Regular or Menthol: Kino Movies Podcast

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. This week we're shipping out to Parris Island and then straight into the Battle of Hué for  Full Metal Jacket  (1987) — Stanley Kubrick's ice-cold, darkly hilarious, and profoundly disturbing Vietnam War film that has generated one of the most passionately argued structural debates in all of cinema: is the first half so brilli...

We did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. This week we're going into the jungle for  Platoon  (1986) — Oliver Stone's raw, autobiographical, Academy Award-winning Vietnam War masterpiece that didn't just win Best Picture — it finally gave a generation of veterans the film they had been waiting a decade to see. This is the film where Stone settled his deb...

Gleaming the cube: pushing your limits to the edge. This week we're grabbing our boards, ditching class, and rolling hard into  Gleaming the Cube  (1989) — the utterly singular, completely unhinged, gloriously committed late-80s teen thriller in which a teenage skateboarder investigates his adopted Vietnamese brother's murder using exclusively the power of skateboarding. This movie exists....

Do you like Huey Lewis and the News? This week we're slipping on our morning moisturizer, reviewing business cards with horrifying intensity, and diving headfirst into  American Psycho  (2000) — Mary Harron's ice-cold, wickedly funny, deeply unsettling satire of 1980s Wall Street masculinity that was nearly destroyed by studio interference, saved by a director who understood exactly what i...

He just got Munsoned. This week we're lacing up our rental shoes and rolling into  Kingpin  (1996) — the Farrelly Brothers' dark, mean, outrageously funny sophomore film that bombed spectacularly at the box office upon release, got overlooked in the shadow of  Dumb & Dumber  and  There's Something About Mary , and has spent the three decades since quietly building a cult following...

He was famous the way that people are afraid to be famous. And the man who killed him became famous for nothing else. This week we're riding into the long golden prairie dusk for  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  (2007) — Andrew Dominik's hypnotic, achingly beautiful, deliberately paced meditation on fame, obsession, myth, and the terrible weight of being a legen...

Report back to me when... uh, I don't know. When it makes sense. This week we're deep inside the most gloriously misanthropic, casually catastrophic, and criminally underappreciated entry in the entire Coen Brothers filmography —  Burn After Reading  (2008). This is the film the Coens made immediately after winning Best Picture for  No Country for Old Men , assembled the most absurdly stac...

Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again. But life goes on. This week we're going deep on  Blow  (2001) — Ted Demme's visceral, emotionally devastating, criminally underappreciated biographical crime drama that tells the true story of George Jung — t...

I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people. Whose car we gonna take? This week we're heading to Charlestown for  The Town  (2010) — Ben Affleck's lean, brutal, impeccably crafted crime thriller that stands as the single most definitive argument for Ben Affleck as one of the most natural and instinctive direct...

You're so money, baby. You're so money and you don't even know it. This week we're sliding into a booth at the Dresden Lounge for  Swingers  (1996) — Jon Favreau's razor-sharp, effortlessly cool, painfully funny and quietly heartbreaking independent film about heartbreak, male friendship, and the desperate grind of trying to make it in Hollywood that launched three of the most...

There's a hundred thousand streets in this city. You don't need to know the route. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. I don't sit in while you're running it down. I don't carry a gun. I drive. This week we're behind the wheel of  Drive  (2011) — Nicolas Winding Refn's hypnotic, neon-d...

Big things have small beginnings. This week we're suiting up and heading to LV-223 for  Prometheus  (2012) — Ridley Scott's visually stunning, philosophically audacious, infuriatingly imperfect, and genuinely one-of-a-kind science fiction film that arrived as one of the most anticipated films in decades, divided audiences immediately and spectacularly, and has been argued about with extrao...

Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite? This week we're holing up in the warehouse for  Reservoir Dogs  (1992) — Quentin Tarantino's incendiary, electrifying, endlessly quotable feature-length debut that premiered at Sundance, became the most talked-about film in the festival's history, changed independent cinema forever, and launched one of the most significa...