Hit Factory

** Come see WTO/99 at The Balboa Theater SF on Sunday, April 26th 7:30pm, hosted by Hit Factory featuring a post-screening Q&A w/ director Ian Bell. Tickets are available here .** Filmmaker Caroline Golum joins Aaron to discuss her singular, stunning new feature Revelations of Divine Love (now playing in New York and Seattle with more cities on the way) alongside the work of visionary Winnipeg...

** Come see WTO/99 at The Balboa Theater SF on Sunday, April 26th 7:30pm, hosted by Hit Factory featuring a post-screening Q&A w/ director Ian Bell. Tickets are available here .** Prolific filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay joins us to discuss her newest feature The Serpent's Skin (expanding this week to Los Angeles and San Francisco ) alongside the high-gloss, sugary sweet, and characteristically tr...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine of the illustrious Pod Casty for Me join to discuss Alex Cox's 1991 crime drama Highway Patrolman. Made during a period of exile in Mexico after Cox's ostensible blacklisting from Hollywood (and the WGA) following the dramatic fail...

Writer and critic Robert Rubsam returns to the show to discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa's enigmatic, unclassifiable thriller Charisma , the story of a failed hotage negotiator torn between factions of scientists, government agents, and madmen all fighting to decide the fate of a very unique tree in a mysterious, nameless forest. It's as strange as it sounds! We discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s vision of nature...

CW: This episode contains discussion of sexual assault and violence, including abuse of minors, in relation to recent revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Listener discretion advised.    Some Big News Weeks led us to a slightly unwieldy conversation about several topics alongside Joel Schumacher's 1999 thriller 8mm. Written by Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker and boasting a rich ensemble cast...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Sam Raimi's new film Send Help is in theaters, so we decided to look back at the director's undersung maximalist Western pastiche The Quick and the Dead . A Raimi Movie ™ through and through, the film pays loving homage to revisionist entries in the western...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Something new for our faithful Patrons - A conversation about all the movies, new and old, that we've been enjoying this month not covered elsewhere on the show. We hope you enjoy! . . . . Our Theme Song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish .

WTO/99 is a new, immersive archival documentary that depicts the four-day clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 40,000+ people who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the WTO Conference and the WTO’s impact on human rights, labor, and the future effects of continued globalization. Aaron sat down with WTO/99 director/co-editor Ian Bell and producer/co-...

This week, we're discussing the winner of our latest Patreon poll, Senegalese auteur Djibril Diop Mambéty's Hyenas . Adapting Swiss-German playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1956 satirical tragicomedy The Visit and transposing its story onto post-colonial Senegal, the film tells the story of Dramaan Drameh, a grocer in the poor town of Colobane, whose life is upended when a former flame, Linguère R...

The party is nearing its end, the food has been consumed, and now it's time to pour yourself a rich, spicy, herbaceous(?) after-dinner drink to aid in the digestion of all your elsewhere and elsewhile 2025 year-end content... It's the Hit Factory 2025 Digestif: A rundown of some of our favorite un-discussed films of the past year as well as some brilliant new-to-us discoveries...A low-stakes sport...

Denzember concludes as Journalist and host of the Turbulence podcast Séamus Malekafzali returns to the show to discuss Edward Zwick's 1998 geopolitical thriller The Siege , a film about a Muslim terrorist cell wreaking havoc on New York City, the resultant fear it stokes, and the vidictive results of martial law being enforced in an American city. Largely lost to time as an artifact of The End of...

Get access to this entire episode, the entire Denzember catalog, and all of our premium episodes by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Roger Ebert Associate Editor Robert Daniels returns to the show to once again discuss the work of Denzel Washington and Spike Lee, this time unpacking his brilliant 1998 sports drama He Got Game . The film stars Denzel Washington as Jake Shuttlesworth...

Denzember continues with Culture Kitsch host Bobbi Miller joining us to discuss Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing . Following his successful Henry V adaptation, Branagh returned to Shakespeare for a much airier, light-hearted affair, fashioning the classic play into an immensely pleasurable studio romantic comedy while preserving the spirit and (more importantly)...

Get access to this entire episode, the entire Denzember catalog, and all of our premium episodes by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Denzember 2 continues with the return of Vulture Film Critic Bilge Ebiri and a spirited discussion of Russel Mulcahy's 1991 thriller Ricochet , a film of lean premise that takes its story to absolutely batshit places at every turn. With the ever-capab...

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Denzember 2 kicks off with a conversation about Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's first collaboration, 1990's Mo' Better Blues , a film about jazz, art-making, and the pursuit of greatness at the expense of personal relationships. The terrific Minnie Zondi is our guest! We discuss the film's tepid reception upon release, and how a (predominantly white) cri...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Better late than never, we're back with a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's recent critical and box office sensation One Battle After Another . PTA loosely adapts (and updates) Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, setting the story against the back...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Writer and critic David Hering joins us from Liverpool to discuss the final film from the ingenious Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut. Originally conceived in the 1970s as a follow-up to Kubrick's landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey as a more straightforward sex c...

Filmmaker Heather Landsman joins to discuss Michael Haneke's Benny's Video alongside a conversation about her latest film, the archival documentary The Best of Me , which chronicles Björk stalker Ricardo López through unvarnished, segments of his 1996 video diaries, created as a means of sharing his ideological convictions and his plan to mail the pop singer a letter bomb. The film shares some the...

It's Halloween, so we decided to do a "scary" one! Podcaster, author, and emissary from the City of Brotherly Love Trevor Strunk joins to discuss Robert Rodriguez's 1998 Breakfast-Club-Meets-Body-Snatchers riff The Faculty . Boasting a memorable cast of young up-and-comers and a script written by Scream -scribe Kevin Williamson, the film is both playfully self-aware and slyly subversive in its exp...

The fine, upstanding gentlemen of Pod Casty for Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to discuss Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life , which follows a group of recently deceased people entering a state of limbo where counselors  (also deceased) help them locate their most important memory and then go about the work of turning that memory into a film that they will watch forever in eternity. The film ad...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Film writer and author of the upcoming book De Palma Does Hollywood Travis Woods joins us to discuss the exemplary filmmaker and his 1993 crime masterpiece Carlito's Way , starring Al Pacino as the titular Carlito Brigante, an ex-hustler freed from prison a...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. On the occasion of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Another in theaters , we look back at the director's ambitious, unwieldy, and under-loved 1999 feature Magnolia starring a massive ensemble that includes returning PTA collaborators Juli...

We inaugurate the late Japanese master Shinji Sōmai with a discussion of his beautiful, melancholy coming-of-age drama  Moving . The film follows the young Ren as she navigates her parents' recent separation, balancing loyalties to both her mother and father, dealing with gossiping classmates, and making attempts to reconcile the marriage. With a characteristic sensitivity and perceptiveness for t...

Film writer and critic Brendan Hodges joins to discuss Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan , a self-proclaimed love letter to the filmmaker's WWII veteran father and all the fighting men of the Second World War. Visceral, upsetting, and deeply conflicted, the film formally disavows many of Spielberg's more populist tendencies as director and creates a tension between the valorizing, mythic tone...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. CW: Discussions of cinematic sexual assault and violence. Film Critic Lex Briscuso joins us to discuss Satoshi Kon's masterful animated psychological thriller Perfect Blue . The film follows Mima, a former J-Pop idol who has recently left the music group Ch...