

Read more of “The Cinephiliacs: Episode #1 – Glenn Kenny (‘Blow-Up’)“