Secret Movie Club Podcast

Aristotle in his POETICS made a simple yet incisive claim-good dramatic work has a 3 act structure-a beginning, a middle, and an end. Horace in classic Rome expanded this to a 5 act structure.  In the age of cinema, a slightly modified three act structure has been the dominant approach in American screenwriting. Yet many, if not most movies, actually deviate from this structure. And filmmakers lik...

Lesson learned. Each year produces so many fascinating movies; it's better to wait and see as many as possible before recording a pre-emptive "Movies of 2025" podcast. So Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill to make up for this mistake records "Movies of 2025 Part 2". SIRAT, THE SECRET AGENT, MARTY SUPREME, SOUND OF FALLING get discussed. And Craig enters the fray with his thoughts o...

John Carpenter explained it best. We're all seated around a campfire. The storyteller says, the evil is. . .out there and points into the darkness. That's external horror. Think Jaws, The Birds, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now same scenario but the storyteller says the evil is. . .in here and points to us, our own hearts. That's internal horror. Think Black Swan, Psycho, Twin Peaks etc. Secret Movie...

One of the most clever ways moviemakers make new movies is to take a movie they love and invert it-do the opposite of key aspects of the movie and problem solve how to make that work. Peter Jackson famously took George Romero's zombie classic Night of the Living Dead where zombies are outside trying to get into a house and made Dead Alive where zombies are inside a house and the hero is trying to...

In the 1980's and 1990's, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, among many others honed their craft and proved their vision directing 3 minute music videos for MTV.  While the "music video" aesthetic was sometimes attacked as hurting cinema, in retrospect, the best directors of that generation brought a much needed innovation to movie language from which we can still take inspiration. Secret...

Adaptation is a tricky thing no matter the source in cinema. Novels, life stories, historical events, original ideas, short stories. Adapting live theater plays is an especially tricky business. Something written to be performed live, often in 1 location/set, with concentrated poetic dialogue, plays different as a movie. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at everything...

The precision, patience, and technical know how needed to sell action filmmaking is underrated and under appreciated. Action directors like Michael Curtiz, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Miller, John McTiernan, even. . .Michael Bay get treated differently than art house canonically revered moviemakers. Yet what is accomplished in action hits like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Aliens...

Oh boy. This one is a movie hodge podge stew. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill announces the first dates of the SMC 2026 season. 8 movies, 5 on 35mm! Then we talk about one more Russian sci-fi classic, 2013's HARD TO BE A GOD by Aleksei German to round out SMC Pod 215. And finally, the Hammill family ages 2 to 48 talk about their thoughts on THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE and going...

Soviet Sci fi is an undiscovered ocean of incredible cinema for folks here in the west who may not know many of these masterpieces exist. While Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are frequently screened, amazing sci-fi works like Dead Man's Letters, Kin Dza-Dza, and On The Silver Globe are just as powerful.  Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill also takes a survey look at other w...

1942's Best Picture winner CASABLANCA, made at Warner Brothers, is ultimately the best evidence one could produce for how the old studio system of the 1920's through the 1940's was set up to occasionally produce a masterpiece that could not have been made any other way.  Defying the auteur-centered way we often appraise movies, CASABLANCA really was a team effort with critical contributions from w...

British filmmaker Ken Loach has been committed to socially minded cinema for over six decades. From early 1960's TV work to his most recent (and possibly last feature) in 2023, Ken Loach has been one of world cinema's most reliable productive practitioners. So why did it take Secret Movie Club programmer.founder Craig Hammill so long to finally see  Loach's 1969 masterpiece Kes? An incredible film...

Episode 212 of Secret Movie Club dives into the life and work of Luis Buñuel, tracing his surrealist beginnings with Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, his powerful Mexican period (Los Olvidados, The Exterminating Angel), and his later French masterpieces (Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire). Founder and programmer of Secret Movie Club, Craig Hammill,...

