Madeleine at the Movies

About

The Woman Behind the Microphone

Madeleine Swain has been watching films all her life and talking about them for nearly as long. She brings to the screen a lifetime of reading, a sharp eye for performance, and a genuine love for the medium in all its forms.

Each week on Golden Days Radio, Madeleine reviews new releases and revisits the classics — holding them up to the light, turning them over, and asking what they mean to us now.

Her reviews are guided by a simple conviction: that cinema, at its best, tells us something true about what it is to be alive.

Heard on GDR 95.7fm · Tuesdays & Fridays, 12:10pm

Reviews

From the Notebook

Madeleine's written reviews — the full text of what she thinks, beyond what three minutes on air allows.

2024

Anora

dir. Sean Baker

A film that shouldn't work as well as it does — and then, in its final minutes, becomes something you won't forget easily. Baker's great subject has always been the economy of desire, and here he finds his masterpiece.

2024

The Substance

dir. Coralie Fargeat

Fargeat takes the body horror genre and uses it like a scalpel — not on her characters, but on an industry and a culture that has always consumed women from the outside in. Messy, deliberate, and unmissable.

1950

All About Eve

dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The wittiest film ever made about ambition, performance, and the theatre of everyday life. Every line is a small perfect knife. Bette Davis has never been better, which is saying a great deal.

1963

8½

dir. Federico Fellini

I return to this film every few years and find something new — or perhaps it is I who have changed, and the film simply holds its ground. An act of cinema that has never aged because it was never really about its moment.

2023

Past Lives

dir. Celine Song

A film about what we leave behind when we leave — countries, languages, versions of ourselves. Song's debut is so quiet and so precise that it sneaks up on you entirely. The last scene is one of the great endings in recent cinema.

1941

The Maltese Falcon

dir. John Huston

A film in love with its own shadows. Huston and Bogart make cynicism feel like a moral position — and perhaps, in 1941, it was. The falcon is a MacGuffin, yes, but it is also a perfect emblem of all that glitters.

Madeleineat the Movies