The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast

Welcome back to the pod Carrie Courogen , author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius out now from St. Martin’s Press. Carrie joins us to discuss Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), her honeymoon horror film co-starring May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin as doomed newlyweds and Cybill Shepherd as the coed for whom Grodin’s Lenny q...

Follow us into one of Rachel Kushner ’s picks: Maurice Pialat’s slow ode to the sacred and profane, Under the Sun of Satan (1987). Co-starring Gérard Depardieu and Pialat’s muse Sandrine Bonnaire alongside Pialat himself, Under the Sun is a pastoral parable with a lot of dialogue and a few good screams. The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and prod...

As summer begins in earnest, we're looking back at a 2022 highlight—Charlotte Wells’s staggering debut feature Aftersun —and revisiting one of our most popular episodes ever: a conversation with film critic, author, and educator ⁠ Adam Nayman ⁠ . Adam shares special insights from his ⁠conversation with Wells⁠ about the film, plus the case for cinematic mystery, Paul Mescal crying, analog devices a...

It’s showtime–in this episode, Chad takes us through the opening of one of Ethan Hawke’s curator picks: Bob Fosse’s autobiographical kaleidoscope, All That Jazz (1979). Here’s the Motion Pictures Editors Guild on what makes All That Jazz the fourth-best edited film in history, and Hawke himself on “personal filmmaking at its finest.” The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzp...

Back from vacation with our summer blockbuster episode: author, Reverse Shot co-founder and editor, and Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image Michael Koresky joins us to proselytize Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Michael takes us back to being an intern in 2001, watching A.I. six times in theaters, how both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick do “sentimentality with a...

Riffing on Kim Gordon’s curation , we get into Lynne Ramsay’s atmospheric Morvern Callar (2002), a mixtape of a film whose cursed vacation vibes echo something of Barbara Loden’s Wanda and foreshadow Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun . Shout outs to Georgia Humphreys’ terrific essay “Another Girl, Another Planet” and The Mamas and the Papas’ unlikely club banger, “Dedicated to the One I Love.” The Bright...

In honor of the 50th anniversary of its release this month , we're revisiting our conversation on Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), looking at the film through the lenses of surveillance and seclusion, Gene Hackman and Walter Murch, Catholic guilt and cool jazz. From its bird’s eye opening to the obliterative final shots, we get into the nuts and bolts of Coppola’s “personal” post- G...

Joining our spicy all-in-the-family March episode are substitute co-host  Fran Hoepfner  and  BW/DR  staff writer  Sarah Welch-Larson . Listen as long-time  Dune -thusiast Sarah absolutely schools us on Denis Villeneuve’s  Dune: Part Two   (2024). We get into the finer points of adapting Frank Herbert, how all the Bene Gesserit are sexy, space gravity, Rebecca Ferguson’s jaw, the secularization of...

On this month's micro episode, we get into Elliott Smith soundtracking a savory first kiss in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting (1997), a film that changed one of our co-host's lives forever. -- The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25 is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands . -- The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25 is sponsored by our friends at  Galerie . To find out m...

It’s still February in our souls. This month, we’re joined by writer and Letterboxd Senior Editor Mitchell Beaupre to revisit Mira Nair’s recently 4k-restored romance, Mississippi Masala (1991), starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury. We get into the film’s ever-timely exploration of diasporic longing, when talking on the phone looks like phone sex, first-gen trauma, a particularly memora...

The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25  is a series in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at Galerie . Every month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. This month we're chatting about expressive sound and slow motion in John Singleton’s  Boyz N the Hood   (1991), a pick by curator Reinaldo Marcus Green. To see the rest of Green’...

This month we’re joined by writer, critic, and editor Nicholas Russell to chat about Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023). We get into: what makes a Bradley Cooper Film (thanks Fran ), when weird voices work, that epigraph, tension as structure and provocation, what’s going on with the ending, getting moved by Mahler, and more. -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick a...

