The Next Picture Show

The heightened gothic sensibility of Robert Eggers’ new NOSFERATU recalls — in its intensity if not its precise contours — BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, Francis Ford Coppola’s feverish 1992 horror-romance that follows the same story from a markedly different perspective. This led us to reconsider Coppola’s flawed but fascinating DRACULA as a film that, even if it arguably never achieves greatness, inargu...

Hey Next Picture Show listeners, sorry there’s no new episode in your feed today. Real life got in the way of podcast life and prevented us from recording our next pairing in time to release it this week. But we will be back next Tuesday with part one of our double feature comparing Robert Eggers’ new Nosferatu with Frances Ford Coppola’s own take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992. If you’re play...

With the beginning of a new year comes our customary look back, as Keith, Scott, and Tasha gather once again to compare their personal lists of the best films of 2024. While there is some crossover among their picks — particularly when it comes to films that have been discussed in-depth on this podcast — there is much more variance, reflective of a movie year that was light on prestige-season heav...

The moments in NICKEL BOYS that nod to 1958’s THE DEFIANT ONES are less direct citations than stylized invocations by director RaMell Ross, who incorporates a number of abstractions and flourishes into the film’s visual language. Chief among those stylistic gambits is the film’s use of first-person perspective, which kicks off our discussion of NICKEL BOYS’ uniquely textured take on Colson Whitehe...

Stanley Kramer’s 1958 feature THE DEFIANT ONES, a film very much of its time, makes multiple on-screen appearances in RaMell Ross’ new NICKEL BOYS, a film about the way the past haunts the present. Both movies take place in the Jim Crow-era South and engage with that setting’s lopsided ideas about justice, but THE DEFIANT ONES does so from a much more straightforward approach, operating as both a...

The antagonist becomes the protagonist in Jon M. Chu’s WICKED, which adapts a stage musical — the first act, anyway — which adapts a novel that flipped the script on 1939’s THE WIZARD OF OZ (itself an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s novel). So while there are plenty of narrative and character parallels between the two films, they often run perpendicular to each other in their respective notions of g...

The new movie musical WICKED, along with the Broadway show and novel that preceded it, is specifically out to subvert the version of the magical land of Oz that was codified in 1939’s THE WIZARD OF OZ, making it the perfect time to consider what made that film a phenomenon to be subverted in the first place. So this week we wade into the vast, varied legacy of THE WIZARD OF OZ to discuss why it ov...

Sean Baker’s ANORA takes the fairy-tale premise of 1990’s PRETTY WOMAN as its starting point, but ends up on a very different route to a very different sort of happy ending. It’s also a best-of-the year contender for most of us, so we spend some time discussing what makes it so before bringing its romcom predecessor back in to consider how these two films about sex workers falling for their wealth...

Sean Baker’s new ANORA takes its initial cues from 1990’s PRETTY WOMAN, but its story of a sex worker who develops romantic feelings for a client in spite of class difference and social stigma soon peels off in a vastly different direction. So this week we’re focusing on that shared starting point to determine what makes PRETTY WOMAN both a deeply weird depiction of sex work and a resoundingly suc...

Edward Berger’s new CONCLAVE is a low-key, intimate political thriller full of unexpected reveals, but fundamentally about power, purity, belief, compromise, perception, and committee decisions. This week we share our thoughts on CONCLAVE’s insular focus and messaging around religion and politics before considering how its power brokers and kingmakers compare to those found in the 1964 presidentia...

While the new CONCLAVE concerns the election of a new pope, its intrigue, backstabbing, and backroom deals have many echoes in secular politics, in particular those found in 1964’s THE BEST MAN. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and written by Gore Vidal adapting his own stage play, the film’s depiction of the behind-the-scenes machinations involved to secure an unnamed party’s nomination for the...

In its attempt to capture the chaotic comedic alchemy leading up to the first-ever SNL broadcast, Jason Reitman’s SATURDAY NIGHT is carrying the weight of the show’s nearly 50-year legacy and its personification in protagonist Lorne Michaels. Whether it manages to get off the ground despite that is up for debate in the first half of this week’s discussion, before we bring in another tense evening...

Capturing the tense hours leading to a pivotal moment in live TV history, the new SATURDAY NIGHT is defined by a looming deadline that reminded us of another New York-based all-nighter captured on film: D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 TV pilot turned documentary film ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY. Despite being less than an hour long, the fly-on-the-wall document of Stephen Sondheim and company recording th...

