Jamie Dunn on Cinema

A conversation about the past and future of films.

Dear Reader,

This week’s interview is with Jamie Dunn, an arts journalist and editor based in Glasgow. He’s the film editor at The Skinny, Scotland’s largest arts and culture magazine, and his writing also appears in publications like Sight & Sound, Cineaste and The Guardian. And, like everyone nowadays it seems, he has a podcast; in this case The CineSkinny, a film podcast he co-hosts with colleagues from The Skinny.

Thank you to everyone who re-shared and supported the release of How Does Change Happen? in May! This week I will be in Dundee, Glasgow and Solas Festival speaking about it. Come say hi if you can.

Love,

Sam

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I wanted to start by asking you if there are any under-discussed/appreciated films from 2025 so far that you might recommend readers look for?

My socks were knocked off earlier in the year by Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. It’s a wild, punky superhero comedy that sees Drew plunder characters from DC comics to tell a version of her own trans coming-of-age story. It’s such a cheeky idea, executed with so much vision and flair, with Drew making expressive use of green screen to create a gonzo version of Gotham City, and blending in a collage of crowdsourced animation of varying styles. It felt like I was seeing a genuinely new type of cinema, made with the kind of deranged confidence and swagger that’s so rare in first-time filmmakers. Its scrappy wit and energy reminded me how audacious indie cinema can be. And my favourite cinema-going experience of the year so far has been The Colours Within, Naoko Yamada’s anime about a trio of teen misfits who form a band. The animation is luminous, and the friendship between the three main characters is charming and deeply heartwarming, but the real kicker is the music. The film ends with a proper concert, with the kids performing three songs they’ve been writing during the movie. Each song is played in full, and each is a banger. It gave me a similar urge to the one I felt when I watched Stop Making Sense on the big screen: I wanted to dance in the aisles.

How do you approach film criticism? Do you have a checklist in your mind when you’re watching a film or is it more about how it makes you feel at the end?

I don’t go in with a checklist. I don’t think there’s a formula or list of requirements to make a great movie. If there were, we’d surely have a lot more masterpieces on our hands. My chief approach as a critic is to try to be as open to the film I’m about to see as possible. Whenever I attend press screenings, I can often hear some of the more jaded journos in the room braced to hate the film that’s screening, but you can’t go in with that attitude. You’ve got to go in without too many preconceptions. You’ve got to try and get on the film’s wavelength, and be attuned to what the filmmaker is trying to achieve and then you can appraise its success on those terms. In saying that, I guess one thing I’m always looking for is innovation: a filmmaker who’s trying something new or showing something from a different point of view. A great example of a filmmaker doing that this year is Ryan Coogler with Sinners. Anyone who’s seen the film will know the sequence I’m thinking of, a hugely imaginative musical setpiece right in the middle of the film that had my jaw on the floor. I’m always impressed when a filmmaker shows me something I’ve never seen before.

In a recent interview, Netflix chief Ted Sarandos called cinemas an ‘outmoded’ idea. He argued that people, for the most part, prefer watching movies at home. I’m curious about your thoughts on this… Do you think streaming companies are putting cinemas at risk?

I think that’s clearly the aim of most streamers: they want cinemas to be at risk. That’s why they’ve fought so hard to shrink the theatrical window. They want films to bypass cinemas and go straight to their platforms – an aim that they’ve pretty much achieved. Now to be clear, I’m definitely not one of those purists who hate watching films at home. I grew up in rural Ayrshire and my nearest cinema was over two hours away by bus, so I fell in love with movies while watching them on a pretty small TV. And I’m actually a bit jealous of kids who are growing up now with an abundance of films available to them on the internet. But for the Netflix guy to call cinema outmoded is preposterous to me. No matter the sophistication of your home setup, it’s never going to match the sound and image of a well-projected film in a cinema. But just as important is the opportunity to watch films with other people. There’s nothing like seeing a blockbuster on the opening weekend with an up-for-it crowd. And for films that require more patience, watching in a cinema free from the myriad distractions of modern life is also really important. The experience simply can’t be repeated at home. For these reasons, the optimist in me reckons cinemas – the good ones at least – will be able to survive in the age of streaming.

Were there any filmmakers that shaped your love for film through their work? If so, could you tell me a bit about your relationship to their work?

It’s hard to pinpoint just a few filmmakers, because my film taste has really changed with age. When I was first getting into film, I relied on late-night Channel 4 programming and matinees on BBC 2 for my film education. Like a lot of adolescent film fans, I was drawn to the flashy directors, the baroque stylists like Brian De Palma, Nic Roeg, Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, Able Ferrara, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, people like that. And I was really taken with directors like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who were all releasing their first films when I was getting into cinema as a teen. Now obviously those are great filmmakers, and you can learn so much about cinema from watching their movies, but I don’t think I really had a grasp of the vast potential of cinema until I was much older and had access to films from all over the world. By being able to watch retrospectives on people like Chantal Akerman or Yasujirō Ozu or Jacques Rivette, and seeing contemporary films from the likes of Claire Denis, Roy Andersson and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, my brain sort of got rewired. I realised that cinema could look and feel very different to the diet of Hollywood films I grew up on. And I guess that’s what’s so exciting, I’ve so much more filmmakers to discover and learn from; my love of film is always evolving.

If I died today and left this newsletter to you in my inheritance, who would you interview next?

I’ve been lucky enough to speak to loads of great contemporary filmmakers over the years at The Skinny, but one I’d love to speak to is James Gray. He’s one of the sharpest thinkers about cinema and where it’s headed right now; he’ll certainly give more eloquent answers on the future of film than I have here. He’s brimming with a passion for movies as an art form, but he’s particularly insightful when he talks about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking as a business. He’s given some great interviews over the years about how flawed the current systems of production and distribution are and how we could get back to healthier models. Plus he’s just one of those brilliant New Yorker raconteurs who can’t help but be funny and engaging.

What’s the last beautiful thing you’ve seen?

It might sound banal, but I remember walking home a few nights ago and being stopped in my tracks by a snail that was out on the pavement enjoying a rainstorm. There was just something so beautiful about the way the streetlight reflected off the wet concrete to illuminate its shell, which was patterned in this incredible swirl of yellows and browns. In terms of film, there’s a stunning overhead shot near the beginning of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, which shows Benicio del Toro’s character lying in the bathtub of an ornate bathroom. He’s recuperating from a plane crash, and in slow motion, several nurses are crisscrossing through the room passing him things or administrating medicine. It’s a hypnotic sequence, shot in slow motion, very Kubrickian, and so full of details that I’m itching to see the film again just to bask in that scene.