Hit Factory

Filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell (Miss Me Yet, Attention Shoppers) joins us to discuss Last Action Hero , a meta action comedy featuring too many ideas, a healthy serving of great jokes, and a fascinating reckoning for its star Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was aging into the second act of his movie star career. We begin with a conversation about the action hero vehicle, its dominance in the 1980s,...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Associate Editor at Roger Ebert Robert Daniels joins to discuss the latest Spike Lee joint Highest 2 Lowest , a loose reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 procedural masterpiece High & Low that marks the fifth collaborationg between Lee and the inimitab...

We inaugurate (and conclude) our coverage of Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène with a discussion of his 1992 feature Guelwaar , the late filmmaker's only work of the decade. In essence a minor comedy of errors revolving around the misplaced body of a departed community leader and political agitator, Guelwaar transforms several times over into a profound and moving chronicle of national identity, r...

3D artist, animator and director of the new film Boys Go to Jupiter Julian Glander joins us to discuss the live wire pleasures of SLC Punk! starring Matthew Lillard as a Stevo, a brash, blue-haired anarchist punk rocker who, alongside his best friend Bob, seeks meaning in the aimlessness of Salt Lake City, Utah. Though set amidst the deeply conservative Reagan 80s, the film belongs to the long lin...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. More new movie talk as we take on the most divisive film of the summer, Ari Aster's COVID-era neo-western Eddington . The film follows Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, NM who - frustrated by the state's mask mandates in early 2020 - d...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Writer, academic, and prestigious poster Peter Raleigh earns his hat trick, returning to the Factory Floor to discuss Abel Ferrara's philosophical vampire film The Addiction . Shot in stark, vivid black & white cinematography and featuring a breathtakin...

We welcome the esteemed critic, journalist, and podcaster Jourdain Searles to the show to discuss Quentin Tarantino's seminal third feature Jackie Brown, an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch that also serves as Tarantino's love letter to Blaxploitation cinema and one of its defining stars, Pam Grier. We begin with a discussion of Blaxploitation cinema, Pam Grier's status within the...

Vulture and New York Magazine film critic Bilge Ebiri returns to discuss Bernardo Bertolucci's stunning mood piece Little Buddha , a rich and evocative story of an American family who travel to Bhutan after learning their son may be the reincarnation of the spiritual leader of a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks. The film also chronicles chapters in the life of Siddartha (played by Keanu Reeves) who...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We're back with more Danny Boyle coverage, this time discussing his latest film 28 Years Later , the long-awaited sequel to Boyle's own 28 Days Later ( as well as its sequel 28 Weeks Later) that bracingly rejects the template set by both its predecessors an...

Film journalist and friend of the show Brandon Streussnig returns to discuss Danny Boyle's debut film Shallow Grave , a British riff on the 90s neo-noir template, self-described by Boyle and his collaborators as their take on the Coen's Blood Simple. The film chronicles a trifecta of beautiful, sociopathic yuppies sharing an Edinburgh flat (Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor) who...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We went exceptionally long on the late John Singleton’s undersung period western Rosewood , a film (and filmmaker) whose fingerprints are all over Ryan Coogler’s recent box office sensation, Sinners . Rosewood tells the story of an independent Black townshi...

We stayed up for three consecutive days without sleep and kept at least one hand on a microphone at all times in order to test our mettle and discuss S.R. Bindler's 1997 "gawkumentary" Hands on a Hardbody, a story of 23 contenstants in Longview, Texas squaring off in a competition of stamina to win a Nissan hardbody truck. Over the course of three days, Bindler and his crew record the ecstasy of v...

This is a re-upload for Spotify of a conversation originally held in November of 2023. Hit Factory wishes to extend our deepest gratitude and reverence to the National Music Publishers’ Association - tireless defenders of intellectual property, guardians of taste, and brave crusaders against independent podcasts that allegedly included a brief clip of copyrighted music within a previous version of...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We got our hands on Sofia Coppola's diary and read it to try and make sense of her dreamy, quietly devastating debut The Virgin Suicides . Adapted from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel of the same name, Coppola's film tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters a...

We finally bring the brilliant, indelible work of Claire Denis to the pod with a discussion of her 1994 TV movie U.S. Go Home . Produced as part of the anthology series Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age… alongside work from other French visionaries like Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas and André Téchiné, Denis' film is an elliptical, compassionate coming-of-age story that regularly subver...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. David Cronenberg returns to the big screen this week with The Shrouds , perhaps his most autobiographical film to date. The film involves grieving tech entrepreneur Karsh (played brilliantly by Vincent Cassel) who has developed the means to surveil the dead...

The Roxie Theater, a San Francisco landmark in the Mission District, is one of the oldest continuously operated cinemas in the United States, with its history tracing back to the early 1900s. Recently, The Roxie kicked off the public phase of their fundraising campaing, Forever Roxie , in order to purchase their buidling, invest in technology upgrades, and expand their programming. As the premier...

We inaugurate the brilliant Taiwanese master Edward Yang with a conversation about his transcendent 1994 social satire  A Confucian Confusion . Following up his staggering masterwork A Brighter Summer Day , Yang turned his attention to Taipei in the 1990s at the height of its rapid evolution into a port city of global capital and the effects this shift had on the value systems and relational dynam...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Xuanlin Tham, author of the new book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene returns to the show to discuss the Wachowskis' debut feature - the sharp, sexy sapphic neo-noir Bound . Emboldened by brilliant performances from its two leads...

Film critic and author A.S. Hamrah joins for a conversation on his recent Fast Company piece "Hollywood’s obsession with AI-enabled ‘perfection’ is making movies less human" , which details some alarming (and frankly, depressing) recent use cases of A.I. in both studio blockbuster fare and awards-contending independent releases like Brady Corbet's The Brutalist. We attempt to unpack the psychology...

Returning friend of the show Comrade Yui swings by to discuss the 1994 Full Moon direct-to-video masterwork Dark Angel: The Ascent. The story follows the exploits of a bored, beautiful young demon Veronica Iscariot (Angela Featherstone) as she defies the orders of her parents and the rules of hell to visit Earth and walk among the humans. It's not long before she realizes that humanity has forsake...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We're back talking about the recently-released Babygirl , directed by Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn. Despite some initial apprehensions based on the discourse and reviews from trusted sources, we both found the film to be a stylish, funny, and in...

Fan favorite Hard Mike returns to the show alongside newcomer Syd Bricks to discuss Paul Schrader's  Affliction , one of the filmmaker's most well-observed explorations of addiction and the generational cycles of suffering that manifest as a result of leaving personal trauma and pain unresolved. The film follows Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse, an alcohlic, washed-up cop in a small New Hampshire town...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Film critic Eamon Tracy returns to the show to discuss Renny Harlin's mountain-bound Die Hard riff Cliffhanger starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, and Michael Rooker. A taut, well-staged action thriller that served as a revitalization effort for Stal...

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. It's a New Year and we don't feel any different! In typical Hit Factory fashion, the simple task of creating an "In/Out" list for 2025 became a discussion about the infantilization of culture, embracing cinephilia beyond marketing cycles, and how the curren...