The Movie Breakdown

It is a really big episode this week as we look at one of the lesser-known movies of Martin Scorsese that was a flop at the time of its release but has gone on to be one of his most influential movies that inspired works like The Joker. It is the Robert De Niro starring deep-dive into the dangers of obsession and fandom in 1982's dark drama with comedic elements in The King of Comedy. We also revi...

It is our first traditional review show of 2021 on The Movie Breakdown. We kick off with some big streaming exclusives like Regina King's directorial debut in One Night in Miami and a heavy drama looking at grief and loss in Pieces of a Woman. Then we get far less serious with the campy fantasy adventure The Beastmaster, where we also talk a little about the career of Tanya Roberts. We keep up the...

It is another special episode this week and we're calling it, The Breakdown of the Future Success of Movies. The movie industry took a huge blow in 2020 with the pandemic, and there is hope that they can start recovering once the vaccines have significant rollout. Whenever in history there has been a significant shake-up to society like a global war or a pandemic, parts of our life are changed for...

It is finally here. Our biggest show of the year and definitely one of our favourite episodes we do every year. We celebrate the best movies of the past year. I know 2020 was a really strange year, and how movies were distributed and discussed were very different from past years. But despite how it may feel and even though there were a lot less big studio movies, there actually were a lot of movie...

This week is a show that has been a long time in coming and is planned to be our third annual 'year-end list' special along with our best of and worst of shows. I've always been a huge fan of our top ten best of the year shows, but there was a part of me n the recent years that was a little uncomfortable having a show where we spotlighted the worst. There were so many high-quality movies that were...

2020 was an odd year for movies. The big studios kept pushing all their stuff off the schedule for another year. It feels like there was a lot less movies, yet stuff quietly kept being released each week through streaming or VOD. It is the least movies I've seen in theatres since I started professionally reviewing movies in 2012. It is also the least amount of new release movie that I've seen as a...

Christmas is right around the corner and The Movie Breakdown is getting into the festive mood by making our own wish list. The week is The Breakdown of Our Wishes for 2021 and Beyond, where we discuss some things that we'd like to see in the movie industry including more original stories from studios and more classic movies from Netflix. We look at the state of the movie industry and acknowledge s...

It is the final traditional The Movie Breakdown episode before we march our way into our annual year-end specials. We wrap it up with four movie reviews including a picture we've been anticipating all year in David Fincher's tale about the screenwriter of Citizen Kane in the ambitious drama Mank. We also have another based on true events drama in the Josh Trank comeback movie starring Tom Hardy in...

It is a wild episode of The Movie Breakdown podcast with some very different movies getting reviewed this week. We go all the way back to the 1970s to review two exploitation movies in Wes Craven's controversial feature debut in The Last House on the Left and the very influential vigilante picture, Death Wish. We cheer things up with a fantasy holiday musical in Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey....

The latest episode of The Movie Breakdown is saying good-bye to November in the form of four movie reviews. We have three Netflix originals for you, and at least one of them we consider a best of the year contender. We have Ron Howard's latest picture in the adaptation of a best-selling book in Hillbilly Elegy. We also have a gothic romance that is both an adaptation of a best-seller and a remake...

This week we've got four piping hot movie reviews for you. We're reviewing a sequel that took almost three decades to get here in the time travelling comedy. Bill and Ted Face the Music. Then it is the movie that kicked off a series that launched an iconic comedic character in The Pink Panther. There is also a sweeping animated adventure that explore some mythology behind a popular Chinese holiday...

For the first time in awhile, we are reviewing all 2020 releases and two of them came straight from the theatre. Friday the 13th just passed and so we appropriately have ourselves a slasher film, but it is directed by Christopher Landon, so it mixes itself with a comedy subgenre with this time being the body swap in Freaky. We have another mash up with a family drama mixed with bloody western in t...

