Critique-Opolis

Send us Fan Mail A good thriller doesn’t just ask, “Will he do it?” It asks, “What part of you breaks while you try to stop it?” That’s why we had to go back to the 1993 political action thriller In the Line of Fire, where Clint Eastwood plays Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan, the last active-duty man on the JFK detail, still haunted by the split-second hesitation he can’t forgive. The result i...

Send us Fan Mail Classic books are supposed to be timeless, so why do they so often feel unreadable? We get into Thug Notes, the short web series that retells Shakespeare, dystopias, and other canon staples through Sparky Sweets, PhD a do-rag-wearing “professor” persona played by comedian Greg Edwards. The format sounds like a gimmick until you notice something: the literary analysis is actually t...

Send us Fan Mail A rich uncle’s final wish sounds like a dream until you hear the fine print: spend $30 million in 30 days, end with zero assets, tell no one what you’re doing, and only then can you touch the real fortune. We jump into Brewster’s Millions (1985) with Richard Pryor and John Candy and unpack why the premise is both hilarious and quietly terrifying once you think like an adult instea...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to feel less alone is to hear someone describe your house without ever having been there. We start with a blunt check-in (yes, we missed a recipe) and slide into a bigger question: why do so many boomers act like they nailed adulthood while their families carry the fallout? We talk about rage, denial, and that familiar move where the past gets rewritten as “that’s...

Send us Fan Mail A movie can be “universally loved” and still bounce right off you and that’s exactly the fight we pick with The Big Lebowski. One of us calls it a forever favorite packed with touchstone lines and endlessly rewatchable moments. The other keeps coming back to the same frustration: it feels stupid, the plot feels fake, and none of it seems to add up. We walk through the story in a w...

Send us Fan Mail A movie can win Best Picture and still feel like a brick wall if you hit it on the wrong night. We watched The French Connection and immediately ran into the big split that makes classic films so fun to argue about: one of us loves the dirt-under-the-fingernails realism, and the other gets stuck on how dark, violent, and character-crowded it can feel without a roadmap. So we build...

Send us Fan Mail Our 100th episode lands on a movie with a reputation that scares people off, and we get why. Silence of the Lambs is brutal, tense, and unforgettable. It’s also one of the sharpest psychological thrillers ever made, and once we started talking about what’s actually on the screen, the “gross horror movie” label felt way too small.  We walk through the plot for anyone who’s never se...

Send us Fan Mail One secret can change the world, but only if anyone believes it. We sit down with Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and end up talking less about extraterrestrials and more about the machinery of secrecy: who holds the evidence, who controls the story, and why “disclosure” might land with a shrug in 2026. We walk through what makes the film tick as a science fiction chase thriller...

Send us Fan Mail Sound can be wallpaper in a movie, or it can be the whole engine. Tuner lands firmly in the second camp, and we had a lot to say about why it works. We talk through the film’s core hook: Nikki (Leo Woodall) is a piano tuner with hyperacusis and perfect pitch, and the same ultra-sensitive listening that makes him great at music also makes him terrifyingly good at cracking safes. Th...

Send us Fan Mail A wedding singer writes a melody for his newborn daughter, years pass, and then one late-night jam turns that private song into a public smash. The twist: the pop star who helps “finish” it takes it back to Hollywood, the production machine cranks up, and suddenly the charts are roaring while the original writer is left texting into the void. We break down Power Ballad with Paul R...

Send us Fan Mail He sends her a pair of gloves from her own workplace and somehow that becomes the beginning of everything. We’re talking about Shopgirl (2005), the Steve Martin adaptation that looks like a romance on the surface but lands as a sharp, quiet story about depression, loneliness, and the way relationships can distort identity when you’re desperate to feel seen.  We walk through Mirabe...

Send us Fan Mail A studio executive gets buried under endless pitches, anonymous postcards, and one creeping fear that won’t go away: he’s about to be replaced. Then Robert Altman turns the pressure up until it becomes something much darker. We’re talking about The Player, the razor-edged Hollywood satire that opens with a legendary tracking shot and never stops reminding you that everything here...

Send us Fan Mail French Lover somehow became a Netflix hit, and we walked in expecting a charming French rom-com with Omar Sy and walked out asking how so many scenes made it past the final draft. We’re not doing a polite “maybe it’s just not for us” review, either. We talk through the exact moments where the movie loses emotional logic, why the pacing feels like it’s on fast-forward, and how the...

