The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast

To kick off our upcoming Summer Blockbusters issue, we invited longtime BW/DR contributor—and podcast five-timer!— Frank Falisi to help us work our way through Disclosure Day , the latest summer blockbuster from Steven Spielberg, the director who all but created the genre more than 40 years ago. We get into: the ending (first, of course), empathy, aliens, camera movements, CGI animals, post- Fabel...

We're back, and just in time for summer blockbuster season! Join Chad Perman and new co-host Elizabeth Cantwell as they talk their way through one of the biggest/best summer blockbusters of all time, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day , on the occasion of its 35th anniversary next month.

Not only is this Veronica and Eli’s last episode, it’s our fourth annual Cruisemas. With the release of One Battle After Another , we revisit Paul Thomas Anderson’s blank check big swing Magnolia (1999), and get into: young PTA and the New New Hollywood, sincerity and good listening, Phil Parma made Chad become a therapist, Fiona Apple as PTA’s Polly Platt, we desperately want a Tom Cruise coconut...

It’s officially fall when the NYFF finally ends. In this episode, Veronica sits down with Fran Hoepfner , Frank Falisi , and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 63rd New York Film Festival. This is a spoiler-free conversation. We get into: Miroirs No. 3 , The Mastermind , Late Fame , No Other Choice , With Hasan in Gaza , The Secret Agent , Peter Hujar’s Day , If I Had Legs I’d Kick You , A H...

Happy 30th birthday to David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Joining us to celebrate is special guest Adam Nayman , Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of, among other books, David Fincher: Mind Games (2021). We get into: boy movies, the intersections of art and trash, Fincher as mad designer and marketing guru, Veronica can’t do math, canceling Det. Mills, how a spark of ambiguity can incite a boo...

Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back to the podcast Michael Koresky ( listen here to his first visit, discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence ). Michael is MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot ’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness , out now from Bloomsbury. Michael joins us to talk about a film from...

For a taste of summertime sadness, we look at a pick from curator Christos Nikou ( Apples [2020] and Fingernails [2023]): Mike Mills’s semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010). We get into the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours ?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as meta...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Bilge Ebiri —the man, the myth, the legend—joins us to bookend our discussion of all things Mission: Impossible from a couple of summers ago , on the occasion of the final (?) film of a nearly 30 year franchise. We get into: the perils of Cruise-dom, building an extension on a plane you've already built, Luther!, missing Rebecca Ferguson, decompression...

On this month’s bite-sized episode we're zooming in on a snappy/passionate moment from Ernst Lubitsch’s effervescent 1932 screwball comedy,  Trouble in Paradise . We get into: sex & pre-code cinema, eye-widening lines, wikipedia marriage math, Betty and Veronica vibes, the Lubitsch Touch, what does classy even mean?, how a perfect escapist film from 1932 works just as well in 2025, and more. -...

Pop quiz, hotshot: join us as we welcome back BWDR veteran and De Palma completist ⁠Travis Woods⁠ for a special conversation on one of our all-time favorites, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). We get into: repetition compulsion and classical Hollywood storytelling, Keanu’s peak hotness, Speed ’s existential lessons, does Jeff Daniels close his eyes?, Mark Mancina’s love theme, what it means to “become b...

This month’s micro-episode takes us inside the mysterious, sensual brilliance of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger , a curated pick from director Ezra Edelman : "The idea of wanting to live with purpose, even if it’s someone else’s purpose—there’s just something so human about it." We get into: the comfort of slow cinema that doesn't feel slow, the aesthetics of existential malaise, the viril...

This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién , author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses , where she recently started writing about “Movies That Fuck.” In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) , Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance. We get into: Roman Coppola’s practical effects, Keanu’s accent work, cr...

This month's bite-sized episode zooms in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg's debut film, The Celebration (1998), one of Palestinian director/writer/producer Annemarie Jacir's curated picks. We get into: Dogme 95 , family gatherings as horror movies, the generative energy of stylistic constraints, dynamic chaos, ghostly POVs, and finding something in a film that's a little bit in exc...

