Peak Viewing

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is arguably one of the most iconic films of all time. A true landmark piece of filmmaking that went on to redefine the western genre, the Italian film scene, and morally ambiguous protagonists in film forever. Today on the podcast we both watched it for the first time and had some very surface-level questions. Where have we heard this film’s motif before? Is “the Goo...

(CW: Mild discussion of the sexual assault scene throughout the episode.) For a Few Dollars More is the name of Leone’s second western, and it can also describe a couple parts of the movie: it was made for a few dollars more, and at the box office it made a few dollars more. In our opinion, it’s a great step up: the bigger budget is a noticeable improvement, the trio of characters have some fun dy...

This week we dip our toes into Leone’s Dollars Trilogy with the first film, A Fistful of Dollars. We’ve got gunslingers, tricksters, Spanish countryside, whistling, and enough stolen plot points to warrant a lawsuit! While this is neither of our favorite westerns, it undoubtedly features a fantastic finale that got us very excited for the next two films in this trilogy. We also discuss time-of-day...

We’re kicking off our Sergio Leone miniseries with The Colossus of Rhodes, a sword-and-sandal epic centered on one of the seven wonders of the world. This film, which came near the tail-end of the peplum film’s heyday, is a serviceable good time, and gives us a lot to look forward to over the next six weeks. We discuss the next time we’ll cover a historical epic, the funhouse design of the Colossu...

Our journey through the cinematic endeavors of Star Trek comes to a close this week with 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. This sequel may not quite live up to the first Kelvin movie, but it was certainly a step in the right direction, and we would have loved to see one or two more sequels with this same formula and tone. We discuss the lighter tone, the development of Kirk and Spock, end credits watching...

Star Trek Into Darkness stinks! The lightning-in-a-bottle magical energy of the first Kelvin film has been replaced with a serious tone, less characterization, worse VFX, and a muddied plot. The result? We (mostly Henry) kinda hated this movie. We get into all the ways it goes wrong, including the return of an iconic villain, the continued objectification of women, the disappointing reduction in l...

We’ve entered the Kelvin timeline! The 2009 reboot of Star Trek brought with it a lot of things: fresh faces on iconic characters, modern cinematic action, and enough lens flares to blind a small child. That said, we really enjoyed revisiting this one! Is Star Trek actually just a utopia because they got rid of email? How much was Kirk living rent-free in the head of “cupcake guy”? Will we ever st...

(CW: Brief discussion of the sexual assault scene from 1:18:00 to 1:21:00.) Y’all are wrong about Star Trek: Nemesis. We get disliking the CGI, and the silly off-road vehicle action, but everything related to Picard’s clone works. Tom Hardy gives a performance full of emotion that is achingly sincere, and the bittersweet mood for the main cast is just right. We discuss the confusing reaction criti...

Star Trek: Insurrection is a film of peaks and valleys. On the one hand, the villain isn’t particularly memorable and the drone special effects suck. On the other hand, it provides some pretty damning commentary on the perils of forced relocation. But then back on the other hand, it muddies the forced relocation message with a bunch of twists out of nowhere! All of this left us very mixed. Does th...

The most well-regarded Next Gen movie is First Contact, but does it deserve that recognition? Yes! This time travel romp is an exciting adventure that pretty expertly weaves together all the things that make Star Trek so special. We get into all that plus the historic week we had that made this movie even more special, our touching personal history with this film, browser-based movie games, more d...

It’s time to enter a new era of Star Trek films. Last week we said goodbye to (most of) the original cast, today we say hello to the Next Generation! This film is a classic example of the “passing the baton” sequel we see attempted often nowadays, and on that front it mostly succeeds. Where it struggles is with the writing, as most of the dialogue is egregious and forgettable technobabble. We disc...

This week we make it to the end of the Star Trek movies with the original series cast. The final swan song for this crew somehow features a murder mystery, courtroom drama, a prison escape, and lots of touching moments of finality for this original cast. Topics discussed include Samuel’s less-than-ideal peak viewing experience, Klingons learning all the wrong lessons from Shakespeare, the Jetsons,...

