The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast

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 actor Taylor Russell’s library, we look at the relentlessness and romance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). A movie so pre...

Joining us this month to wax rhapsodic about Katharine Hepburn is film professor, author ( Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism ), and Hepburn devotee Kyle Stevens . Listen as we get into George Cukor’s 1940 film adaptation of The Philadelphia Story : the oppositional coherence of the love “square,” getting radicalized by late night TCM, why Hepburn wasn’t hot...

Welcome to 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 director Mike Mills’s library, we look at Daisies ( Sedmikrásky , 1966), directed by Věra Chytilová and co-written by Ester Krumbachová...

It’s been a minute but we’re back! With writer and Bright Wall OG—literally, she wrote the first essay for our first issue back in 2013— Karina Wolf to discuss Wim Wenders’s iconic Wings of Desire (1987), a film that bridges “road movies” and “siblings” (trust us). We get into: the essential decency of Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk’s warmth, transformative romance, whether angels have grandmas, Henri Ale...

This month for our sports issue we’re joined by ace writer and admitted baseball enthusiast Frank Falisi to run the numbers on Bennett Miller’s Oscar-nominated ode to analytics, Moneyball (2011). We touch on romance versus data, the fractious appeal(?) of Billy Beane, how Miller replaced Soderbergh in this case of life imitating art, 2010s’ signature “slick cinema” and baseball’s televisuality, wh...

For our annual fashionably late “Best Of” issue , we’re looking at a 2022 highlight: Charlotte Wells’s staggering debut feature Aftersun , featuring 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 and the technology of memory, good karaoke scenes, fa...

December means one thing: Happy Cruisemas, from our home to yours. This month we welcome back special Cruise correspondent and BWDR torchbearer Elizabeth Cantwell to discuss Cameron Crowe’s 2001 Vanilla Sky . Surrealist rom com or indulgent puzzle film? Flop or parable? We get into needle drops, Crowe’s self-referentiality, whether Cruise is always more or less wearing a mask, is Brian real, what...

Our November episode comes a little late, but in the continuous spirit of “recovery,” Chad and Veronica are joined by writer, editor, and Powell's Books managing editor Kelsey Ford to talk Pedro Almodóvar’s Dolor y Gloria ( Pain and Glory , 2019). We get into the film’s “wildly tender” exploration of autobiography and artistic process, Almodóvar’s aspirational apartments, that for-old-times’-sake...

On this very special episode, cohost Veronica sits down with beloved critic Fran Hoepfner to talk highlights of the 60th New York Film Festival–of which Fran’s omnibus review for BWDR is out now. In it, Fran describes the programming slate as offering, maybe, catharsis: “a healing that can only be done in a dark room, surrounded by others, but entirely viewed through your own eyes.” Listen as we b...

For October’s B-Movies issue–just in time for spooky season–we’re casting an eye back toward RKO darling Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), one of the studio’s most successful forays into low-budget, low-runtime horror. Joining us is film critic and curator, and Artistic Director of Indie Memphis , Miriam Bale . Listen as we historicize our love for Cat People back to Ma...

It’s a month of time travel at BW/DR . Right on the heels of the growing buzz for Rian Johnson’s new genre love letter Glass Onion , we’re discussing his 2012 sci-fi thriller, Looper . Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a young Bruce Willis (with the help of that infamous prosthetic nose), but we might be the first to ask: is it a metaphor for parenting? Meanwhile, Veronica interprets a symbolic reincarna...

We’ve traveled back to 1987 to wax ecstatic about Elaine May’s maligned box office failure, Ishtar. We match May’s compassion for the brashly stupid Chuck and Lyle (played by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, respectively) as Chad explains his personal connection to the movie, Veronica wonders how (and if) the movie successfully balances its many threads, and guest Frank Falisi lays out his theory...

For “Voyeur” July, we’re talking one-on-one about The Conversation (1974) 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 Francis Ford Coppola’s “personal” post- Godfather film and what it means to watch, fixate, deduce, mishear, and, despite...