The new Dreamworks animated feature THE WILD ROBOT is partially about the struggles of parenthood, partially about the joys of community, and the larger idea bridging those two parts — that of being more than you were “programmed” to be — is also what links it most directly to Brad Bird’s THE IRON GIANT. But there’s a lot more going on in THE WILD ROBOT besides that, arguably too much, which forms...

It’s understandable that new Dreamworks feature THE WILD ROBOT pulls some of its source code from THE IRON GIANT, considering the latter’s towering reputation as one of the greatest animated films ever, robot protagonist or otherwise. But the enduring legacy of Brad Bird’s debut feature was far from assured when it blipped through theaters back in 1999, so this week we’re examining what’s behind t...

Azazel Jacobs’ HIS THREE DAUGHTERS is, like Tamara Jenkins’ THE SAVAGES, a film about the heartbreaking experience of caring for an aging parent, but even more so it is, also like the other film in the pairing, about adult siblings reuniting and renegotiating their relationships under those fraught conditions. We’re decidedly more mixed on Jacobs’ film, however, which often plays like a stage adap...

Caring for an elderly or infirm parent is a common experience that is less commonly depicted on screen, particularly with a comedic bent, which is why Azazal Jacobs’ new HIS THREE DAUGHTERS inspired us to revisit the 2007 dramedy THE SAVAGES, which writer-director Tamara Jenkins drew from her own experiences dealing with a father with dementia. Much of the film’s success lies with the performances...

Jeremy Saulnier’s REBEL RIDGE puts a distinctly 2020s spin on the one-man army formula established in the era-defining ‘80s action hit FIRST BLOOD, resulting in a film with more nuance, less firepower, and equal amounts of ass-kicking. We parse that equation a bit more in-depth in our spoiler-light discussion of REBEL RIDGE, before bringing back FIRST BLOOD to see how the decades between the two f...

Genre specialist Jeremy Saulnier’s latest banger, REBEL RIDGE, owes an obvious debt to the film that kicked off Sylvester Stallone’s second long-running franchise, 1982’s FIRST BLOOD, but the two films are of very different eras with very different core concerns about policing in America. So this week we’re focusing on the shadow of Vietnam that falls over the Pacific Northwest in the form of John...

Fede Álvarez’s ALIEN: ROMULUS is at its core an act of homage to the larger franchise, but is that a feature, a bug, or both? That’s a question we attempt to reconcile in our discussion of Álvarez’s acid-blood-soaked film, before comparing how this late-stage sequel compares with the franchise’s original sequel, James Cameron’s ALIENS, in iterating on the corporate meddling of Weyland-Yutani, the...

Fede Álverez’s ALIEN: ROMULUS is so reference-packed that an argument could be made for pairing it with just about any ALIEN film, but since we’ve already discussed the 1979 original, and because the Next Picture Show bylaws state that if an opportunity to discuss ALIENS arises we must take it, we’re digging into the first of the many sequels this franchise has spawned. Thanks to writer-director J...

Is it a bit unfair to compare M. Night Shyamalan’s new grip-it-and-rip-it thriller TRAP to Fritz Lang’s 1931 cinematic landmark M? Sure, but that’s the name of the game here on The Next Picture Show, and for all of TRAP’s faults — which we try not to take too much glee in enumerating in this discussion — it does work, however awkwardly, as an extrapolation of the ideas and narrative techniques fir...

The new TRAP, like so many M. Night Shyamalan movies, openly courts comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but its focus on the large-scale manhunt for a serial killer combined with its psychological interest in said killer has roots even further back in film history. So this week we reach all the way back to Fritz Lang’s first talkie, 1931’s M, to see how it frames the search for a compulsi...

No show this week, but NPS co-host Genevieve Koski announces the next pairing, inspired by M. Night Shyamalan's "Trap." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/join/NextPictureShow See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Osgood Perkins’ new LONGLEGS shares some clear narrative and thematic DNA with THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, but it’s much more bizarre and divisive in its approach to horror-adjacent serial killer storytelling than Jonathan Demme’s crowd-pleasing, Oscar-sweeping hit. We’re joined again this week by critic and author Charles Bramesco to talk through the varying degrees to which we vibed with Perkins’...