Uncertain Age

  Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas hosts solo for a deep dive into the award-winning feature film The Addiction of Hope, with indie filmmakers Martin Grey Gottlieb and Anne-Marie Johnson. The film is a moving story about a successful female actor of a certain age coming to terms with the realities of ageism in show business as she reconnects with herself, her family, and dis...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye dissect the 2025 Netflix film A House of Dynamite. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, A House of Dynamite has the President of the United States (Elba) making the toughest decision of his life when a mysterious missile is launched toward the country, with only minutes to decide whether to...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye dissect the Netflix series The Diplomat. Keri Russell plays Kate Wyler, a no-nonsense American ambassador suddenly thrust into the heart of a major international crisis, all while navigating a complicated marriage to a politically ambitious husband and a role she never expected to be in. Is The Diplomat a savvy and compulsively...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye take on the 2025 film Black Bag. Starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, Black Bag is a sleek espionage thriller that delves into themes of trust, loyalty, and the dangerous intersection of marriage and spycraft.  Is the film a taut and stylishly crafted exercise in tension, or does it sacrifice emotional depth for genr...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye pack their bags for a lavish Labor Day weekend in Sirens, the Netflix dark comedy limited series where Julianne Moore plays a billionaire's wife so magnetically unhinged she makes wealth look like a personality disorder (which, in many ways, it has proved to be). When Devon shows up to a gorgeous island estate to pry her sister...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye take a look at Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment in Rian Johnson's acclaimed whodunit series, starring Daniel Craig as the inimitable Benoit Blanc: this time drawn into the baffling death of a divisive Catholic priest tangled up with a missing inheritance. As the film layers questions of faith, guilt...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye waddle into The Penguin Lessons, the true story of a British teacher (Steve Coogan) in 1970s Argentina whose life is unexpectedly transformed by an orphaned penguin. What begins as a small act of kindness turns into a surprisingly moving tale about friendship, empathy, and the strange teachers that wander into our lives: someti...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye take a look at Jay Kelly, the reflective dramedy starring George Clooney as a man quietly unraveling the meaning of success, fame, and identity in midlife. As the film follows Kelly navigating family, regret, and the strange distance that can grow between who we were and who we’ve become, we explore how the story balances humor...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye dish about the surprises, snubs, and standout moments of the 2026 Academy Awards fresh from watching the year’s Oscar-nominated live-action short films. From the delightfully prim absurdity of Jane Austen’s Period Drama to the eyebrow-raising intimacy of Two People Exchanging Saliva, we dive into the strange, funny, and sometim...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye unpack their emotional baggage, grab a fruity cocktail, and check into The White Lotus, HBO’s satire of wealth, privilege, and the many creative ways people self-destruct on vacation. Is The White Lotus a brilliant, biting portrait of modern anxiety wrapped in luxury linens, or a garish resort stay that leaves you with tedious...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye go undercover with Man on the Inside, Netflix’s 2025 series about aging, identity, and the strange courage it takes to reinvent yourself when no one’s looking. Set in a world where retirement doesn’t mean retreat, the show follows an unlikely infiltrator navigating secrets, surveillance, and second acts from the inside out. Is...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye sharpen their pencils, lower the lights, and step into the shadowy world of The Critic, the Ian McKellen–led drama that asks what happens when brilliance, bitterness, and power collide. McKellen stars as a fearsome theater critic whose words can make—or quietly destroy—careers, until his own carefully controlled life begins to...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye dive headfirst into One Battle After Another, the latest from Paul Thomas Anderson. Is PTA offering a bracing meditation on endurance, ideology, and personal reckoning, or an overlong skirmish that mistakes intensity for insight? We dig into the performances, the themes, the choices: and the aftershocks that linger once the dus...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye join Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for The Trip movies—four culinary comedies of egos, impressions, and exquisite tasting menus. Between bites of lamb shank and Michael Caine impressions, the duo wrestle with fame, friendship, and the slow roast of middle age. Are The Trip flicks a four-course feast of wit and melancholy, or just...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye step behind the sequins for The Last Showgirl—no, not Taylor Swift's Life of a Showgirl, but Gia Coppola’s 2024 drama starring Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a longtime Vegas showgirl whose staple revue is about to close after thirty years. Will Shelly overcome her glittering past to carve out a new act, or will the curtain fall be...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye blend baseball with brutality for Caught Stealing—Darren Aronofsky’s 2025 crime-comedy thriller starring Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a washed-up baseball phenom turned bartender who just agreed to cat-sit for a neighbor and suddenly finds himself neck-deep in New York’s criminal underworld. Is Caught Stealing a darkly playf...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye dust off their badges and questionable one-liners for The Naked Gun: Rebooted—the slapstick comeback nobody asked for but everyone secretly needed. Starring Liam Neeson as the world’s most serious man in the world’s least serious movie, this reboot promises bullets, belly laughs, and—thankfully—less OJ. Will it recapture the ch...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye go off half cocked as they take aim at The Last Rifleman: the 2023 drama starring Pierce Brosnan as a World War II veteran who escapes his care home to make a pilgrimage to Normandy on D-Day’s anniversary. Is The Last Rifleman a moving salute to memory, courage, and reconciliation, or does it march too heavily on well-trodden g...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye tee up Stick: Apple TV+’s new drama starring Owen Wilson as a washed-up golfer trying to find his swing—and maybe himself—after life in the spotlight fades. Is Stick a hole-in-one redemption story, or just another tired round stuck in the rough? Find out on Uncertain Age! And if there’s a movie, show, or podcast you’d like us t...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye get clearance to check into The Residence: Netflix’s 2024 whodunnit set in the White House, starring Uzo Aduba as the steely investigator called in after a state dinner goes fatally sideways. Is this twisty mix of politics and parlor mystery a fresh take on the murder-mansion formula, or does it get lost wandering the halls of...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye plunge into the shadowy corridors of political paranoia with Zero Day—Netflix’s tense thriller starring Robert De Niro as a former U.S. president pulled back into the spotlight amid a national cyber crisis. Is Zero Day a sharp, timely warning about trust, power, and misinformation—or does it pale in comparison to what is ACTUAL...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye step into the absurdly glamorous (and gloriously dysfunctional) world of prestige filmmaking with Seth Rogen's The Studio—Apple TV’s satire about a Hollywood production spiraling into chaos. From inflated egos to creative compromises, is The Studio a wickedly funny look behind the curtain… or just another insider comedy lost in...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye risk stranger danger to watch either The Company of Strangers or Strangers in Good Company (it’s complicated). This 1990 Canadian docufiction film features eight elderly women who find themselves stranded in the countryside when their tour bus breaks down. Is this largely improvised film a poignant look at what is revealed when...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye saddle up to watch the Apple TV+ show Slow Horses, the spy thriller following a group of disgraced MI5 agents led by their cynical and sharp-tongued boss, Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman). Does the show gallop through the spy genre with dark humor and gritty drama, or is it a tired steed destined for the TV glue factory? Fi...

Welcome to Uncertain Age! This week, AR (Anna) Nicholas and Dale Basye stock up on antidepressants and watch Everything Went Fine, a 2021 French drama where an 85-year-old father asks his daughter to help him end his life through assisted suicide after suffering a debilitating stroke. Is the film a deeply human and unsentimental meditation on love, mortality, and agency, or a depressing slog led b...