All The Right Movies

Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead wrote the eerie, dissonant score, and it's now considered one of the finest of the century. John, Westy, and Matt continue the story as Plainview's empire and soul curdle. We dig into the crew behind the film — the screenplay loosely drawn from Upton Sinclair, Greenwood's extraordinary score, and Robert Elswit's Oscar-winning cinematography — before breaking down the f...

I drink your milkshake. John, Westy, and Matt begin the story of Paul Thomas Anderson's monumental study of greed, oil and a man hollowing himself out. In Part 1 we cover the film's opening, director Paul Thomas Anderson, the cast, and the second act — including that near-wordless opening stretch, Daniel Day-Lewis's towering Daniel Plainview, and the simmering battle of wills with Paul Dano's prea...

Peele shot an alternate, far bleaker ending and changed it in response to the world outside the film. Luke, Westy, and Matt continue the story, picking up as the truth of the house comes out. We dig into the crew behind the film — Peele's Oscar-winning screenplay, Michael Abels's score, and the cinematography that turns suburbia sinister — before breaking down both endings, the reception, and the...

Who lets a comedian best known for sketch shows direct a horror film? Jordan Peele did exactly that, and walked away with an Oscar for it. Luke, Westy, and Matt begin the story. In Part 1 we cover the film's opening, director Jordan Peele, the cast, and the second act — including Daniel Kaluuya's breakout, the uneasy weekend at the Armitage house, and the dread Peele layers under every polite smil...

Savaged on release. Buried by a friendlier alien playing two screens over. Now? Widely held to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) stars Kurt Russell, features practical creature effects so extreme that Rob Bottin worked himself into hospital, and ends on the most argued-over freeze-frame in the genre. John, Westy and Matt judge it, and score it, ou...

What's in the briefcase? Quentin Tarantino has never told a soul, and thirty years on, the glowing contents remain cinema's favourite unsolved mystery. His 1994 crime mosaic scrambled chronology, resurrected John Travolta's career overnight, and turned Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and half its dialogue into pop culture. The Jack Rabbit Slim's dance, the overdose, the diner stand-...

Real mobsters worked as extras on this one. They handed the studio fake Social Security numbers, and to this day nobody knows how they got paid. That's the kind of authenticity stitched through Goodfellas (1990), Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy and one of the most quoted gangster films going. Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and a genuinely frightening, Oscar-winni...

What happens when a film critic turns the most formative year of his own life into a movie? Cameron Crowe found out, and won an Oscar for the screenplay in the process. Luke, Westy and Matt hit the road for Almost Famous (2000), Crowe's semi-autobiographical love letter to 1970s rock journalism. They cover Crowe's direction and deeply personal writing, a cast led by Patrick Fugit, Kate Hud...

How do you film a battle that runs the best part of an hour, almost entirely at night, in the rain? You shoot for months, you wear out everyone involved, and you emerge with Helm's Deep. Peter Jackson's The Two Towers (2002) is the middle chapter of The Lord of the Rings, the one that had to bridge two other films and still ended up many people's favourite of the three. It also gave us...

The marines wake from hypersleep in twelve chambers. The production could only afford four. The other eight? Mirrors. That kind of make-do genius runs right through Aliens (1986), James Cameron's ferocious follow-up to Alien. Cameron went to war with his British crew to get it made, firing a cinematographer and trashing the tea trolley along the way, built a 14-foot Alien Queen by hand, and ha...

Before a single scene was shot, Oliver Stone marched his cast into the jungle for two weeks of brutal military training. He wanted them exhausted, and as a Vietnam veteran himself, he knew exactly what that felt like. Stone's searing, semi-autobiographical war drama gets pulled apart in full: the direction, the writing drawn from his own tour of duty, and a cast led by Charlie Sheen, Tom Beren...

One night during filming, someone laced the crew's clam chowder with PCP. Eighty people ended up in hospital, hallucinating. It's one of the strangest things ever to happen on a set, and it barely registered amid the chaos around Titanic (1997). James Cameron's epic ran wildly over budget, briefly became the most expensive film ever made, then went on to be the highest-grossing and an...

What do you do when your best friend decides, out of nowhere, that he simply doesn't like you any more? On a small Irish island in 1923, the answer involves a set of shears and several fingers. That grim, very funny premise powers Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), the tragicomedy that reunited his In Bruges pairing of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with Kerry Condon a...

