The Next Picture Show

There’s a lot to enjoy about  The Weight : the tactile 1930s Oregon setting, strong performances from Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe, a premise that allows for multiple suspense sequences. But Padraic McKinley’s directorial debut is arguably lacking in thematic heft and visceral grit, particularly when compared to the other film in this pairing. So after considering how The Weight...

Padraic McKinley’s The Weight isn’t a remake of The Wages of Fear, though it feels deeply indebted to the H.G. Clouzot classic in its thrilling depiction of a group of outlaws on a near-impossible mission across deadly terrain. William Friedkin’s 1977 cult favorite Sorcerer technically isn’t a Wages remake, either — Friedkin insisted it was his own adaptation of the o...

Alexander Ullom's It Ends is a daring little piece of microbudget drama about four friends at transition points in their lives, who find themselves in a place where life and death no longer hold any meaning. Whether it’s a film about despair, about the afterlife, about the human condition, or all of the above, is up for discussion this week, as well as how It Ends fits into this current mome...

Alexander Ullom’s feature debut,  It Ends , has been billed as a horror movie, but it’s more of an existential exercise wrapped inside a genre premise. That same description could be applied to  Solaris , though Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science-fiction classic takes nearly twice as long to ponder the nature of life in a situation where death has no meaning anymore. So th...

The Platt family is barely surviving, and that’s before their neighborhood is inexplicably dropped millions of years into the past and overrun by hungry dinosaurs.  The End of Oak Street  isn’t nearly as concerned with explaining that premise or exploring its characters as it is with facilitating dino mayhem and nostalgia for the films of writer-director David Robert Mitchell...

David Robert Mitchell’s  The End of Oak Street  drops an ordinary family into extraordinary circumstances, forcing them to focus all their energy on surviving— and maybe, just maybe, learning to understand each other along the way. That structure, combined with  Oak Street ’s Spielbergian spectacle, pointed us toward 2005’s  War of the Worlds,  whic...

Matt Johnson’s new biopic  Tony  sidesteps the infamous  Walk Hard  trap by narrowing its scope to a single summer that would end up shaping the rest of Anthony Bourdain’s life, but not necessarily defining it. Whether that approach is ultimately satisfying to fans of the late celebrity chef and author is up for debate this week, as we’re once again joined by...

Anthony Bourdain, whose early experience working in a restaurant kitchen is chronicled in the new biopic  Tony,  once singled out  Ratatouille  as Hollywood’s best depiction of working in a restaurant kitchen, which is all the invitation we need to revisit Brad Bird’s 2007 Pixar classic. So this week, with the help of Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi, we consider how&nb...

Christopher Nolan’s  The Odyssey  approaches Homer’s epic from a much more literal vantage point than  O Brother Where Art Thou,  but that doesn’t mean it’s a dutiful, beat-by-beat adaptation. So this week we’re talking through the ways in which Nolan put his personal stamp on one of the most well-known stories in all of literature, from the film&r...

Considering  The Odyssey  is one of the most famous and influential stories of all time, there had been relatively few attempts to directly translate Homer’s epic poem to the big screen until Christopher Nolan came along to do it at a blockbuster scale. It’s been more common for filmmakers, such as Joel and Ethan Coen, to use it as the loose framework for a flawed hero’...

A good chunk of  Supergirl ’s DNA can be traced back to  True Grit  by way of the comics miniseries the film is adapting, which is why we paired it with Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2010 version of that story. But as our discussion of Craig Gillespie’s new entry in James Gunn’s revamped DC Universe details,  Supergirl  often feels less indebted to its spac...

The new  Supergirl  isn’t an outright adaptation of the comic-book miniseries  Woman of Tomorrow , but it retains enough of its shape that it evokes that comic’s own source of inspiration,  True Grit . Either of the two film adaptations of Charles Portis’ 1968 Western novel about a young girl enlisting a reluctant, drunken hero to help her enact revenge would...