The AI disruption for movies is here. Poor movies, battered on the choppy seas of digital, streaming, COVID, and now AI, have yet another challenge to contend with. But we've been here before with sound, color, television, home video. In fact, if anything, the history of movies and the history of technological innovation and disruption are forever intertwined. And movies, at least so far, have fou...

Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026) is a master documentarian who across 60 years made doc masterpieces about systems and institutions like TITICUT FOLLIES, HIGH SCHOOL, HOSPITAL, ESSENE, WELFARE, MULTI HANDICAPPED, IN JACKSON HEIGHTS. Although not as widely known as some of his narrative feature contemporaries, Wiseman is one of the greatest moviemakers who ever practiced the craft. His ability to find...

Across the age of cinema, the way a movie lover has been able to consume movies has changed. The movie repertory theater, the video store, and now the streaming channel all have pros and cons on how they expose cinemagoers to great cinema and the cinema experience. Secret Movie Club programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at each, gets the Secret Movie Club community in on the conversation to share...

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are now often universally viewed as the two great silent film movie comedians. And their personal biographies, even their physical characteristics (they were both 5'5), rhyme in a fascinating way.  They both made some of the towering comedies-The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, Seven Chances, Sherlock Jr., The General. Most intriguingly, Chaplin can be vie...

The character actor is one of the most important yet least discussed aspects of cinema. Whether it's Thelma Ritter as a no nonsense feisty nurse in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Eli Wallach as a captivating roguish bandit in Leone's The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly or Tilda Swinton in almost about anything, character actors provide a rhythm, contrast, opposite color that provides shape, dynamism, form...

Like all American tribes in the melting pot, Jewish-Americans express their identity in their art. Maybe nowhere as strongly as in cinema. Secret Movie Club founder Craig Hammill, who has a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, looks at just a few of the many great movies that get at being Jewish-American. Movies like the 1980's hit Dirty Dancing, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the Coen Brothers' A Seri...

Today we talk about 12 fascinating movies from 2025. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer starts with the movies he still needs to see (The Secret Agent, Marty Supreme), the movies he felt were essential (Sinners, Mission Impossible 8, Cover Up, Sentimental Value) and what other 2025 movies (Highest 2 Lowest, Train Dreams, One Battle After Another, Weapons) might say about our current cinematic mo...

Yes, they're connected by name. Yes, they're connected by being born within 9 months of each other. Yes, they're connected by their crazy talent to bring the best out of the sci-fi, horror, fantasy genres. But filmmaker Steven Spielberg and best-selling writer Stephen King are most connected by being in the rarefied extremely small subset of creative artists who have both climbed to the top peak o...

Christmas movies are a genre unto themselves. And Classic Hollywood Christmas movies are a special part of that genre. Holiday movies made in Hollywood's heyday of the 1930's-1940's. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at five favorites-Frank Capra's 1946 It's A Wonderful Life, Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 The Shop Around the Corner, Preston Struges' 1944 The Miracle of Morgan...

What is it about the Italians? The rich food. Thousands of years of incredible art and sculpture and music. Something's in the blood over there that produces a high concentration of moviemakers with incredible lush styles: Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento to name just a few. This week, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill riffs on what it mea...

Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi dystopian noir Blade Runner where a disillusionedd private eye/cop/robot hunter Harrison Ford tracks down and falls in love with "Replicants" or robot cyborgs made to look like humans is a pinnacle of the sci-fi dystopian genre. Blade Runner presents a disturbing, overpopulated, megalopolis Los Angeles and explores sci-fi questions of what it means to be human, to exist,...

To celebrate our 200th podcast, we take a look at some of the less screened and spoken about movie masterpieces that give us "that feel". Movies like Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Forman's The Fireman's Ball, the Coens' Barton Fink, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire among many others are what Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill calls "lightning bottle movie...

Filmmaker Blake Winston Rice returns to the pod to talk about his most recent short, DISC, starring Victoria Ratermanis & indie phenom Jim Cummings and how it premiered at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). Blake joined us on SMC Pod #182 to talk about how his short TEA got into the Cannes Film Festival and what it was like to actually attend the world's greatest film fest in person. Now B...