This month, we're looking at James Gray's Two Lovers , exploring its intimacy, specificity, complexity—and a fantastic Joaquin Phoenix dance scene . --- The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25 is a series of bite-sized episodes in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at  ⁠⁠Galerie⁠⁠ . Each month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole....

Merry Cruisemas, from our home to yours! For our 3rd annual celebration, we sit down with bosom buddy, film critic, and podcast extraordinaire Blake Howard to discuss Doug Liman’s 2014 film, Edge of Tomorrow . We get into: time loops, Emily Blunt's triceps, Cruise's determined pathos, Liman's blockbuster craftmanship, McQuarrie's calibrations, repetition and rewatchability, three-beers-in movies,...

This holiday season, a very special holiday podcast treat: an audio version of one of our most popular essays of all time, 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 music by Ryan Pollie and art by Brianna Ashby . Happy Holidays from Bright Wall/Dark Room ! -- This episode is sponsored...

On this special episode, co-host Veronica sits down with critic Fran Hoepfner to talk high/lowlights of the 61st New York Film Festival . We get into: looking in vain for the element of surprise ( All of Us Strangers ), Bradley Cooper as crazy guy ( Maestro ), the Sunday-night-on-HBO vibes of Anatomy of a Fall , Elordi charisma ( Priscilla ), the biggest laughs in Last Summer , Janet Planet ’s per...

This is The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25, a series of bite-sized episodes in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at  ⁠Galerie⁠ . Each month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. Privacy, intimacy, and conspiracy are all at play in this month’s moment from George Stevens’ 1951 tragedy, A Place in the Sun . --- The BW/DR Podca...

This month, author and Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett joins us to talk about Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). We get into the elasticity of the western, what constitutes pure cinéma, Claudia Cardinale thirst, Big Screen Movies and the garages that screen them, Leone the minimalist and maximalist, and more. -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by ⁠Veroni...

The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25 is a series in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at Galerie . Every month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. This month we chat about a musical moment in Charles Laughton’s spellbinding Appalachian noir The Night of the Hunter , a pick by curator Duke Johnson . And we’ll be hosting a liv...

It’s nearly spooky season and we’re waxing nostalgic for The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) with Los Angeles film critic and podcaster extraordinaire Katie Walsh . We get into crushing on Robin Tunney, the 90s, the death of subculture, slow-motion hallway walks, where are their parents—and stay tuned for Katie’s on-air pull from the Rachel True tarot deck . -- The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co...

This is The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25, a series of bite-sized episodes in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at  Galerie . Each month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. This month we bid goodbye to summer with Robert Altman’s hallucinatory 3 Women (1977), a Palm Springs take on Persona . For info on upcoming live movi...

This is The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25, a series in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at Galerie . Each month, we pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. This month, in concert with Mike Mills' curated list , Chad and Veronica look at The Cameraman (1928), reflecting on the impossible beauty and precision of Buster Keaton, bod...

Your mission, if you choose to accept it: in concert with this month's “Heists” issue, we’re talking across Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), and Mission: Impossible (1996) with brilliant Vulture and New York Magazine critic—and platinum-tier BWDR supporter!— Bilge Ebiri . We get into the [redacted] of Ilsa Faust, when plot makes no sense,...

This is The BW/DR Podcast: Frame 25, a new series in conversation with, and sponsored by, our friends at Galerie. Every month, we’ll pick a title from Galerie’s curated library and zoom in on a single moment to better see the whole. This month: in concert with Karyn Kusama’s library, we chat about how Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995) transposes the female ennui of Antonioni’s Red Desert to the sherbet in...

We’re proud to feature our June issue’s guest editor, poet and PhD student Spencer Williams , in conversation about a pair of films that hearken to our theme of trans cinema: Canadian Billy Tipton doc No Ordinary Man (Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, Canada, 2020, now streaming on Criterion Channel) and the incendiary short American Reflexxx (Alli Coates, 2015, on YouTube ). We get into: why this...