Movie Nights with Dad

This week we're kicking off our "Comedians in Dramatic Roles" theme with "Good Will Hunting" (1997). It's also our first episode recorded at Big Iron Sound! Thankful for the Big Iron Sound team and letting us use their space for this episode. Join the discussion in the comments below! We'd love to hear any feedback, movie suggestions, and your personal thoughts on t...

This week we're closing out our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962). We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club!

This week we're continuing our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "Curse of the Demon" (1957) — released in the UK as "Night of the Demon," and a film Martin Scorsese has called one of the scariest ever made. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discu...

This week we're continuing our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "The Spiral Staircase" (1946) — a storm-soaked thriller about a mute servant hunted by a serial killer. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday a...

In 1925, a German court ordered every copy of Nosferatu destroyed. Bram Stoker's widow had sued over the film's unauthorized take on Dracula, and the studio behind it had already gone bankrupt. But prints had been shipped overseas before the order came down, and the film outlived the court that tried to erase it. This week we're kicking off our "Horror Through the Years" them...

The fleas were so bad that the Maysles brothers wore flea collars around their ankles while they filmed. The house had no running water, raccoons in the attic, and cat food cans stacked toward the ceiling — and it belonged to Jackie Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin. This week we're closing out our "September Fan Picks" theme with both versions of "Grey Gardens" — the 1...

Dev Patel broke his hand in the first action sequence he ever directed, told his producer to keep rolling, and finished the night with a hand he described as an elephant's foot. Then Netflix bought the movie for three times its budget and left it on a shelf for three years. This week we're continuing our "September Fan Picks" theme with "Monkey Man" (2024) — a $10 milli...

September is Fan Picks month and the listeners chose one of the most famous films ever made. The Wizard of Oz had five directors and gave credit to one. MGM executives wanted to cut "Over the Rainbow" before release, believing it slowed the pace. The original Tin Man was hospitalized by his own makeup. Judy Garland was sixteen when filming began. It became what it is not through theaters...

September is Fan Picks month — every film chosen from listener suggestions — and we're opening with two firsts for the show at once: our first animated film and our first film not in English. Kiki's Delivery Service was never meant to be a Hayao Miyazaki picture. He came on as producer while Sunao Katabuchi prepared his directorial debut. Miyazaki read the first draft, rewrote it, and ende...

Mrs. Miniver won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Greer Garson, and it may be the most influential piece of wartime filmmaking Hollywood ever produced. Director William Wyler openly admitted he made it as propaganda, to pull an isolationist America toward Britain during the Blitz. Winston Churchill reportedly said it did more for the war effort than a flotilla of des...

Before she made The Heiress, Olivia de Havilland took Warner Bros. to court and won. Her lawsuit broke the studio system's practice of trapping actors in endless contracts, but it cost her nearly three years off-screen. The Heiress was her comeback, and it won her a second Best Actress Oscar. There's a poetry to it. She plays Catherine Sloper, a shy young woman controlled by a domineering...

In 1938 the industry literally labeled Joan Crawford "box-office poison." Five years later MGM let her go after eighteen years. Everyone had written her off. Then she made Mildred Pierce, won the only Oscar of her career, and forced Hollywood to take her seriously again. This week we continue our August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with a noir about a mother who claws h...

Gloria Swanson was the biggest star of the silent era — and then the movies moved on without her. In Sunset Boulevard she plays Norma Desmond, a faded silent star clinging to a comeback that's never coming. She barely had to reach for it. Between 1934 and 1950 she'd made exactly one film. In a very real sense, she was playing herself. Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece earned 11 Oscar nom...

All About Eve earned 14 Oscar nominations in 1950 — a record that stood over 40 years — and it's still the only film ever to land four female acting nominations. Two went to Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for the same Best Actress prize. They split the vote. Both lost. This week we kick off a new August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with maybe the definitive one: Bette Davis as M...

The same man who created James Bond also gave the world a flying car for children. Ian Fleming wrote the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang novel, and Bond producer Cubby Broccoli brought it to the screen in 1968 with Dick Van Dyke, Roald Dahl on the screenplay, and the Sherman Brothers on the songs. This is the finale of our Summer From the Stage series, and it's the one film that breaks the pattern. Ev...

Rosalind Russell doesn't play Auntie Mame so much as she detonates in every scene she's in. She originated the role on Broadway, then brought it to the screen in 1958, and the result is one of the great comic performances in classic Hollywood. This week we take on a film about a woman who's decided that living timidly is the only real failure. And Mark's got a personal way in — he...

Every week we find something to love. This week we didn't. Don't Drink the Water (1969) stars Jackie Gleason as an American tourist trapped in an embassy behind the Iron Curtain, and it may be the roughest film we've sat through in 41 episodes. But Mark played Krojack in a stage production of this — and the play works. So what happened between the stage and the screen? New episodes eve...

On Golden Pond gave Henry Fonda the only Oscar of his career — and he died just five months later. Katharine Hepburn won her fourth. Jane Fonda produced it as a way back to her own father. It's a quiet film about aging, distance, and the things fathers and children never quite manage to say to each other. This week Mark and Riley dig into all of it — but with a twist you won't get anywhere...

The Odd Couple (1968) pairs Jack Lemmon's neurotic, freshly divorced Felix against Walter Matthau's slovenly, exasperated Oscar, and the chemistry between them is the entire engine of the film. Neil Simon wrote the script, and more than fifty years later the comedic timing still lands. This week continues our Summer from the Stage series, and Mark played Murray the cop, one of the regulars...

Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) adapts Neil Simon's own semi-autobiographical play about a cramped, struggling Brooklyn household during the Great Depression. Jonathan Silverman plays Eugene, the teenage narrator caught between adolescence and his family's hardships, and Bob Dishy plays Jack Jerome, the father quietly exhausted from trying to hold everything together. This week's episode...

The Rainmaker (1956) stars Burt Lancaster as Starbuck, a charming, larger-than-life con man who rides into a drought-stricken town promising rain, and Katharine Hepburn as Lizzie, the rancher's daughter who slowly, reluctantly lets herself believe in something for the first time. This week is the second episode in our Summer from the Stage series, and Mark played Starbuck in a theatrical produ...

You Can't Take It With You (1938) won Best Picture and Best Director for Frank Capra, and this week it kicks off our Summer from the Stage series — episodes where Mark has personally performed in a theatrical production of the film being reviewed. For this one, Mark played Boris Kolenkhov, the boisterous Russian ballet instructor at the center of the story's most chaotic scenes. Riley and...

Funny Girl (1968) is carried almost entirely on the back of one of the most magnetic screen debuts in Hollywood history. This week Riley and Mark close out Musical May reviewing Barbra Streisand's Oscar-winning performance as Fanny Brice, getting into what she does in this role that simply cannot be taught, how Omar Sharif manages to hold his own opposite her, what the film gets right and wher...

One year before this episode, Mark played Tevye in a community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof. Reviewing the 1971 film adaptation with that kind of experience in the room makes for a very different conversation. This week Riley and Mark get into what Norman Jewison got right and where the stage version still has the edge, what Topol brings to Tevye that caught Mark off guard, whether th...

Calamity Jane (1953) has been filed away as a cheerful Doris Day musical for decades — and that filing is doing it a disservice. This week Riley and Mark review the film starring Doris Day as the hard-riding, sharp-shooting Jane, digging into what Day actually pulls off in this role that tends to get ignored, why the friendship between Jane and Katie quietly outperforms every romantic subplot in t...