The Gauntlet

Breaking Away (1979) / Good Burger (1997) This week we’re taking a sick day and prescribing some cinematic medicine: burger flipping and strawberry jacuzzis with Kenan & Kel and a long bike ride through Indiana with Peter Yates

Archipiélago (1992) / The House that Jack Built (2018) This week we’re taking a seat at the drafting table as we construct a house of corpses with Lars von Trier and try to restore a church – and Chile’s collective memory – with Pablo Perelman Watch Archipiélago for FREE via Cineteca Nacional de Chile: https://www.cclm.cl/cineteca-online/archipielago/

Road House (1948) / Terribly Happy (2008) This week we’re taking the crime out of the city as we go bowling at the road house with Jean Negulesco and get reassigned to oblivion in the boggy lowlands with Henrik Ruben Genz

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) / All the Colors of the Dark (1972) This week we’re having bad dreams with Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino as we attend black mass and trip with debauched hippies in swinging London

Sugar Cane Alley (1983) / Shottas (2002) This week we’re island hopping in the Caribbean as Euzhan Palcy transports us to the sugar cane fields of 1930s Martinique and we get blazed from Kingston to Miami with Cess Silveira’s shottas

Waxworks (1924) / Ganga Bruta (1933) This week we explore the universal language of silent cinema and love triangles as we tour Paul Leni’s nightmarish waxworks and flee to the Brazilian countryside to erect a factory with Humberto Mauro

Continental Divide (1981) / Smoke Signals (1998) This week venture into the Dream Life with two films screened by US presidents: first we help Michael Apted lug Belushi up the rockies then we hit the road with Chris Eyre’s indigenous buddy comedy

The Sisterhood (1988) / Futuresport (1998) This week the future is now as we hoverboard through a geopolitical crisis with Ernest R. Dickerson and try to survive Cirio H. Santiago’s post-apocalyptic wasteland with a band of women warriors

Some Came Running (1958) / Avengement (2019) Join us this week for two fraught homecomings as Frank Sinatra drinks his troubles away in a Minnelli-drama and Scott Adkins guzzles pints and holds court in a Jesse V. Johnson beat-em-up

Mountains of the Moon (1990) / Vacas (1992) It’s rivalry week as we head to Basque country with Julio Medem for some log cutting and generational conflict and then set out to find the source of the Nile with Bob Rafelson’s adventurous duo Burton & Speke

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (2020) This week we’re going long in our shortest episode yet as we depart from our normal format to toil in the fields of C.W. Winter & Anders Edström’s 480-minute poem of life and loss in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture

Waiting to Exhale (1995) / Now and Then (1995) This week our pal Alex Sherman joins us as we wait to exhale with the ladies of Forest Whitaker’s sensual melodrama and raise the dead with the BFFs of Lesli Linka Glatter’s nostalgic flashback

Color of Night (1994) / The Island of St. Matthews (2013) This week we’re getting dangerously wet as we go skinny dipping with Richard Rush and water ski down memory lane with Kevin Jerome Everson

Barabbas (1961) / The Beast of War (1988) This week the chosen ones lead us down dangerous paths as we chase tanks with Kevin Reynolds and the Mujahideen and get tossed into the gladiator arena in Richard Fleischer’s biblical epic

Giwaku aka Suspicion (1982) / Court (2014) This week we’re going to court and cross examining Yoshitaro Nomura’s fiery legal procedural and Chaitanya Tamhane’s understated indictment of judicial injustice and class conflict

Dirkie (1969) / White Sun of the Desert (1970) This week we’re getting lost in the dunes with Comrade Sukhov and Dirkie as we wander through the unforgiving sandscapes of the Karakum and Kalahari deserts

Marat/Sade (1967) / I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) This week we’re going into production as we join the crew of Radu Jude’s Romanian historical reenactment and get caught in the madhouse of Peter Brook’s play-within-a-play

Summerfield (1977) / Missing (1982) This week we join the search party for a missing Australian schoolteacher and a vanished American abroad in an enigmatic slow burn by Ken Hannam and confrontational thriller by Costa-Gavras

Quicksilver (1986) / The Cyclist (1989) This week we’re celebrating Spoketober as we pedal our way through Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s satirical circus and bunny hop from Wall Street to the mean streets with Kevin Bacon

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) / Deadly Weapons (1974) This week we’re going on a date with the grand dame of the grindhouse as we discuss Doris Wishman’s bad girls and deadly weapons

The Incredible Journey (1963) / MVP2: Most Vertical Primate (2001) This week we’re going beast mode as we discuss the homeward bound trio of Fletcher Markle’s kids classic and Robert Vince’s skateboarding chimpsploitation

An Autumn’s Tale (1987) / Far From Heaven (2002) This week autumn leaves are falling as we discuss two tales of love and transition in Todd Haynes’ modernist melodrama and Mabel Cheung’s immigration romantic comedy

The Lusty Men (1952) / Knightriders (1981) This week we’re hitting the rodeo circuit and traveling with a troupe of jousting motorcyclists as we discuss Nicholas Ray’s sensitive cowboys and George Romero’s chivalrous knights

First Graders (1984) / Three O’Clock High (1987) This week we’re getting schooled by Abbas Kiarostami and Phil Joanou as they take us on a ride through the ups and downs of the educational experience

McQ (1974) / Police Beat (2005) This week we're investigating two Emerald City policiers: one with an unlicensed Duke wielding a MAC-10 and another with a lovesick beat cop wielding a green card and the American Dream