The Playlist Podcast Network

The comedy “ Balls Up ” isn’t messing around. Yes, the title is a dick joke. The plot is a dick joke. And yes, the script is packed with dick jokes. It’s as immature and as dumb as they come, and yet, it oddly works because it just commits so hard and earnestly to the bit. Directed by Peter Farrelly —who knows a thing or two about immature, purile comedies with lots of dick jokes like “ Dumb and D...

Bob Odenkirk playing a small-town interim sheriff squaring off against the Yakuza is not a sentence that should make sense, let alone sell a movie. It sounds like a dare, or the kind of idea you giggle at before moving on. And yet, “ Normal ” takes that slightly absurd premise and treats it with just enough sincerity, grit, and tonal whiplash to make you lean in instead of check out ( read our rev...

What made the first season of “ Beef ” so good is that it refused to shrug off a ridiculously small thing, a little bit of road rage. It didn't let that incident seem small. Instead, it became a complete and total falling apart for two people. They just kept making a conflict that should have ended in a parking lot get bigger and bigger, until it was uncomfortably, painfully true to life. It f...

Adam McKay and Kevin Messick have spent the last decade-plus pinballing across genres with a kind of deliberate, morbid curiosity. One project dissects the financial system ( “The Big Short”), another stares down extinction with a grin (“Don’t Look Up”), and another turns boardrooms into bloodsport ( “Succession” ). So no, a lean, camp-tinged shark thriller isn’t the obvious next stop. But “Thrash...

“ Pizza Movie ” locks onto a very dumb, very specific crisis and rides it for all it’s worth. After one terrible drug-based decision, the night keeps getting weirder, louder, and more desperate, with pizza becoming the only objective that matters. It keeps escalating without losing the thread, which is what makes it work. For all the bodily chaos and ridiculous panic, the movie understands somethi...

Yup, the wedding bells already rang, the in-laws already exploded, and somehow “Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come” still finds a way to make that universe feel even bigger, bloodier, funnier and a whole lot weirder. The sequel to the 2019 horror-comedy favorite picks up with Samara Weaving’s Grace still very much in the blast radius of her last marital disaster, only now the satanic board game has expan...

Grief rarely arrives quietly. In "The Madison" , it detonates and leaves a family trying to rebuild their lives in the emotional rubble. The sweeping Paramount+ drama from Taylor Sheridan follows the Clyburn family after a devastating loss sends them from New York City to Montana, where grief, reinvention, and culture shock collide. The series stars Michelle Pfeiffer as matriarch Stacy C...

Crime fiction has rarely produced a protagonist quite like Kay Scarpetta. For decades, Patricia Cornwell ’s bestselling novels followed the brilliant forensic pathologist and medical examiner navigating grisly cases while balancing the messy emotional realities of family, love, and professional obsession. Now, the long-awaited adaptation has finally arrived in the form of Prime Video ’s new series...

Few shows reinvent themselves as boldly between seasons as Dan Fogelman ’s “Paradise.” What began as a tightly wound political mystery in Season 1 mutates into something far bigger in Season 2: a survival story, a character odyssey, and a puzzle box full of fan theories that viewers are now happily dissecting online. The world expands dramatically beyond the bunker, pushing its characters into unf...

At first glance, “ Heel ” (released internationally as “The Good Boy” ) looks like it might be a grim captivity thriller. A troubled young man is abducted and chained in a basement by a grieving couple. But filmmaker Jan Komasa has something stranger and more psychologically rich in mind. Instead of a story about imprisonment and escape, “Heel” becomes a meditation on grief, redemption, and the un...

There’s a specific flavor to a Steve Conrad show. A little awkward. A little hilarious. A little sad. A little dangerous. Sex, lies, murder, and old smut. That tone is back in full force with “DTF: St. Louis,” the HBO Max series that follows adults who think they’re signing up for an app that's simple and transactional, only to discover that intimacy is never that clean. The ensemble includes...

There’s a blunt-force clarity to “ The Bluff .” Cannons roar, cliffs loom, and survival comes down to grit, guns, and one badass mother who refuses to bend. Directed by Frank E. Flowers, the 19th-century Caribbean thriller follows Ursell ( Priyanka Chopra Jonas ), a former pirate whose quiet life is shattered when Connor ( Karl Urban ), a betrayed former ally, arrives with vengeance and unfinished...