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating. As romantic dialogue goes, it has not aged like fine wine. But there's more to Attack of the Clones (2002) than its most mocked line. George Lucas shot almost the whole thing on digital greenscreen, making it one of the first major films to abandon celluloid, and served up Christopher Lee, a clone army, and the sight of a tiny Yo...

The first twenty-four minutes are still the most harrowing depiction of combat ever filmed. Veterans walked out of cinemas in 1998, not in protest, but because Steven Spielberg had marched them straight back onto Omaha Beach. Tom Hanks leads a squad sent behind enemy lines to bring one man home, with Matt Damon as the man in question, kept apart from the cast's brutal boot camp on purpose so t...

What's in the box? The studio never wanted you to find out. They pushed hard for a softer ending, and it took David Fincher and a stubborn Brad Pitt to protect the one that makes Se7en (1995) unforgettable. Pitt, Morgan Freeman and a sweltering, rain-soaked city chase a killer working methodically through the seven deadly sins. Luke, Westy and Matt pull apart Fincher's grimy vision, the wr...

Before he was James Bond, Pierce Brosnan made his film debut here without a word of dialogue, as an IRA hitman. Before she was a Dame, Helen Mirren was the gangster's moll. And in the lead, Bob Hoskins gave the performance that made him. The Long Good Friday (1980) is one of the great British gangster films, a London crime saga that nearly got carved up and dumped onto television before anyone...

Heath Ledger shut himself in a hotel room for weeks, kept a diary in the Joker's voice, and built a performance so complete he won an Oscar he never saw, having died before the film reached cinemas. The Dark Knight (2008) is Christopher Nolan's crime epic in a cape, the one that hauled the comic-book film somewhere darker and more serious, shot huge stretches in IMAX, and flipped a lorry c...

Forty-seven minutes in, Alfred Hitchcock murders his leading lady in a shower and changes cinema forever. Audiences in 1960 had seen nothing like it, helped by Hitchcock quietly buying up copies of the novel to keep the twist secret. Psycho (1960) was shot fast and cheap in black and white with his television crew, scored with those shrieking strings, and sold on a marketing campaign as devious as...

The masterstroke was casting deadly serious, square-jawed dramatic actors, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Peter Graves, and having them deliver the silliest jokes ever written with total sincerity. It rebuilt Nielsen's entire career. Airplane! (1980) was lifted almost line for line from a forgotten 1950s disaster movie, then crammed with so many gags per minute you miss half of them laughing at...

Plenty of people left cinemas in 1999 genuinely believing they'd just watched three real students die. A fake documentary, a clever website and an IMDb page listing the actors as missing, presumed dead, had done the job. The Blair Witch Project cost around sixty thousand dollars and took nearly a quarter of a billion, more or less inventing modern found-footage horror in the process. The cast...

No film in history arrived under heavier expectation. Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi, people queued round the block and bought tickets just to watch the trailer. Then the lights went down, and... well. You know. George Lucas brought Star Wars back with Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman, a wall of fresh CGI, a pod race, the finest lightsaber duel in the whole saga, and one Gung...

The film pivots from disco euphoria to eighties dread, and that nightmarish drug-deal scene is where it all curdles. Luke, Westy, and Matt continue the story. We dig into the crew behind the film — PTA's screenplay, the wall-to-wall needle-drop soundtrack, and the roving camerawork that became his signature — before breaking down the finale, the reception, and its lasting legacy. Plus the hosts' f...

Paul Thomas Anderson was twenty-six, on his second film, and somehow directing a cast of this size like a veteran. Luke, Westy, and Matt begin the story of his breakout. In Part 1 we cover the film's opening, director Paul Thomas Anderson, the cast, and the second act — including Mark Wahlberg's career-redefining turn, the huge ensemble, and the long tracking shots that announced a major talent. T...

Lucas funded the film almost entirely himself to keep control, gambling everything on the sequel. It paid off spectacularly. John, Westy, and Matt continue the story, up to that line in Cloud City. We dig into the crew behind the film — the screenplay with Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, John Williams's score and the Imperial March, and the advances in creature and effects work — before breaki...