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is perhaps best described as a mess. Shatner’s only time in the director’s seat produced a Star Trek film with strange tone, questionable villain writing, hasty visual effects, and some fantastic science fiction ideas. It ultimately left us with more questions than answers. Why does this light jokey tone feel so much worse than last week? Why is Sybok’s whole deal r...

If you were three movies deep into the Star Trek series and getting annoyed at how self-serious it was, then Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home should hit you like a cold lemonade on a hot summer day. This light and airy time travel romp with space whales is more a comedy than anything else. We discuss how to get into the right headspace to enjoy this lighter tone, how we think the transporter works, t...

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is unfortunately not very good! An emphasis on bringing back Spock means that the other subplots have to a take the backseat, and as a result nothing of consequence or importance really happens in this movie until the last five minutes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a good podcast dissecting this one as we discuss how we would improve this screenplay, Klin...

Ask any Star Trek fan what the best Star Trek movie is, and a lot of them will tell you it’s The Wrath of Khan. Like most Star Trek stories, it’s a mishmash of ideas: you’ve got a villain-of-the-week from the original series, Kirk’s inability to confront failure and death, a powerful device that can create (and eat) planets, all wrapped up in a distinctly naval theme with a strong Moby Dick metaph...

This miniseries we’re boldly going where no podcast has gone before! Wait, actually there are a lot of Star Trek podcasts… Well then, we’re going somewhere we’ve never gone before, and that’s 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture! While this film might have more in common with slow cinema than it does with the Kelvin timeline films we’re used to, there’s still plenty to enjoy with it’s heavy themes...

In 2026, Peak Viewing covered The Bride!… on a DARE. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore film felt like a nice coda to the Frankenstein series we did last year, so we added it to the slate. Having now seen it, do we still want to do an episode? We would prefer not to. The film itself is kind of a headache inducing beautiful mess, but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss everything to do with the often rem...

It’s been a long miniseries, but the day is finally here: we’re becoming made men. Not in the Italian mafia or anything, just men who made a podcast about Goodfellas! We’re finally discussing what is arguably the crowning achievement of Scorsese’s career, and the most enduring and enjoyable gangster movie of all time. That Copacobana shot? We got it! The duality of glorifying and condemning the or...

This Last Temptation of Christ is arguably Scorsese’s most controversial film (at least at the time of release). This passion project that was years in the making is less about retelling the Gospels and more about struggling with the eternal conflict between spirit and flesh. As two non-believers, we were pretty impressed! We discuss why this interpretation of Jesus Christ is one of the most compe...

The Color of Money delivers on a lot of fronts: hot young Tom Cruise, old (but still hot) Paul Newman, and enough great pool shots to fill the two hour runtime. Still, it’s perhaps an outlier in this miniseries, in the sense that it’s the least “like” a Martin Scorsese movie. Also, did Marty Supreme and Top Gun: Maverick both rip off this movie? Did Scorsese have other things on his mind while mak...

For the second week in a row Scorsese is leaning into his more humorous side, this time with the thriller parody After Hours. We found this convoluted plot needed quite a bit of buy-in, but once you do there is plenty of fun to be had. As we sprint around the winding streets of SoHo, we discuss potential titles for a follow-up film, revisiting the Star Wars sequels, the archaic concept of having n...

Many aspects of The King of Comedy (now over 40 years old) feel incredibly timeless. It’s a story of fanaticism and parasocial relationships that feels possibly more relevant today in the age of the internet than it did in the age of television personalities. We discuss this unique brand of cringe comedy, Scorsese’s slightly more subtle stylistic touches, office layouts, and come up with a bunch o...

Last week we bet big that Raging Bull would be the first truly amazing film of this miniseries. And this week, we’re pleased to say: we were correct! Everything seems to have come together at just the right time for this to be a truly stunning work of art: Robert De Niro’s passion, Martin Scorsese’s redemption, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s pitch-perfect editing. And that’s before we even get to Joe Pe...

If you find yourself trying to watch the currently un-streamable film New York, New York, it’s recommended you take a break every time you can’t stand De Niro anymore. Unfortunately, the troubled nature of this movie’s production—Scorsese’s cocaine addiction and extramartial affair, Minelli’s discomfort with improv, De Niro’s obsessive method acting—seeps into the final product, resulting in a mov...