The Projection Booth

Few bands burned brighter—or more colorfully—than Culture Club, and director Alison Ellwood joins Mike to unpack the making of her acclaimed documentary Boy George & Culture Club. From the group's improbable formation and meteoric rise to the personal relationships, creative tensions, and heartbreak that shaped their music, Ellwood reveals how she crafted an intimate portrait using the voices...

What kind of man doesn't drink, avoids women, and prefers the company of other strange men in the park? Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) plays the alien-infiltration premise with surprising melancholy and remarkable restraint for a film with such a lurid title. Mike, Bill Ackerman, and Ben Buckingham dig into the film's overlapping readings — Cold War paranoia, the Lav...

Editor Sarah Affleck pulls back the curtain on one of filmmaking's most invisible—and essential—arts. From cutting reality television to shaping animated features at LAIKA and Pixar, Affleck traces her journey through the editing room while explaining why animation offers creative possibilities unlike any other medium. The conversation dives into her work on the acclaimed animated short Dear Upsta...

Gregg Allman lived inside the central contradiction of American music — a white Southern kid who built his art on the blues, fled his demons while pouring them into song, and emerged as one of rock's most essential voices. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces that journey from a childhood shattered by his father's murder to the soulful authority the Allman Brothers Band carved out through rel...

Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Proyas's tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a Philip K. Dic...

Mike and Aaron Carruthers kick off Sci-Fi June with William Dear's time-travel oddity Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, in which motocross racer Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) accidentally blasts a century into the past and spends the entire film completely unaware that he's done it. That central gag — a fish out of water who doesn't know he's a fish — drives most of the conversation, along with the...

Kenji Tanigaki is anything but furious when he discusses his latest film, The Furious (2025). The film stars Xie Miao and Joe Taslim as two men united by a common enemy - child trafficking. The movie combines pathos with some breath-taking fight scenes in a film reminiscent of The Raid, Taken, and John Wick.  Check local listings for where The Furious is playing near you. Become a supporter of thi...

Mike welcomes Andrew Nette and Jedidiah Ayres back to dissect Dark of the Sun (1968), a brutal, kinetic men‑on‑a‑mission film whose pulp thrills sit atop a surprisingly rich political and historical foundation. The trio digs into the movie’s Cold War backdrop, its depiction of the Congo Crisis, and the real mercenaries who inspired characters like Curry and the sadistic Henlein — from “Mad” Mike H...

Mike talks with re-recording mixer Duncan McRae and sound designer/supervising sound editor Jeffrey A. Pitts about their work on They Will Kill You (2026), the action-comedy horror film directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov. Co-written by Sokolov and Alex Litvak, the film stars Zazie Beetz as an ex-convict who answers an ad for a housekeeping job at a mysterious New York City high-rise, onl...

In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie completed his second film, Reconstituirea — known in English as Reconstruction or The Reenactment — and, within a month of its 1970 release, it vanished. Not banned outright, but buried: withdrawn, never televised, never revived for nearly two decades. By the time Romanian audiences could see it freely in 1990, it had acquired near-mythological status. A...

Mike talks with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, whose work — spanning documentary, fiction, and experimental forms — is now collected on the Criterion Channel. Takesue grew up shuttling between Honolulu and Massachusetts, and that cross-cultural, biracial upbringing informs every frame she has made, from early shorts rooted in identity politics to acclaimed features documenting cross-cultural encounters i...

Orson Welles spent thirty-five years trying to put Sir John Falstaff on screen. Chimes at Midnight (1966) is the result: a film drawn from five Shakespeare plays — primarily the two Henry IV parts, with passages from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor — that lifts Falstaff from comic supporting player to tragic protagonist. Welles plays the knight himself, a lumbering, larger-than...

In 2025, New Jersey's favorite hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength returned — twice. Writer/director Macon Blair's big-budget reimagining, The Toxic Avenger (2023), finally received a wide theatrical release in August 2025. Peter Dinklage voices Winston, a terminally ill janitor at a corrupt pharmaceutical company who falls into a vat of toxic chemicals and emerges as Toxie...