Forty-four years after his science-fiction classic about the deep connection between a 10-year-old human boy and an alien visitor stranded on earth, Steven Spielberg is once again considering humanity’s capacity to accept and understand extraterrestrial life with his latest,  Disclosure Day.  So after sharing our reactions to  Disclosure Day,  including an ending that&rsq...

Disclosure Day  is not Steven Spielberg’s first film about the confirmation of alien life, nor is it the first such Spielberg film we’ve discussed on this podcast — that would be  Close Encounters of the Third Kind , which we covered a decade ago. But Spielberg’s latest is specifically concerned with whether humanity possesses the empathy to process such a revelat...

Backrooms ’ journey to the big screen — from anonymous 4chan post to viral creepypasta to mega-popular YouTube series to A24-backed box-office smash — is as unique and unexpected as the film itself. 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ liminal horror hit feels unlike everything else currently happening in the genre, which is partly what inspired us to pair it with the similarly expect...

20-year-old Kane Parsons is now the youngest director to ever hit No. 1 at the box office thanks to his A24-backed horror film  Backrooms,  which made back its budget several times over in the first week of release and is already inviting talk of sequels. All of that offscreen context makes it a natural pairing with 1979’s series-spawning cult hit  Phantasm , but it has plenty...

The Mandalorian and Grogu  plays like a few stitched-together episodes of  The Mandalorian , which makes it a particularly apt pairing with the 1980  Lone Wolf and Cub  assemblage  Shogun Assassin  — but whether the first new Star Wars feature film since 2019 manages to distinguish itself from its television counterpart is another question. We’re joined ag...

The Mandalorian and Grogu  gives the feature-film treatment to a streaming series whose premise — an outcast warrior lives by a code of honor while traveling in the company of an adorable small companion — owes no small debt to the Japanese multimedia franchise  Lone Wolf and Cub . But rather than comb through the six installments comprising that film series for a good match,...

Kyle Balda’s new family film The Sheep Detectives  pulls off a move George Miller was dissuaded from including in his 1998 sequel  Babe: Pig in the City —  killing off its human farmer figure — but that premise-setting death aside, it’s generally a warmer and gentler take on talking animals venturing beyond their green pastures and into the big, scary human w...

The Sheep Detectives is about as short on pigs as Babe: Pig In the City is short on sheep, but Kyle Balda’s new family film still reminded us of the 1998 box-office-bomb-turned-cult-classic in its tale of talking animals venturing beyond their idyllic pastures and into a dangerous corner of the human world. George Miller’s  poorly received sequel to Babe may technically have a lower body count tha...

Despite the snowy setting, law-enforcement-officer protagonist, and pointed poking at the idea of "Minnesota Nice," Ben Wheatley's new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-'em-up Nowhere is in many ways the anti- Fargo. Is it fair to compare this scrappy (some might even say sloppy) genre effort to a film as revered as the Coen brothers' comedic crime classic? Maybe not, but that's what we do here at The N...

As a comedic crime thriller set in snowy Minnesota and featuring a sheriff protagonist, it would be pretty tough for the new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-em-up Normal to avoid comparisons to Fargo , and since we will never pass up an opportunity to discuss the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic, that’s precisely what we will be comparing it to next week. But first we’ll spend this week discussing why Farg...

Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative new The Drama turns on the revelation of a secret past that is more of an abstraction than the one in the other half of this pairing, making the resulting relationship rift between Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s characters both frustrating and fascinating to parse. After talking through our responses to the film’s button-pushing, and our vastly different takes on it...

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama uses the revelation of one character’s dark secret as a provocative “twist,” but also as the basis for an exploration of whether a romantic relationship can survive such dramatic upheaval, a premise that calls to mind 2005’s A History of Violence. The central couple of David Cronenberg’s thriller, played by Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello, is much further along in the...

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary is an exceptionally audience-friendly adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, offsetting the story’s doomsday scenario with lots of jokes, a charismatic lead, and most especially the buddy dynamic between Ryan Gosling’s human protagonist and an alien engineer named Rocky. The film’s light touch has made it a hit, but it also left some...