The Projection Booth

Finish him. Or at least finish the plot. Mortal Kombat II arrives with the promise of the full tournament, a new roster of fighters, and the long-awaited arrival of Johnny Cage — played by Karl Urban — as the wisecracking Earthrealm champion fans have been demanding since 2021. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast take on Simon McQuoid's sequel to the 2021 reboot, written by Jeremy Slat...

Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous forest guardians risk their lives to defend ancestral lands from illegal loggers — and the fate of the entire rainforest hangs in the balance. We Are Guardians follows indigenous guardian Marçal Guajajara and indigenous leader Puyr Tembé as they stand at the frontlines of this fight, while on the other side, illegal logger Valdir struggles to survive and se...

She's not her cousin. Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) arrived on screen in Supergirl with a chip on her shoulder and a body count on her conscience — a cosmic revenge story light-years removed from the sunnier mythology of Superman. Whether the DCU's second theatrical outing delivered on that premise is another question entirely. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast dig into Craig Gillespie'...

From his 1933 debut as a tragic fairy-tale monster to his current reign over an ever-expanding Monsterverse, King Kong has spent more than ninety years proving that beauty isn't the only thing capable of killing the beast — time certainly hasn't. Mike talks with film historian and self-described Kongophile Ray Morton about the revised and updated edition of his book King Kong: The History of a Mov...

This is the Way — but is it the right way to bring the galaxy's most beloved odd couple to the big screen? After three seasons on Disney+, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu trade the small screen for an IMAX-sized adventure, with the stakes raised and the runtime expanded accordingly. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast discuss Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Fa...

Western month begins here. Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966) arrived in the wake of Django riding a wave of Italian genre fever, and it announced something different lurking inside the spaghetti Western: a director with a genuine appetite for cruelty. Franco Nero plays Tom Corbett, a gold prospector summoned back to a hometown now wholly owned by the Scott family — their name on every building, t...

The truth belongs to seven billion people. That's the promise of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction and to the extraterrestrial obsessions that have haunted his work since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Whether audiences are ready to believe is a different matter. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast sit down with the summer's most buzzy Spielberg event fi...

Thirty years after Boy Meets World made them household names, Danielle Fishel (Topanga), Rider Strong (Shawn), and Will Friedle (Eric) launched a rewatch podcast and hit the road — and directors Chris Levitus and Zane Rubin were there to capture it all. Mike talks with Levitus and Rubin about Doc Meets World, their feature documentary premiering at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival. The two filmmaker...

Twenty-five years ago, a group of idiots convinced MTV to let them hurt themselves on television. Now, Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew are back one last time — older, creakier, and somehow still willing to do things that no sane human being would consider. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast pay their respects to Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and final installment in the fran...

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver inspired millions with her celebrations of nature, attention, and the examined life — yet she remained one of American literature's most intensely private figures. Filmmaker Sasha Waters spent years building an intimate portrait of Oliver from the inside out: sifting through thirty to forty boxes of correspondence, notebooks, and personal photographs before...

Fifty years on, The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history — and it shows no signs of stopping. Linus O'Brien, son of creator Richard O'Brien, joins Mike to discuss Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, his feature documentary tracing Rocky's unlikely journey from a Royal Court Theatre upstairs production to a global midnight-screening phen...

Sci-fi month concludes with one of the great cinematic boondoggles of the '90s. Kevin Costner directs and stars in The Postman (1997), playing a wandering drifter who stumbles into a postal uniform and accidentally becomes the savior of a shattered America, restoring hope and democracy one undelivered letter at a time. Standing in his way: General Bethlehem (Will Patton), a Shakespeare-quoting war...

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...