From indie narratives to deeply personal documentaries, filmmaker Mye Hoang has built a career around stories about identity, community, and unexpected connections. On this episode of *The Projection Booth*, Mike sits down with Hoang to trace her creative journey—from her early work to her breakout documentary Cat Daddies—before diving into her latest film, 25 Cats from Qatar. The new documentary...

Mike talks with Simon Glassman, the writer-director of the 2025 Canadian horror-comedy Buffet Infinity, a feature debut that premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival to instant cult acclaim. Buffet Infinity takes place in the fictional Alberta town of Westridge County, where an all-you-can-eat restaurant chain arrives alongside a mysterious sinkhole and begins swallowing the local com...

Comedy Month wraps up as Mike talks with Rob St. Mary and Heather Drain about Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Producer Lauren Lloyd joins Mike for an interview about working on the film that was almost universally trashed on release.  Green wrote, directed, and stars as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist who heads to Hollywood to sell his drawings as an animated series. After a catastro...

Mike talks with editors Martin Biehn and Kevin Hibbard about their work on Drift (2026), directed by Deon Taylor. Isaac "Drift" Wright is an Army veteran and self-taught photographer whose trauma finds an outlet in illegal high-rise climbing — scaling some of the world's tallest structures to capture images from vantage points no permit would allow. The film documents his pursuit of art and healin...

Identity fractures and reality starts to slip in this deep dive into The Infinite Husk. Mike sits down with the film’s writer-director-composer-etc., Aaron Silverstein, to unpack a mind-bending indie that blurs memory, selfhood, and the fragile boundaries of perception. The conversation cuts straight to process—how the film’s layered structure took shape, the challenges of sustaining ambiguity wit...

Todd Solondz's disowned debut finally gets its day in court. Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989) follows Ira Ellis, a bespectacled, self-deluding playwright adrift in the last gasp of the East Village art scene — too busy pining after a performance artist named Junk to notice the woman who actually loves him. Mike Sullivan and David Rodgers join Mike to dig into the film Solondz famously begged...

Paul Gallico's 1970 novel Matilda told of a male boxing kangaroo who becomes an unlikely heavyweight contender, upending the worlds of sports promotion and organized crime. Producer Albert S. Ruddy, fresh from his Oscar-winning triumph with The Godfather, acquired the rights and brought the story to the screen in 1978, co-writing with Timothy Galfas.  The resulting G-rated family comedy stars Elli...

Mike talks with director Marcie Hume about making Corey Feldman vs. the World, the ethics of documentary filmmaking, and what it means to capture a subject in freefall. Hume has said the film was never intended as a hit piece, and the documentary bears that out. It presents testimony from Feldman, the Angels, his then-wife Courtney Anne Mitchell, and fans who attended the shows, letting events spe...

When a bank robbery goes sideways, two strangers find themselves bound together on the road — Billie (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), whose desperation brought her to the bank in the first place, and Franny (Grace Van Dien), a pregnant teenager with nothing left to lose. What begins as a hostage situation slowly reshapes into something stranger and more human: an unlikely alliance, an argument across th...

John Singleton was twenty-three when he wrote Boyz N the Hood and twenty-four when it made him the first Black filmmaker and youngest person ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Released in 1991, the film drew from Singleton's own upbringing in South Central Los Angeles to deliver an unflinching portrait of Black life there, launched the careers of Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, and...

Comedy Month continues as Mike talks with co-hosts Keith Gordon and Heidi Honeycutt about Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959). Chicago, 1929. Musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are barely scraping by when they stumble onto the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, witnessing Spats Colombo and his mob gun down a rival gang. With the killers on their tail, the two desperate musicians dis...

Released in 1978 and directed by John Landis, National Lampoon's Animal House follows the anarchic members of Delta House fraternity at Faber College as they wage war against pompous Dean Wormer (John Vernon) and the rival Omega House. Written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller, and starring John Belushi as the legendary John "Bluto" Blutarsky, the film became one of the highest-gro...