Cozy Quilt Cinema

Whether you’re in pre-med to save lives or just morbidly obsessed with death, this week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, Beth and Michelle tackle Flatliners (1990), Joel Schumacher’s thriller about five Chicago medical students who stop their hearts to see what lies beyond death. Each one comes back followed by the worst thing they ever did. Oliver Platt, who has never done anything wrong, mostly watches. As...

We’re deep into Supertobertacular, our all-month run of not-so-scary movies, arranged from the not-so-scary to the mostly not-so-scary. This week we’re knocking on the very breathy door of Robert Wise’s classic haunted house film, The Haunting (1963). Dr. Markway wants proof of the supernatural, so he gathers a few guests with brushes with the paranormal at Hill House. The house quickly decides it...

It's week two of our Supertobertacular! All month long, we're celebrating Halloween with our picks of not-so-scary movies, ranging from the least scary to, well, not-so-scary. This week, we're digging up Dark Shadows (2012), Tim Burton's gothic soap opera turned vampire comedy, starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, and Helena Bonham Carter. Barnabas Collins has spent 200 years in a c...

Welcome to week one of Supertobertacular, Cozy Quilt Cinema’s all-month celebration of not-so-scary movies. We start with the least spooky of the spookies and work our way up to the spookiest ones we can tolerate (Michelle is a weenie, and she’s not sorry). First up is Teen Witch (1989), the cult classic every Gen X girl swears she watched on HBO. Louise Miller is 15, invisible at school, and hope...

It's our 100th episode, and somehow no movie fits that milestone better than Fried Green Tomatoes. This week in the Blanket Fort, Beth and Michelle dig into John Avnet's 1991 classic starring Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker, and Cicely Tyson, the story of a stifled Birmingham housewife, a nursing home friendship, and the Depression-era love story of Idgie and...

Grab your Nan's afghan and get in the blanket fort, because this week Cozy Quilt Cinema is diving into Blow Dry (2001), the bittersweet British hairdressing comedy you didn't know you needed. Set against the backdrop of the national hairdressing championships in a small Yorkshire town, retired stylist Phil Allen (Alan Rickman) is pulled back into competition when his estranged ex wife Shelly revea...

Clueless (1995) is Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills retelling of Jane Austen's Emma, and it's still changing how we talk. This week in the Blanket Fort, Beth and Michelle take on the question: is Cher Horowitz really clueless, or is she sheltered, sharp, and thoughtful? We follow Cher (Alicia Silverstone) as she plays Cupid for two of her teachers to raise her grades, gives new girl Tai (Brittany Mu...

This week we're ditching the usual format and pulling up a pillow inside the Blanket Fort with our friend Pat Green. No Stitch Count this time. Just three people talking about a movie and following the conversation wherever it goes. The movie is Gypsy 83, the 2001 indie about two goth misfits in Sandusky, Ohio, Gypsy Vale and her best friend Clive Webb, who pile into a beat up Trans Am and head fo...

This week, we’re heading for the high seas with Muppet Treasure Island (1996), in memory of the brilliant and wonderful, Tim Curry. Tim Curry’s Long John Silver is charming, dangerous, funny, warm, and somehow exactly the person you want Jim Hawkins to stay away from and become best friends with at the same time. Because yes, he’s a thief. Yes, he’s a pirate. But also, it’s Tim Curry. We talk abou...

This week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, we are taking a quiet moment to remember Dolly Parton with 9 to 5 (1980), the feminist workplace comedy that gave us one of her most iconic songs and one of her most memorable performances. Dolly stars alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three women pushed to the breaking point by their sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical boss, played to oily perfection by...

It’s 2263. We have flying cars, restaurants that come directly to your window, apartments the size of closets, and somehow humanity is still a mess. So naturally, the fate of the world rests with a burned-out taxi driver and a perfect being who takes one look at human history and immediately develops anxiety. This week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, we’re talking about The Fifth Element (1997), Luc Besson’...

In As Good as It Gets (1997), Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall is a romance novelist who seems determined to keep the entire world at arm’s length, that is until Helen Hunt’s Carol, Greg Kinnear’s Simon, and one ridiculously lovable monkey-faced little dog start getting through the armor. This week, we talk about Melvin’s OCD without confusing it with the many other ways he can be an absolute ass, wh...

