Required Watching

A personal audio essay on Glen Hansard, Once, and twenty years of chasing the feeling of that first screening. Recorded the week the world lost him.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Baz Luhrmann has made six feature films. Every single one is about the same thing — a person of extraordinary natural talent trapped inside a world that wants to commodify and contain that talent, expressed through maximalist visual language and music as emotional truth. EPiC, his first documentary, is the purest version of that argument he's ever made — because this time the subject is real, the footage is found, and the most interesting creative decision Luhrmann has ever made was to get completely out of the way. This episode makes the case for EPiC as the best thing in Luhrmann's filmography, explains why that's the argument his entire career was building toward, and asks what it means that the most maximalist director alive found his greatest work in restraint.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 2022 Elvis biopic has Austin Butler giving a career-defining performance inside a form that couldn't contain what it was trying to say. Three films about extraordinary artists. Three completely different formal approaches. And a structural argument about why the biopic — the most commercially reliable form for telling stories about artists — is almost constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about them. This is the synthesis.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In October 2025, I was alone in Hiroshima. I wandered into a kabuki theater not knowing what kabuki was, and watched a performance of Princess Takiyasha. I didn't speak the language well enough to follow the dialogue. I followed every second of it anyway. Months later I watched Kokuho — Lee Sang-il's three-hour epic about kabuki's bloodline system, the outsider who transcends it, and what it costs — and something clicked. This episode is about the film, the director who made it, and the specific irony of Japan's highest-grossing live-action film of all time being made by someone Japan has never fully claimed as its own.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the film most Western audiences still haven't fully understood: the political satire hiding inside the procedural, the tonal architecture that makes you laugh and then takes the laugh away, the final shot that became more devastating in 2019 than it was in 2003. And the specific things you miss when you watch this film without the cultural context it was made in.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yesterday's episode made the case that Western TV pilots lie — that they're persuasion documents built for commissioners rather than honest first chapters built for audiences. Today is the answer. J-drama structures its first episode like a complete short film — establishing emotional register before plot, tone before event, the specific texture of who these people are before anything happens to them. This episode explains the structural reason why, what it produces in the shows that follow, and why it creates a fundamentally different contract between audience and story.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series behind them. This episode makes the structural case for why the pilot format is lying to you, which pilots told the truth, and what the ones that lied reveal about how Western TV gets made.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018. The reviews were glowing. The words "found family" and "poverty" appeared in almost all of them. And most of them described a film that is significantly less interesting than the one Kore-eda actually made. This episode makes the case that Western criticism landed on the warmth and missed the argument — and that the argument, which is cold and specific and directed at the Japanese state, is the reason the film is essential.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The British film industry produces diversity reports. It has standards, targets, tick-box initiatives, and annual announcements about progress. And the structural situation for Black filmmakers — in development, in commissioning, in creative control — has barely moved. This episode isn't another recitation of the numbers. It's about what the numbers can't capture: the specific texture of how exclusion works in a system that has learned to perform inclusion without delivering it. And what it looks like to decide not to wait.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Somewhere in the British TV development process, the logline became the product. Not the story. Not the characters. The pitch. The elevator concept that sounds clean in a commissioning meeting and then struggles to hold together past episode two. This episode makes the case that British TV has built a development culture that selects for ideas that are easy to explain — and what that's costing us in the actual television being made.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SummaryIn this episode,we discuss the profound impact of Disney's 1992 film Aladdin on the animation industry and its cultural significance. He highlights how Aladdin redefined Disney's approach to animated musicals through innovative storytelling, memorable music, and the introduction of a relatable protagonist. The film's humor, particularly through Robin Williams' iconic performance as the Genie, attracted a broader audience and set a precedent for celebrity voice casting in animation. Epps also emphasizes the film's legacy in shaping future Disney films and its role in cementing Disney's place in pop culture during the 1990s.Chapters00:00 The Impact of Aladdin on Disney's Animation05:38 Cultural Significance and Legacy of AladdinRequired Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 You're tired of actors you actually like. That's not an accident — it's a business model. Hollywood is treating talent as intellectual property and audiences as brand targets, casting for TikTok engagement rather than craft. This episode breaks down the human IP factory, why it's going to collapse, and what Song Kang-ho and Paul Mescal's careers tell us about what's actually worth watching.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A personal re-watch of The Lion King — this time with a kid and a writer's eye — surfaces something hiding in plain sight. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" is Simba telling the audience exactly what he wants and the film giving it to him in the cruelest possible way. A breakdown of protagonist desire, emotional craft, and why this film hits differently as a parent.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 A 67-minute German silent film from 1920 is the foundation of modern horror, film noir, and psychological cinema. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari invented the unreliable narrator, the expressionist frame as psychological state, and the authoritarian villain. Here's why it still matters.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hollywood abandoned the mid-budget everything-film. Chennai Express — Shah Rukh Khan, Rohit Shetty, every genre at once — proves Bollywood never did. A breakdown of why this specific kind of film is so hard to make well, and what it teaches about craft.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Twisters has some of the best storm sequences in recent cinema. It also abandons Daisy Edgar-Jones, pivots to a rom-com, and loses the thread entirely in the second half. Quick reaction on what went wrong, and why a film this well-made managed to underdeliver.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 Kevin Hart made a show about Kevin Hart wanting to be an action star — except he already is one. Die Hart is fun, disposable, and accidentally fascinating. This episode is a short rant that becomes a bigger question: what happens when enormous talent picks small bets?Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A film from the London Film Festival about a disabled couple who want to get married — and can't, because the UK benefits system punishes them for it. Patrice: The Movie is playful, warm, and devastating. And it exposes a privilege most of us have never thought to question.Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when a film about conversion therapy is so aggressively colour-coded that the production design becomes the argument? In this episode, we break down But I’m a Cheerleader — Jamie Babbitt’s 1999 queer camp classic that weaponises pink, pastel, and Natasha Lyonne against the logic of forced identity correction.We talk about camp as a protest language (not just an aesthetic), why Megan’s arc is actually about permission rather than discovery, what RuPaul’s casting choice tells you about the film’s entire argument, and why in 2025 this isn’t a time capsule — it’s a warning dressed in sequins.In This EpisodeCamp as political language: what it actually means when a film weaponises its own artificialityProduction design as critique: how the colour-coded sets work harder than any line of dialogueMegan’s real arc: not discovery, but permission — and why that distinction mattersRuPaul as reformed straight coach: drag logic deployed in its most hostile possible contextWhy 1999’s radical lesbian love story with no tragedy lands differently in 2025Film MentionedBut I’m a Cheerleader (1999) — dir. Jamie BabbittLetterboxd page: @requiredwatchingSubscribe & ConnectYouTube: youtube.com/@RequiredWatchingInstagram: @requiredwatchingLetterboxd: letterboxd.com/requiredwatchingrequiredwatching.comRequired Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.▶️ Subscribe for new video essays every week: ▶️ Website▶️ Twitter/X▶️ Instagram▶️ Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.