There’s a very specific kind of comfort that only “ Scrubs ” can deliver. It’s the snap‑cut from slapstick to soul‑crushing. The hallway daydream that detonates into real grief. The sense that medicine is both sacred and absurd, and that humor is the only thing keeping anyone upright. The new “Scrubs” revival understands that alchemy. It is not interested in embalming the past. It is interesting t...

You've really got to love the jolt of pure cinematic adrenaline that hits when a movie announces itself with extreme confidence instead of apology. “ Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die ” does it by storming into a Los Angeles diner and unleashing a crazed, high‑wire opening monologue that plays like a dare, a sales pitch, and an exhausted rallying cry all at once. From the jump, the film makes it...

There’s a particular kind of confidence required to make a modern Los Angeles heist movie without flinching at the shadow of “ Heat. ” It’s the cinematic elephant in the room, the reference point that inevitably looms over any story involving meticulous thieves, dogged cops, and asphalt‑level tension. With “ Crime 101, ” filmmaker Bart Layton acknowledges that lineage without trying to wrestle it....

“The Beauty” is nowhere near subtle about its ambitions & its message. FX’s provocative sci‑fi drama isn’t content to simply unsettle you; it wants to corner you, interrogate you, and then quietly ask how much of yourself you’d be willing to trade for comfort, power, or control. Episode 5 is where that thesis sharpens into something genuinely frightening, and it does so by re-introducing one o...

Some movies are about finally arriving somewhere. ‘ Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie ’ is about two people refusing to stop walking the same thankless path together. Built from decades‑old footage, rewritten realities, real stunts, and a running gag that has never paid off, the film disguises something deeply human inside its most absurd impulses. Beneath the time travel, the public stunts, an...

There is a point while trying to explain “The Beauty” where the description simply gives up. FBI investigations. Global travel. Corporate greed. A miracle cure. Bodies everywhere, beautiful and horrific. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the sentences collapse, because the show isn’t interested in being neat or easily digestible. It wants overload. It wants provocation. It wants you pausing mid...

Some shows live comfortably in one gear. “Landman” decidedly does not. Season 2 is best when it’s bouncing between tones, when a moment that plays like broad comedy suddenly curdles into something personal and more uncomfortable. One scene has you laughing at unchecked confidence. The next reminds you that this confidence has consequences, usually paid by family. Set in the oil fields of West Texa...

Sweaty palms, bad decisions, and the creeping realization that the walls are closing in have always been Joe Carnahan ’s cinematic comfort zone, from the raw nerve of “Narc” to the adrenalized chaos of “Smokin’ Aces.” With “The Rip,” Carnahan distills that obsession into its most claustrophobic form yet, a lean, pressure-cooker cop thriller that weaponizes procedure, grief, and mistrust by refusin...

There’s a certain kind of midnight movie that feels like it crawled out of an alley, brushed itself off, and dared you to follow it home. “ Night Patrol, ” the new wild horror stew from writer-director Ryan Prows, is exactly that. A vampire flick with cop-movie nerves, magic, and a nasty little conscience, it’s the kind of film that can play as pulpy, borderline campy fun and still leave you chewi...

There’s a specific perverse pleasure in watching a murder mystery show that knows exactly when to let you feel confident and exactly when to pull that confidence out from under you. Netflix 's “ His & Hers ” does that trick over and over again. You think you’ve got a handle on it. You start building your little internal conspiracy corkboard. Then it quietly slides one detail out of place,...

Disaster movies are built to end things. Cities collapse, the planet cracks open, and whatever survives crawls out into the credits. Sequels are supremely rare because escalation usually feels beside the point. But “ Greenland 2: Migration ” exists because director Ric Roman Waugh never viewed the first film as a one-off thrill ride. For him, it was always the opening chapter of a single emotional...

The Wasteland doesn’t care who you are. It burns everyone the same. "Fallout" returns for Season 2 with a broader canvas and more confidence, expanding its ensemble-driven apocalypse while keeping its eye on the emotional wreckage left behind. Set in a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, the series follows citizens forced to survive in underground bu...

Holiday horror is usually all tinsel and trauma, but the new remake of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" decides it also wants to add a warm hug, a nervous breakdown, and a full-blown Nazi Christmas party for good measure. Director Mike P. Nelson takes the infamous killer Santa premise and rebuilds it as a supernatural slasher with a bruised, endearing Hallmark heart at the center, following...