Beer and a Movie

We dive into some mindbending animation this week when we pair the second installment of Lord and Miller's Spider-Verse series with Fantastic Planet, an underground animated classic from 1973. New guest Connor Stewart joins Joe and Dave as they discuss some of the finer points of animated superheroes and sci-fi - and drink some beers from friends of the pod - this week!

It's been 50 episodes since we last stepped into the "cage," so we find ourselves there again with a selection of three films with Nicolas Cage in lead performances. Joe's pick is Drive Angry, a 2011 supernatural actioner riding the wave of 3D excitement in the post-Avatar moment in which it arrived. Dave selects Bringing Out the Dead, a relatively underperforming Scorsese vehicle that had more cr...

When our returning guest Pam Brouillard told us that she would be bringing back some beers from her roadtrip to Wisconsin, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to visit some films with Midwestern settings. Pam's instinct to go the comedy route yielded one luminary of the recent past, 2011's Bridesmaids which brought SNL's Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph to feature film success, and an even...

With Coronas in hand, we visit the Toretto Family BBQ once again to check in on what our favorite group of superhuman street racing mercenaries are up to in (the beginning of?) what is purportedly their final bow. Does Diesel finally shift to that higher gear as a thespian? Do the stunt casting cameos hit the intended sweet spots? Do cars make it back into space? We'll reveal all this and more, as...

For the first time in recent memory, a Finnish action film showed up at our local multiplex, and we just had to find out what might warrant such a wide release. Learning that it was a Nazi revenge film set late in WWII, we felt that the best cinematic pairing would be Inglourious Basterds, and boy were we happy with that selection once we had actually seen them both. With beers from Germany (one o...

We go full-on Swayze (how did we not drink a hazy?) this week on BaaM. Our Discord crew (get in there if you're not already!) picked Point Break for us to watch, and we decided to double down, or "double deuce" if you will, by pairing it with Road House. Anthony Z joins us for this discussion of two late 20th century action classics(?), and we enjoy some new-to-us beers from Martin House and Real...

It's all about horror in families this week on BaaM as we take on the newest entry the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise, the first to really focus on how Deadites can wreak havoc within a family unit. Following that, we take on a pre-Evil Dead classic of the demonic possession subgenre, The Exorcist, a film with a storied past that helped to raise the profile of horror in the 1970s. It's an epi...

With the arrival of Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster's latest epic dark comedy, Dave and Joe felt they needed to have an Aster skeptic in the third seat to help bring some balance to the proceedings. Welcoming back returning guest Kyle Ferguson, the conversation is predictably lively, spilling over to our second film, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, a film that also has a troubled person played by Joa...

We sink our teeth back into the tried-and-true BaaM format this week, even bringing back former regular host, Carlos Cooper, to review the latest release featuring our patron saint, Nicolas Cage. With him portraying Dracula in Renfield, we chose to pair it with Coppola's cinematic take on the character from 1992, and Joe comes in clutch with outstanding thematic beer pairings. Don't f*ck with the...

This week on Vin et Cinéma, we reach the conclusion of our quest to cover all of the 10 movies in the Sight and Sound 2022 Critics' Poll with our review of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman on this week's episode. Along with our returning guest, Pam Brouillard, we also take on Agnes Varda's French New Wave classic, Cléo from 5 to 7.

We take on Apple TV's latest feature film, Tetris, which dramatizes the surprising yet telling story of how one of the most popular video games of all time came from out of the waning moments of the Soviet Union to become the global phenomenon that it is now. The timing is perfect for us to do one more film on the 2022 Sight and Sound list, Man with a Movie Camera, an experimental documentary that...

After numerous delays, the 4th chapter of the John Wick series has finally arrived on the screens of our multiplexes, and we offer our thoughts on this latest installment and the franchise overall. Our second film is the one currently sitting in the 10th spot of the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, the classical Hollywood musical, Singin' in the Rain. It's a week of glorious cinematography, rain-drenched...