  This week it is The Breakdown of Sean Connery as we review five movies starring this Hollywood icon. We look at the movie that earned him an Academy Award in the gangster drama directed by Brian DePalma, The Untouchables. We also have Connery as a crook in the ambitious heist picture The Great Train Robbery. Speaking of crimes, he is a suspect in the murder mystery film, Murder on the Orient Exp...

It is time for our yearly Halloween special, The Breakdown of Horror, because nothing is scarier than a holiday episode released after the day it is celebrating. We are reviewing a diverse array of five pictures that fall under the broad horror genre. If you like a song and dance number before your kills, then we have the Tim Burton directed and Johnny Depp starring Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber...

It is a huge episode this week as we have five movie reviews for you, and we are dipping into all kinds of genres. Halloween is almost here, so it seemed appropriate to look at two pictures about ghosts. One of them is the appropriately named Ghost, which was a massive blockbuster smash hit in 1990 and a huge career boost for Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg who became major box office names in the...

We are approaching Halloween season, which means we are building towards our annual scary movie episode. That also means we want to see some horror movies on the way, and this week, we're discussing what is one of the most influential horror thrillers of all-time in The Silence of the Lambs. We go deep on this one as we discuss it for well over a half hour, as we really look at its impact and what...

Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian listeners and readers, and for everyone else, I hope you're having a wonderful Monday. Since our show is recorded in Canada, we've decided to have a special Thanksgiving episode called The Breakdown of Things We Are Thankful for in Movies. The title is self-explanatory, but it is over an hour of us celebrating some of the many things we appreciate about movie...

There has been a lot written and said about how modern comedies aren't as good as those made decades ago. This doesn't mean that there haven't been some great and even classic comedies that have been released in the 2010s. This week we want to celebrate the best comedies of the last decade. We do that by both of us revealing our top ten favourite movies of the 2010s. We had a blast recording this...

We are serving up four movie reviews this week on The Movie Breakdown, including two movies that are really beloved comedies. We discuss the movie that not only was the likely inspiration for a slew of comedies in the 1990s but also gave Leslie Nielsen a second career in the cop parody picture, The Naked Gun. We also have what is a Canada cult classic in the mockumentary about two headbangers in F...

It is another big week of The Movie Breakdown as we have four movie reviews for you with some of the pictures considered beloved classics. We discuss the buddy comedy that showed Arnold Schwarzenegger can do the funny and teams up with the always great Danny DeVito in Twins. Thrillers based on John Grisham novels were huge in the 1990s, so we look at one of the big ones in the Tom Cruise starring...

It has been a few weeks since movie theatres opened up back here in Ontario, but it looks like it will be months before the big studios start delivering most of their major pictures. It is allowing for some smaller films time on the big screen and this week we look at the romantic comedy starring Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers, The Package) and Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things) in The Broken Hea...

The movie theatres have been open for a few weeks in most of Canada, but the real movie studio tentpoles have finally arrived. We have one of the biggest and most anticipated movies to review this week in Christopher Nolan's twisty sci-fi spy thriller, Tenet. Speaking of anticipating, it has been three years since we originally were expecting to see it on the big screen but the coming-of-age super...

It has been a crazy year and for a long portion of it, there weren't any theatrical movies to review. But we still had movies and some of them were really good. This is why that even if it is a few months late, we've decided to do our annual look at the best movies at the mid-year point (plus two months). It is The Breakdown of the Best of 2020 So Far, and for long-time listeners, you know this is...

The movie theatres are opening up again in Ontario, so that means that for the first time since March that we are reviewing some theatrical releases. This includes an animated adventure that isn't coming to the United States until next year but is the big new release in Canada in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. The other theatrical release is the Russel Crowe starring thriller, Unhinged. W...

This week we get personal with The Breakdown of Our Influences, as we look at the things in our life that have formed how we watch and review movies. We have said on many occasions that film criticism is subjective and this is the week we reveal some of the things that have formulated and informed the way we approach motion pictures, We look at things like our experience in high school, parenting,...