Secret Movie Club Podcast

Movies have always had their ups and downs. Every time it looks like cinema is gonna give up the ghost, it somehow roars back and a new era is born.  But is that true in 2025? Or has cinema finally come to the end of the line? Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes stock of the state of cinema. He tries not to pull punches or manufacture a conclusion. Where are we? Do we have a f...

Today, we inaugurate an occasional series "Is this Cinema?" in our podcasts. We'll look at a controversial, shocking, and/or divisive movie that divides cinephiles. There may be no better place to start than famed Italian moviemaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, 1975's SALO or 120 DAYS OF SODOM adapted from shocking source material written by the Marquis De Sade. Pasolini adapted the movie to...

Today, we look at watershed movies: movies that changed the culture. That became juggernauts. Where cinema was clearly changed/different AFTER the movies. These movies aren't always enjoyable still to watch. OR. . .they were so big, it's hard to enjoy them as movies. They have become markers on the road of cinema. Yet some still offer up endless joys. While others have not aged well at all. We loo...

Of all the Saturday Night Live TV actors who have gone on to the movies, Bill Murray has had possibly the most fascinating, long lasting, unpredictable run.  Murray is complex, known equally for great performances, hilarious in-real life stunts, endless restlessness, and difficult personal behavior. Yet, very few actors have built up the reservoir of good will Murray has with his fans and the movi...

On January 16, 2025, cinema lost one of its greatest lights. David Lynch passed away in Los Angeles at 78 years old. Like all master moviemakers, Lynch contained multitudes. The writer/director behind Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and many other films crafted a dreamlike, surreal, spiritual, emotional tone with intense lights and darks that was impossible...

First and foremost, Secret Movie Club sends everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires (this podcast is posted January 2025) the best. We're here as a community to help rebuild. If it can bring a smile to your face in a helpful way, we offer this podcast on "The Lubitsch Touch".  Master classic Hollywood filmmaker Ernest Lubitsch developed a cinematic shorthand storytelling style full of visual, v...

Realizing we've all ready done several podcasts on Akira Kurosawa, we're treating this like an addendum to a revised edition. Today, we work to fill in some of the gaps by focusing on some of Kurosawa's amazing but lesser seen works like his 1943 debut feature Sanshiro Sugata, his incredible I Live in Fear (1954)where actor Toshiro Mifune plays an aging industrialist who loses his mind thinking ab...

Furiosa, Hundreds of Beavers, I Saw the TV Glow, Anora just to name a few showed that 2024 had lots of genius, fight, promise, vitality, relevancy still for cinema. And movies like Dune Pt II, Hit Man, Conclave, Juror #2 were worthwhile, stimulating additions to the annals of moviedom. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the year in movies 2024...and finds there's mercifull...

Stanley Kubrick may be one of the key patron saints of all cinema (even if he himself was an ardent athiest). Born in the Bronx, New York, a mediocre student, Kubrick followed a monofocused drive to make movies. From making low budget features to cut his teeth in the mid 1950's to becoming one of the only true Auteur American moviemakers to work in the studio system yet be on a level with moviemak...

Has any moviemaker made more out and out hits, influenced 20th century cinematic pop culture iconography, or so married the pop, commercial, and artistic into one as Alfred Hitchcock? Hitchcock directed 53 movies, 10 of which are arguably unqualified masterpieces (39 Steps, Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Bird...

With the passing of the "Pope of Pop Film" Roger Corman at 98 this year, a key era of American moviemaking left us. Producer/Director Roger Corman famously made hundreds of movies without "ever having lost a dime". He did this by shrewdly making very low budget genre pictures catered to what was hip at the time (monsters, drugs, motorcycles, sharks, aliens...) with super talented hungry young movi...

And. . .we're back. After almost a year of radio silence, the Secret Movie Club podcast returns with SMC Pod #162! Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill gives thanks (Thanksgiving 2024 weekend) for the Bravo Channel in the early 1990's. Way back then (Craig was 12-15 years old), the Bravo Channel was devoted to idiosynchratic world cinema and American indie movies. Sneaking to the tv...