In honor of guest Michael Koresky's new book announcement, we're revisiting this conversation with him from last summer about Steven Spielberg's  A.I. Michael's new book,  Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness , will be out from Bloomsbury in June. --- Reverse Shot ⁠ co-founder and editor, and Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image Michael Koresky...

We’re back with an episode analyzing writer-director Aaron Schimburg’s Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man . Joining us is critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi , co-founder of Garden State Lantern . We get into Adam Pearson’s Oscar snub and Sebastian Stan’s win, The Substance for boys, shooting in NYC, if you want to dance the mask, the humanism of karaoke, doing your life wrong, self-im...

Our first mini-episode of 2025 looks to one of director Andrew Haigh’s curated picks: Billy Wilder’s subversive farce Some Like It Hot . We get into the unlikely modernity of Hot ’s sexual politics, Orry-Kelly’s naked dresses, Wilder’s collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond, is this the greatest comedy of all time, and more. -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick an...

Be thankful we did your Gladiator II homework, rewatching Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 1 (2000) with amateur Russell Crowe historian Blake Howard . This is a Gladiator II- spoiler-free conversation: listen as we get into Crowe kissing disembodied feet, Scott’s world-building, the technology of acting, Oliver Reed’s digitized face (RIP), is anything better than practical effects, expressionism vs. hist...

This month’s mini-episode takes us into the rich opening sequence of a pick curated by director Andrew Haigh: Nicolas Roeg’s Venetian nightmare, Don’t Look Now . We get into Graeme Clifford’s expressionist editing, celebrating movies for grownups, the color red, non-chronology, grief, and what lies “beyond the fragile geometry of space.” -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronic...

This holiday season, we're revisiting last year's holiday special: an audio essay of one of the most popular articles we've every published on the site: Ethan Warren's ⁠ A Grand Yuletide Theory:  The Muppet Christmas Carol  is the Best Adaptation of A Christmas Carol ⁠ . Written and read by ⁠Ethan⁠ himself, with holiday music from ⁠Ryan Pollie⁠ . (Originally aired December 17, 2023) -- We'll be ba...

On this special mega episode, co-host Veronica sits down with critic ⁠Fran Hoepfner⁠ and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 62nd New York Film Festival. This is a mainly spoiler-free conversation! We get into: Hard Truths , Caught by the Tides , Nickel Boys , April , Harvest , The Brutalist , The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Shrouds , Queer , Maria , Stranger Eyes , Eephus , I’m Still Here ,...

This month’s mini-episode takes us into one of costume designer Sophie de Rakoff’s curated picks: Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), an American giallo with style to spare. We get into Faye Dunaway’s scream, POV in horror, how this is Helmut Newton x John Carpenter, the ethics of glamorizing suffering, and, yes, the clothes. -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronic...

This whole episode is a trap. In it, we join Josh Hartnett scholar and The Film Stage gentleman Dan Mecca to dissect the ins and outs of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. We talk about: baby bangs, Hartnett always being a little bit weird, the tooth gap, Sleeping with the Enemy ’s hand towels, auteur theory, one good part in The Village , Hayley Mills on the walkie-talkie, and more. Further reading: Dan’...

Inspired by the curation of costume designer ⁠Sophie de Rakoff⁠, this month we're taking a loving look at the gear-shifting, hybrid charms of Jonathan Demme's screwball noir, Something Wild —and the Ray Liotta entrance that changes everything. -- This episode is sponsored by  Galerie , a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for 3 months of free access  here .

Joining us this month: Blank Check co-host & staff writer at The Atlantic, David Sims ! In summer’s last gasp, we go back to a flashpoint of summer blockbuster season: Jan de Bont’s 1996 Twister , plus its legacy in Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024), epic ensemble casting, craving movies about grown-ups, Hollywood’s dangerous brunettes, why not kissing at the airport matters, whether anyone vot...

Chad goes full dad in this mini-episode on Richard Linklater’s 2014 coming-of-age epic Boyhood. Specifically, the plural meanings of Patricia Arquette’s anguished move-out speech, and why raising children to lead their own lives is a bittersweet success. The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands . Our theme music is...