DOLLY BACK

Death haunts every corner of this sprawling, environmental epic from Studio Ghibli. Whether it is the exploration of its eponymous revenge spirit, nature's ability to survive through all adversity, or a protagonist marked from death, every aspect of Hayao Miyazaki and crew's filmmaking rises to meet fate, be it real-life climate calamity or our own struggle to live in harmony with the wo...

Happy Valentine's Day listeners - to celebrate, your hosts dive into one of the most kinetic and tender love stories put to film, in Gina Prince-Bythewood's debut Love and Basketball ! Doubling as star athletes and conflicted lovers, Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps deftly explore the grief of professional failure, the loss of the family unit, the forfeiture of one's dreams - and never le...

Every end is a new beginning, and what Kevin Flynn refers to as biodigital jazz, your hosts view as a deeply spiritual, meditative encounter with the digital and non real. Helmed by Joseph Kosinski, an architecture student now responsible for one of the most slickly directed and highest grossing actioners of all time, had his roots in a similarly precise big swing that resurrects a past icon onscr...

Tofu, cake, snow, celluloid - Park Chan Wook’s 2005 slow burn thriller walks a retributive path towards a philosophy of purity. Geum-Ja, recently freed from a prison sentence for a crime she was wrongfully accused of, cultivates an intricate debt of human relationships that culminate in one of the most gruesome and casually cruel murders in the director’s career. Anchored by a female perspective,...

"Racism, or tradition as they call it nowadays, gets passed down like recipes" jokes Denzel Washington's Demetrius as he strolls down the beach with Sarita Choudhury's Mina, the two lovers opting to spice up the formula in their subversive but tender relationship. In a story that travels from Uganda to Jackson, Mississippi, a soundtrack that bounces between world and soul, and...

In the rainy and smokey environs of the moral detective and noir's favorite stomping grounds, we tell ourselves it's a dog-eat-dog world. "What went wrong?" is one of the questions Robert Altman expertly poses in his 1973 mystery, where Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe (in an all-time performance from Elliot Gould) finds himself increasingly at odds with a corrupt and su...

As we start off the new year, Dolly Back takes some time to reflect on the one that just passed us by. In a year that marked a return to widespread exhibition across the world, mass love letters to the movies, and the beginning of this podcast, your hosts are incredibly excited to spotlight some of their favorite releases of the year! In an episode where they share notes on what inspired them, whi...

What better way to close out the calendar year than a tip of the hat to one of the medium's most critical artists - meditating on one of the most critical icons in our cultural consciousness? In The Last Temptation of Christ , Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader interrogate the dual nature of Jesus, the man and the messiah, and the tribulations that torture him on the path to his destiny. Impor...

With jingle bells ringing and snowflakes falling, Stanley Kubrick gleefully frames the most wonderful time of the year as its most impotent. In Eyes Wide Shut, which his collaborators describe him as claiming as his most significant contribution to the art of cinema, the legendary director's swan song forces a wedge between one of Tinseltown's biggest marriages - Tom Cruise and Nicole Ki...

"I guess the rest of us really are just suckers" becomes a mantra for Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale Jr,  a pilot, doctor, lawyer, cheque expert - and conman! In this ultimate fake-it-'til-you-make-it story, Steven Spielberg takes a telephoto lens to family discord, juvenile criminality, and 1960s America, elements which have recurred throughout his filmography and rings ev...

CONTENT WARNING This episode contains discussion of intense sexual violence with regards to some of the film's scenes - a brief warning will also play before this episode's plot summary. Listener discretion is advised. If you have any feedback for our handling of sensitive subject matter, please let us know on any of our socials or email. Closing off Dolly Back's Noirvember is Satos...

Take heart dear old men and women, as Dolly Back takes a Noirvember sabbatical in post-war Vienna in Carol Reed's timeless The Third Man (1949)! As Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins watches water diluted by penicillin, fact by fiction, light with shadow, the city's underworld threatens to erupt as if it were a powder keg once again. Flanked by Alida Valli's resolute Anna Schmidt an...

