Second Take Cinema

It's the end of season 3 and the end of listener request month here on Second Take Cinema! For this entry we're going to Luke in Chelmsford who asked us to look back at this highly regarded 80s sci-fi movie and give it a second take. How well does Back To The Future hold up in 2026? How are those effects looking? And why-oh-why does this film love to keep us all uncomfortable with incestuous implications? 

An obscure cult film from the 1980s, The Last Dragon is a mash-up of hip hop music with martial arts, produced by music legend and founder of Motown Berry Gordy. It's an unusual film that, whilst not good cinema in the traditional sense certainly has a sense of style and charm all its own. Will Jamie and Rory appreciate the unusual charms of The Last Dragon or will it go over their heads? 

Listener request month continues with Danny Boyle's low budget indie horror hit 28 Days Later which helped revive the zombie genre in the early 2000s and has gone on to spawn a franchise (28 Months Later and 28 Years Later). Jamie has seen this film many times but Rory never has. It's sure to be a fun experience seeing he reacts to it. 

Requested by listener Tierra in Wisconsin, USA this week Rory and Jamie was watching cult Sci-Fi indie movie "Cube." A group of strangers wake up in a steel cube with no recollection of how they got there or how they know one another. Every subsequent room is an identical cube, some equipped with terrifying and brutal traps designed to whittle their group down. Will they band together to make it out? Will they succumb to the sinister and monolithic Cube and does this movie still hold up in the year 2026?

It's the start of listener request month (or listener requests for slightly more than a month) and first up is Batman Begins! The start of Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, listener Craig claims this is the best film in the trilogy but Jamie has always considered it his least favourite. Will that opinion change with a Second Take? 

We wrap up season 3 of Second Take Cinema with a pair of movies made by musicians! Moonwalker is the vanity project by Michael Jackson at the height of his fame (and arguably madness). Rejecting narrative and traditional filmmaking in favour of a surrealistic blend of noir gangster movie, music videos, Looney Tunes and...Transformers?Meanwhile, Spice World made roughly a decade later is a testament to the cynicism and relentless grinding of the pop culture machine; taking the biggest girlband of the 1990s and throwing them into a Frankenstein of a movie stapled and tied together from scraps of other scripts, celebrity cameos and the sheer desire to see just how much Spice Girls the world could take before it finally snapped.

After a stunning start with Iron Man, the MCU hit a misstep early on with its second movie out the gate; The Incredible Hulk. Or did it? The film has a mixed reaction and the lead actor Edward Norton was famously replaced by Mark Ruffalo going forward. There also weren't any solo Hulk movies after this (so far at least) which would lead one to believe this movie sucked and so we decided to give it a second take and see how it stacks up in 2026.

Based on the popular play and featuring a cast of massive names including Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Jack Lemmon and Ed Harris this is a contained movie about salesman facing the chop if they can't reach the increasingly high targets set by their corporate overlords. A meditation on capitalism, desperation and toxic masculinity, does the film resonate even more now than when it was released?