Secret Movie Club team members Edwin Gomez and Craig Hammill hash out what really IS the criteria that makes a movie a masterpiece? Although they easily agree on JAWS, they split when Edwin calls AIRPORT 77 and KING KONG 1976 masterpieces while Craig views Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT and PERSONA as masterpieces. Craig also is concerned that the term "masterpiece" gets used way too much these day...

Today, Secret Movie Club Team Members Edwin Gomez and Craig Hammill discuss Terry Zwigoff's breakout 1990's documentary CRUMB about underground comic book artist R. Crumb and his dysfunctional brothers. Both Edwin and Craig talk about how a second viewing really emphasizes how heavy Crumb's home life was. We nominate some other powerful "dark" documentaries. Edwin name checks the Maysles' 1960's k...

As part of our final season wrap up on Alfred Hitchcock director of the year, we look at Hitchcock's late career advice to film schools to make sure that young filmmakers knew how to tell their stories visually/cinematically without needing to rely on dialogue. SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about how this approach has come to mean for him the goal of "an idea in every shot". Today we...

For as popular and perennial as Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO is, 62 years after its initial release, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill feels it is still underrated. In many ways, Craig feels PSYCHO is the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of horror movies. That is-a movie which changed the cinematic form, created new film language, and in many ways, has never been surpassed.  We take a look at t...

When you love cinema, it's fascinating how some of your favorite moviemakers are beloved by a small passionate group of "in the know" fans and other of your favorite moviemakers appeal to the entire world including your grandparents who know nothing about the film world. What defines the "art house" versus the "blockbuster" sensibility? If you're a moviemaker, where does your sensibility ultimatel...

While the team re-assembles, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill goes solo to discuss the history of sex in American cinema and the X and NC-17 rating. Craig marvels that 50 years ago X-rated movies like MIDNIGHT COWBOY were winning Best Picture and THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES were mainstream, making the equivalent of $100 million dollars, and getting 3 star ratings from Roger Ebert whi...

And so, finally, we get to Summer 2023 Pod #10. The number of completion. We look at Parts 9-18 of Twin Peaks: The Return. We discuss how David Lynch managed the seemingly impossibly by matching Part 8 with the sheer brilliance of Part 18. And we discuss all the grace notes throughout. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer feels that TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN ultimately is the greatest movie of 2017,...

Alfred Hitchcock is one of American cinema's most daring risk-takers and experimenters. His filmmography is filled with wild experiments from single location movies like LIFEBOAT, ROPE, REAR WINDOW to rule breaking near avant garde stunners like PSYCHO and THE BIRDS. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at 1948's ROPE (comprised of only 11 shots and filmed to look like o...

Today we continue our TWIN PEAKS masterwork series by looking at 2017's TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN Parts 1-8. Founder. Programmer Craig Hammill talks about how David Lynch and Mark Frost telegraphed their ambition with the VERY FIRST Twin Peaks episode/pilot in 1989. Lynch's expanded vision which encompasses all of America married to Kyle Machlachlan's commitment to 5 different roles (!!) married to a...

SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about his personal favorite movies of the 21st century including Catch Me If You Can, Zodiac, No Country For Old Men, Un Prophete, Boyhood, Lovers Rock among several others. He notes how watching recent masterpieces can help give a current moviemaker the faith and belief necessary to commit to cinema in the current strange moment. David Lynch's and Mark F...

SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill continues the podcast summer mini-series deep dive into David Lynch's & Mark Frost's TWIN PEAKS. Today we talk about Lynch's 1992 feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and the 90 minutes he cut out that he later released in 2014 as THE MISSING PIECES. Fire Walk With Me was initially met with near universal dislike. Now it is considered one of Lynch's g...

As our Summer podcast series heads into the back stretch, founder.programmer Craig Hammill decides to devote the remaining 4 summer pods to a deep dive into each phase/cycle of David Lynch's magnum opus Twin Peaks which now comprises two tv seasons, a movie, and a limited series on cable. If last week was a kind of general prologue, this week Craig deep dives into television seasons #1 and #2 whic...

Today in our ongoing August "summer break series" something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. . .Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about season one of David Lynch's and Mark Frost's revolutionary TWIN PEAKS. Arriving in 1990 on network television, TWIN PEAKS was like nothing anybody had ever seen. Disturbing, unsettling, cinematic. It's also a fascinati...