Let it be known that Dolly Back never misfiles ANYTHING! Your hosts are joined by the fantastic Morgan Beck, a fellow film and literary scholar, with a particular interest in disentangling  “bad” art, and the master; Nicolas Cage. Back in the land of bloodsucking parasites, your hosts go to their “C” files and discuss Cage, Cult, and Camp in this unique horror/romance/black comedy marriage - here’...

It’s not easy facing up when your whole world is Black - there could not be a more fitting surname and indeed director for Dolly Back to ring in their Noirvember! Shane Black’s 2016 neo-noir and buddy cop extravaganza The Nice Guys remains one of the film world’s most treasured sleeper hits, inspiring debate on the future of film exhibition and providing a potential template for the loveably sleaz...

In this 80s horror extravaganza, only one rule is true - opposites attract. Whether they’re the sun and moon, science and religion, matter and antimatter, an ancient secret under a decrepit Los Angeles church threatens to swallow all of reality, and our understanding of time and space itself! Channeling his inner Michael Jackson, John Carpenter takes a look at *man* in the mirror - gleefully captu...

Have no fear for your light switches - that's just the stark and shadowy world of German Expressionism! Dolly Back switches gears and tackles a canonical behemoth in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), now a centennial (and indeed timeless) tale of pestilence and the power of love. Famously part of scholar Siegfried Kracaeur's overview of Germany's film culture reflecting the anxet...

Watch out listener, this episode might chew you up! Dolly Back takes on Julia Ducournau's directorial debut Raw , revolving around the coming-of-age of a young veterinarian student developing new appetites. As your hosts get a taste of what this course has to offer, they explore Ducournau's many cinematic influences, incredible command of lighting and montage, and set the film against th...

Dream much, listener ? Joining Dolly Back this week on a filmmaker and film near and dear to our hearts is Anna Swanson, a film critic and senior contributor to FilmSchoolRejects, and fellow Manniac on the director's neon-soaked and transcendent Manhunter (1986)! In the earliest adaptation of Thomas Harris' novels, the film would overcome its initial reception and commercial prospects to...

Ringing in the scariest month of the year, Dolly Back is mesmerized by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure , a 1997 detective thriller that is equal parts horrific and incisive. As a gruesome crime wave sweeps Chiba, Detective Takabe joins forces with the psychologist Sakuma to uncover the mysteries behind the distinct X pattern slashed into their neck and the amnesiac wanderer cropping up at crime scene...

In the worlds of Alan J. Pakula, one thing is paramount - trust no one. Your hosts are happy to make an exception to that rule this week as they are joined by Saffron Maeve, a fellow UofT student, a writer with featured publications across sites such as ScreenSlate and MUBI, and most recently, the recipient of the Canadian Cinema Scope Reader's Choice Award! Much like Warren Beatty's sha...

Between Warholian pop art and Diego Velasquez, Jean Luc-Godard searches for a joie de vivre in perhaps his most astonishingly eye-popping and impressionist work. As iconic screen couple Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina hit the roads of Europe, this hallowed director and his characters make peace with their demons on love, life, and literature, breaking down screen barriers and the form's en...

As they brave the always-dangerous waters of Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy, Dolly Back is joined by Hannah Fleisch, a UofT graduate student with an extensive knowledge of world cinemas! Whether it's a sob at the end of the world or a family photograph at the center of yours, this famed Hong Kong filmmaker turns his viewfinder to every nook and cranny that conceals a piece of home - everywher...

Enter Bayhem - a world of impulses and entropy that has perhaps never been as potent and singular as it was in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009)! To your hosts, it is a miracle this film exists - even moreso that it sustained commercial success in spite of its WGA strike affected script, IP origins, and near-total departure from its predecessor's setting. As Optimu...

In an odyssey into Douglas Sirk's black-and-white, melodramatic masterclass, Dolly Back is joined by Ryan Akler-Bishop, a UofT graduate student and film writer, on its 25th episode! Revolving around a toymaker who grows emotionally neglected by his family and reconnects with a coworker from his past, this German director explores the human condition through a focus on the American family, and...

"If it bleeds, we can kill it" - this immortal affirmation of an unknowable foe's mortality uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, embodies not only the ethos of John McTiernan's classic sci-fi actioner, but indeed all the body builders who went on to fight the many villains who personified a post-Cold War America on the silver screen. In the depths of a Central America...