We are in the Blanket Fort with our incredible friend Allaina Humphreys to talk about Project Hail Mary (2026), and it completely wrecked us in the best possible way. We thought we were getting a standard sci-fi survival story about a guy waking up alone in deep space or maybe a football movie. Instead, we got a profoundly beautiful reflection on the messiness of being alive. Science isn't clean c...

Grab your blanket and get cozy. This week Beth and Michelle are curling up with the ultimate 90s teen rom-com, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), starring Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Larisa Oleynik, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Larry Miller. We're breaking down how this loose Taming of the Shrew adaptation still holds up 25+ years later: Kat's cynicism as armor, Bianca's slow climb out of the shallow...

Beth and Michelle are heading to 1500s Spain and beyond for their first ever animated movie on Cozy Quilt Cinema. This week they're unpacking The Road to El Dorado, the DreamWorks classic starring Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh as two con men turned accidental gods. They talk friendship over greed, why this is not really a child friendly kids movie, Elton John's music choices, and the horse that...

Beth and Michelle revisit My Brilliant Career (1979), Gillian Armstrong’s Australian period drama starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Sybylla Melvyn is a headstrong aspiring writer surrounded by people who believe marriage is the only sensible future for a young woman. Then she meets the charming Harry Beecham and discovers that choosing freedom becomes much harder when the life she is refusing inc...

This week Beth and Michelle grab their throws for Sunshine Cleaning (2008), the dramedy about two semi-estranged sisters, played by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, who start a crime scene and biohazard cleanup business in Albuquerque, New Mexico to fix their money troubles. What they end up cleaning up is a lot bigger than blood stains. ***This episode does discuss suicide and death in detail. If that'...

This week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, Michelle and Beth discuss John Carney's 2007 indie darling Once, the quiet, music-drenched story of an Irish busker and a Czech girl who fall into something between friendship and love. They talk Glenn Hansard and Markéta Irglová's real-life history, the ick factor versus the movie's actual restraint, busking as eulogy, community in a building with one shared TV, an...

What does it mean to know exactly who you are when the whole world is handing you a beige palette and wondering why you won't use it? This week, Beth and Michelle are joined by award-winning filmmaker and author Polly Schattel, whose new trans-centered novel Crater Girl is out now, to discuss the 1997 French-Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), directed by Alain Berliner. Seven-year-old...

Three queer people and one gloriously unashamed 1994 film. Beth and Michelle bring returning guest Pat Green back to the blanket fort for a Pride Month deep dive into The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the drag road trip that keeps giving the longer you sit with it. We find there are two love stories buried under all those feathers and sequins. Bernadette and Bob, Tick and his family...

We finally watched Love, Simon (2018) and gave it our first-ever perfect score, 9 of 9 on the Stitch Count! This week we're curling up with the story of a kid counting down the days to graduation with one big secret, a string of anonymous emails that turn into something like falling in love, and a Ferris wheel ending that had us both tearing up. We talk about what it means to live in a closet that...

Some movies entertain you. Some movies find you at exactly the right moment and crack something open. Boy Meets Girl (2014) is both. This week Beth and Michelle curl up with Eric Schaeffer's tender, sex-positive trans romantic comedy set in small-town Kentucky, the story of Ricky Jones, a 21-year-old trans woman with big dreams, a best friend named Robby, and a chance encounter with a Southern deb...

Pieces of April (2003), written and directed by Peter Hedges on a shoestring budget and two digital camcorders, is a small film that quietly breaks you open and leaves you with the pieces. Katie Holmes plays April, the black sheep, the first pancake, preparing Thanksgiving dinner for an estranged family that has never really seen her, using an oven that doesn't work, in a building full of stranger...

What does it cost to be truly seen by another person and what does the world do when it doesn't know what to do with you? This week, Beth and Michelle climb into the blanket fort with two extraordinary guests to unravel Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012): a story of two lonely twelve-year-olds who decide to stop waiting for the world to make sense and just run toward each other instead. We tal...

This week we're curling up with a film that, we believe, has been misread by its own trailers for twenty-five years. Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), directed by Sharon Maguire, written by Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davies, and starring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant is not, it turns out, a film about a clumsy woman falling into love. It's a film about a woman falling in...