Send us Fan Mail The moment we realized The Score is the only time Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando share the screen, we knew we had to dig in. What surprised us is how well this 2001 heist film still works: it’s tense without being gross, funny in small doses thanks to Edward Norton, and anchored by a setting that actually matters. Montreal isn’t just a backdrop here, it shapes the whole vibe, fr...

Send us Fan Mail A newborn talks from the womb, delivers himself, and immediately starts asking the one question most adults avoid: why. That’s the spark of Kirikou And The Sorceress, Michel Ocelot’s French animated folktale inspired by West African folklore, and it turned into one of those reviews where the deeper we looked, the more the movie revealed. We break down what makes Kirikou such a rar...

Send us Fan Mail A space movie can look expensive and still feel hollow. Project Hail Mary does the opposite: it feels human, funny, tense, and oddly comforting, even when the premise is pure nightmare fuel. We just saw it in theaters and we’re still buzzing, so we jump straight into what makes it work, from the opening mystery of an amnesiac teacher waking up light years from home to the terrifyi...

Send us Fan Mail A chained-up dog. A kid who stops and says “no,” then frees him. A glowing gold thread that refuses to break even after death. We talk through Run Totti Run, a Cambodian-set animated short with a watercolor sketch look that feels like a Monet painting in motion, and we don’t dodge what it’s really about: pet loss, grief, and the stubborn ways love keeps showing up after someone is...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to you favorite straight from Michigan movie podcast! We are back after a brief hiatus because, well, life.  For this latest episode of Critique-o-polis, Jay stumbled upon an animated short called Snow Bear. Being a lifelong fan of the polar bear, Louisa was more than happy to watch this Snow Bear. This short movie did not let its most recent viewers down.  This movie...

Send us Fan Mail In today's episode of Critique-o-polis, Jay and Louisa discuss the 1987 cult classic Raising Arizona. Nicolas Cage plays a conflicted HI McDonnaugh torn between his primal criminal nature and the desire to be a loving, stable husband to Holly Hunter's Ed(wina), is police booking photographer, having met during HI's repeated bouts of recidivism within the Arizona pen...

Send us Fan Mail This week on your favorite movie podcast we chat about the Danish film, "Another Round," starring Mads Mikkelsen. Martin played by Mads Mikkelsen is the married father of two boys and also a history teacher. Martin joins three of his friends, also teachers at the same School in a sort of social experiment: Drinking while at work, but more specifically maintaining a const...

Send us Fan Mail This afternoon, Jay and I are discussing the movie Night Hunter. This is not a movie that was on my radar which is surprising to me, but also not. The casting is excellent. I love all of the names in this film. I'd say some of the subject matter is intense, but movie is gritty, but worth a watch as it comes together (well for the most part) at the end. Another detail to note,...

Send us Fan Mail Hello friends. Welcome back to Critique-o-polis. Today, Jay and I discuss the third installment of The Knives Out series: Wake Up, Dead Man.  As with the previous two movies, the location is remote, set aside from the busy city and focuses the viewer on the story AKA the crime at hand. Wake Up, Dead Man is set in a small, fictional village, Chimney Rocks. The movie centers around...

Send us Fan Mail After our brief hiatus, Critique-o-Polis is back! Jay says that it is his fault that we were off for a few weeks, and while that might be true (it's not), he has a good "excuse," Jay was working elsewhere. I think that it is very fair that we took some time off to live another part of life. We will always be watching movies and reviewing them for you! It is one of o...

Send us Fan Mail Happy New Year! Welcome back to another wonderful episode of Critique-o-polis. Today, we review the French-Italian film "Cinema Paradiso." Let me just start off by saying, if you haven't seen or heard of this movie, (ever), watch the trailer and decide for yourself if you want to watch it. Just watching the trailer makes me cry. Also, there are three different versi...

Send us Fan Mail Guess what? Jay finally remembered to include a honey based recipe. He felt so bad about not remembering to deliver a recipe the last several episodes that he put this one at the front of the episode. Try not to be too hard on him, he's getting rather elderly and forgetting things.  This week we watched the Japanese animated "Tokyo Godfathers." Although, this movie...