Episode 147. The Icepod Cometh

For the winter wrap-up episode to close out the year, Alex and Jonathan talk about four films that focus on the ways that people have to survive in freezing and desperate situations: Touching the Void (2003), The Grey (2011), Everest (2015), and Arctic (2018). We discuss ways to tell a true story through documentary and…

Episode 146. The Equestrisode

From the very first photographs of motion, horses have been integrated with the cinema, so today Alex and Jonathan talk about different ways horses can be used to drive a story in The Black Stallion (1979), Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), Seabiscuit (2003), and War Horse (2011). We discuss horses as both thematic metaphors…

Episode 121. Rueful Ramsay

The Patrons voted on what contemporary female director we should talk about and the winner was Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay! So today Alex and Jonathan talk about her films Ratcatcher (1999), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and You Were Never Really Here (2017). We discuss Ramsay's very personal and close-to-home debut feature, the…

Episode 108. Pandemic Panic

There haven't been a lot of movies about pandemics, yet, but today Alex and Jonathan take a look at the various ways they have been done in the past, specifically in Outbreak (1995), Contagion (2011), and Flu (2013). We talk about the ways pandemic movies suffer from not having a defined genre, what they might…

Episode 84. The New Noir

As a follow up to last season's episode on classic film noir, Alex and Jonathan travel through the evolution of the modern subgenre of neo-noir in The Long Goodbye (1973), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Drive (2011). We discuss ways that noir themes cross over into neo-noir, the ways neo-noir uses violence, and the changing aesthetics…