Boy Party

Critic Alistair Alger-Ryder joins Lucien for a rundown of the biggest and best films at BFI London Film Festival 2026.
Films discussed include The Debut, Tender Loving Care, Behemoth!, Wild Horse Nine, Club Kid, La Bola Negra, The Liberation, Julián, Fjord, The Unknown, A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, Ink, Artificial, Possible Love, Ray Gunn, Paper Tiger, Elsinore, The Man I Love, Chronovisor, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Josephine and The Idiot(s).
Read Alistair's writing on several LFF films on The Film Stage and follow him on Letterboxd

Special guest Brendan joins us from Madrid to discuss another great Spanish city, Woody Allen's Oscar-winning Vicky Cristina Barcelona , and its Spanish stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, plus Scarlett Johansson and the movie's secret lead, Rebecca Hall!

Hey, it's me, it's Boy Party, ask us anything! This week we're discussing Michael Showalter's new thriller Verity, a pretty terrible Colleen Hoover adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. We talk about this movie's failures relative to something like The Housemaid or Gone Girl, dig into Dakota Johnson's career from Fifty Shades to Materialists and analyse Josh Hartnett's early 2000s breakout and recent comeback in Oppenheimer and Trap.

Boy Party's Tom Cruise Month comes to a close, as Shane and Lucien discuss the brand new Alejandro González Iñárritu film Digger, which has just had one of the most disastrous openings in box office history and - in our opinion - is significantly flawed. We're also joined via voice message by friend of the pod Dave Hanratty who mounts a solid defence of the film, which is dividing audiences around the world. We round off the episode with a ranking of every Tom Cruise film we've seen, and play the Box Office Game for this past weekend.

Tom Cruise Months continues, taking us into the early 2010s and Cruise's two-hander action comedy(?) with Cameron Diaz, his former Vanilla Sky co-star. This James Mangold-directed caper takes the pair from Wichita to Sevilla, and sets the template for the sort of mediocre streaming blockbuster Diaz is likely to star in today. But, it has a pretty good Black Eyes Peas end credits song! Tune in next week for Digger!