The category is summertime sadness as we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love. Chad and Veronica are joined by author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski to break down Guadagnino’s long standing collab with Tilda Swinton, the social necessity of melodrama, how DP Yorick Le Saux crafted two distinct worlds, the erotics of shellfish, radical haircuts, justice for Ida,...

To salute our May theme of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” Chad sits down with deputy cohost Fran Hoepfner and our special guest, movie and music writer Sydney Urbanek , to discuss the greatest initially-PG-rated movie of all time(?): Miloš Forman’s 1984 Amadeus. They get into childhood piano lessons, reading love letters in Salzburg, which composers hated their wives, modern resonance in period...

Lock the door: for our April devotional to Paul Newman, we’re revisiting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958) with BW/DR contributor and Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi . Join us as we get into the irrepressible chemistry of Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, the pitfalls and opportunities of stage-to-screen adaptation, where Tennessee Williams’s queer plot went, stormy weather indoors and out, and...

Break out the tissues: for our tenth pod, we’ve got a revealing one-on-one episode with cohosts Chad and Veronica swapping a medley of their most memorable, formative movie moments, with a very special cameo by our producer and editor, Eli Sands . We chat about camera movement and transcendence, the power of misremembering, why melodrama rules, the terrible beauty of Cary Grant, the sun, the moon,...

February is “Opulence” month at BW/DR and we’re at the juncture of maximalism and mid-century modern, tackling Peyton Reed’s 2003 rom-com Down With Love . Joining us is editor-in-chief of Fran Magazine , writer and OG Bright Waller Fran Hoepfner . We talk about the calculus of comedy, homage vs. parody, “high concept” romance, the David Hyde Pierce of it all, whether Pillow Talk sucks, and what go...

For our Best of 2021 issue, we’re diving deep into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with film critic and Quorum ( Film Quarterly ) editor Girish Shambu , author of The New Cinephilia –now in its second, expanded, PDF-only edition ! We talk about Campion’s signature expressionism, the versatility of props, masculinities, Jonny Greenwood, and the capital-R Romanticism of this profound gothic west...

​​ This month at BWDR, we swerve from the usual holiday sentimentality and instead explore films that exemplify a state of ‘FUBAR’ : fucked up beyond all recognition/repair. Joining us is poet, educator, and original Bright Wall co-conspirator Elizabeth Cantwell to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s beloved psychosexual Christmas thriller, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). We chat about color and Christmas lights, sh...

Our theme this month is “ Generations ,” and we’re joining renowned pickle man enthusiast and Elaine May biographer Carrie Courogen to discuss Joan Micklin Silver’s intergenerational NYC rom-com, Crossing Delancey (1988). We chat about marriage brokerage, douchey literary parties, movie magic in a Papaya King, Jewishness and immigration in Silver’s oeuvre (watch her 1973 educational short here ),...

David Lowery's The Green Knight captured the heart of a whole lot of our staff this summer, so for our August episode we're talking our way through the forest. Join guest host Zosha Millman as she dives deep into Lowery's latest film with special guests Fran Hoepfner and Kelsey Ford .

This month, Veronica & Chad sit down with special guest Travis Woods —erotic thriller aficionado and the driving force behind our July issue —to talk through a film he and Veronica consider one of the "icons of the genre," the 1993 Sharon Stone/William Baldwin film, Sliver. (Episode produced by the wonderful & amazing Victoria Alejandro )

Our May issue is focused on the films of 1971, so for the second episode of our podcast we're going deep on one of the more fascinating films from that year, Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge . Join co-hosts Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman, and returning special guest Zosha Millman, as they talk their way through Nichols' darkly complex and cinematic battle of the sexes.

Our pilot episode is here! Join hosts Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman as they talk through a perennial BW/DR favorite, Moonstruck , with special guest Zosha Millman . Topics include: John Patrick Shanley’s moons, Nicolas Cage’s wolf growls, Cher’s anti-walk of shame, and all things operatic multi-generational romantic comedy.