This week finds us delving back into the singularly visionary mind of David Lynch as we approach Mulholland Drive, a film that wasn't initially intended to be a film but that nonetheless is now ranked as the 8th best of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, and we pair it with an earlier film that also had its origins in televisual storytelling. Playing with tropes of soap opera, police procedu...

Claire Denis had wowed us back in episode 45 when we reviewed her then-new-release, High Life, but it has taken our Sight & Sound catch-up journey to get us back to the writer/director's unique cinematic perspectives. To pair with her 1999 film Beau Travail (#7 on the 2022 poll), we look at one(!) of her two features from 2022, Both Sides of the Blade, starring BaaM faves Juliette Binoche (High Li...

With the streaming arrival of 2022 critical favorite EO, we took the opportunity to look at this rather unorthodox Polish film which provides glimpses of the range of human behavior, especially as pertains to treatment of animals, through the eyes of the titular donkey at its center. As our companion film, we review our fifth overall from the top ten of the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, Yasuj...

Forget Wong Kar-Wai's whip pans, this episode may cause some whiplash with its shifting between its A- and B-pictures. First up is the horror comedy of Cocaine Bear, currently burning up the box office during a relative lull in new releases. We follow it with our first review in a series that has us playing catch-up with the top ten films of the newest iteration of the Sight & Sound critics' list...

It's that time of year again! Your hosts have done their level best to take in as many films released in 2022 as they possibly could and to look back at the beers they had reviewed in that year as well. They are now ready to share their personal preferences and other assorted thoughts on the year, along with some fun diversions. It's a jam-packed episode with none other than BaaM's former producer...

In our final episode before our 2022 year end wrap-up, The BaaMies, we look at two films that are in the mix for Academy Awards. The (anti-)war film All Quiet on the Western Front has 9 nods, mostly focused on more technical aspects of filmmaking, but also including Best Picture - an award that the 1930 adaptation of the same novel had received long ago. The harder to classify Bardo, from Alejandr...

Sarah Polley's latest effort, Women Talking, is currently in limited release as a nominee for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. BaaM invited a crackerjack panel of returning guests - Emily Suggs (Episode 205) and Kailey Diaz (Episodes 216 and 228) - along with one new guest, psychologist Dr. Pam Brouillard, to discuss it over, you guessed it, some beer. As a second film, we look at She Sai...

We go on holiday this week with two films with resorts as their settings. Brandon Cronenberg's latest, Infinity Pool, is a speculative horror trip that charts the experience of a struggling writer who stumbles into a sort of tourism that goes beyond any we've ever before seen on screen. Aftersun is the debut feature of Charlotte Wells, offering a semi-autobiographical look at a moment in a father-...

We go audacious and then reserved with our pairing of films this week. First up, we take on the Tollywood (a nickname for the Telugu language film industry) blockbuster, RRR, an historical epic packed with action, song, dance, and romance that is getting lots of attention even outside its home market. Our second film is a much quieter police procedural-cum-psychological drama, Park Chinook's Decis...

We're in full on awards season catch-up mode with this week's episode. While Tàr and The Banshees of Inisherin were both released in the fall, neither were readily available to us at the time. Now that both are available on streaming platforms and have begun receiving copious accolades, we felt the need to seriously engage. Join in and hear what we think of these performance-driven films while we...

It's an almost-but-not-quite-human episode this week when we take on the recent horror satire hit M3gan, about a robot doll going rogue and running amuck when its creator chooses to test it on her recently orphaned niece. For our film pairing, we also look at Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film project inherited from Stanley Kubrick and which has at its center another robot dol...

This week, we invite back returning guest Kailey Diaz to help us take on two films from Darren Aronofsky, a director who regularly plunges into stories about characters who struggle with addiction and obsession. His latest, The Whale, generated controversy even before its release for its casting and over concerns that it would be fatphobic. In wide release now, it is actually generating a lot of O...

We pair two holiday releases this week, starting with our discussion of Damian Chazelle's audacious new epic meditation on stardom, excess, and the early days of Hollywood, Babylon. For our second half, our friend Sean McLain joins us to share our critical perspectives on Rian Johnson's Glass Onion, the second installment in his burgeoning murder mystery franchise. We warm up for the convos with t...