The Next Reel Film Podcast

There are a lot of elements from Ann Hui’s own life in her film Song of the Exile . It’s not a biographical film, though. Knowing that, what are we meant to take away from it? Is it an exploration of Hui’s own life? A chance for her to exorcise some demons from her youth? Or did she simply use those elements as a way to frame this story about a daughter slowly growing to know her own mother? Join...

"No one gets an unwrapped present on my watch!” The original idea for Arthur Christmas , at the time called Operation Rudolph , had a much darker thread in it involving reindeer burgers. Luckily, the story evolved and turned into a wild story about a hereditary line of Santas running things with a million elves helping out (really doing all the work). The story is one of commerce and efficiency, b...

Ann Hui has had a long career and was close to retiring in 2011 when she made A Simple Life . Luckily, she enjoyed making that film so much and enjoyed its success that she decided to keep directing. The film is a quiet one about a maid who has served the same family for over 60 years, now looking after Roger, the son who has become a film producer. After a stroke, however, she decides to retire....

"Your fiancée can’t crash your bachelor party!” Bollywood has overtaken Hollywood as the largest center for film production in the world, but we have yet to talk about a Bollywood film on this podcast. Well, we’re changing things with today’s episode. Zoya Akhtar, co-writer and director of this film, is from a prominent film production family. This was her second film and it became an immediate su...

Nadine Labaki started as an actress but starting in 2007 with Caramel , she started working as a writer/director. Her films look at life in Lebanon but through unique prisms that aren’t confined by the grim realities. In her 2011 film Where Do We Go Now? , Labaki uses a magical realist tone with musical elements to craft a story about the women in an isolated village working together to stop the m...

"You don’t look happy.” “Have I ever?” Tackling a film that looks at a school shooting is a challenging prospect, but writer/director Lynne Ramsay and her co-writer Rory Stewart Kinnear decided to accept the challenge when they signed on to adapt Lionel Shriver’s book “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” The film is a tough film to watch, but the focus on the mother dealing with what her son has done al...

"It’s kind of complicated, actually.” Céline Sciamma had already proven herself a strong writer/director of complicated love stories involving people figuring out their own sexuality when she wrote and directed Tomboy . The film tells a story of a 10-year-old girl – our titular tomboy – who tells all the kids she’s a boy when she moves to a new neighborhood. It’s a small decision but an important...

"You’re not the podcast I knew ten years ago.” “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” It’s fun revisiting Spielberg’s 1981 classic Raiders of the Lost Ark , the film that we used as our launching point for this podcast. In honor of our ten year anniversary, we thought it would be fun to return to where it all began and have another conversation about Raiders as well as what we’ve been doin...

“I’m not running. I’m choosing.” While in film school at NYU, Dee Rees directed a short film called Pariah that was essentially the first act of a feature script she was developing. Spike Lee, her professor and mentor, helped her get the feature version financed and in 2011, she released it to much acclaim. Join us – Pete Wright and Andy Nelson – as we continue our 10 Year Anniversary series with...

"This place is a real find!” Brazil’s economy has certainly had its share of ups and downs over the decades. The struggle to create a capitalist economy hasn’t been easy, and allowed for rich fodder for the filmmaking duo of Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra to write and direct a story about a middle class family struggling in the labor market. This film, Trabalhar Cansa or Hard Work in English, came...

"So for all practical purposes, in a month, that’s it for us.” Miranda July spends more time as a performance artist than as a filmmaker, so it makes sense that her second film, The Future , feels a bit like a performance piece. That also likely speaks to why its quirky charm works for some but for others, they feel it represents the worst side of independent film. But that’s what art is, right? J...

"Remember how devastated you were at first? So why get others to do the same?” In 2008, 18 students at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, MA, all got pregnant. At the time, the principal said that there had been a pact between a number of the girls to all get pregnant together. The mayor later came out to say that there wasn’t a pact, and later some of the girls said there was a pact but it had...

Seven films, one series, and a whole lot of reassessing. Pete and Andy close out The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series by revisiting their original ratings for Messiah of Evil, Goodnight Mommy, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, The Lure, Saint Maud, and Relic to see what still holds up. They dig into why so few women-directed horror debuts exist before the 2000s, whether these films c...

“Meryl Streep is not in enough movies where she feeds on people with the mouth in her armpit.” Who rules the roost in this month’s Flickchart Re-Ranking? Pete or Andy? Pete and Andy are back for yet another cockfight, this time for our October Flickchart Re-Ranking for our wonderful members. Also, Andy challenges Pete to remember which series each movie was featured. Here’s a breakdown of the batt...

A nurse's devotion to God curdles into something far more dangerous. "Saint Maud" follows a private palliative care nurse whose obsession with saving her dying patient's soul spirals into religious mania, closing out The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Rose Glass directs her feature debut, starring Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle. Pete and Andy land in genuinely different places on this one, spl...

What happens when a fairy tale, a horror movie, and a jukebox musical all wash ashore at once? "The Lure" follows two carnivorous mermaid sisters who become overnight nightclub sensations in an alternate 1980s Poland, continuing The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs her feature debut, starring Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska. Pete and Andy dig into how the film r...

A grandmother goes missing, then comes back changed—and the house changes with her. "Relic" follows three generations of women confronting a dementia so unsettling it becomes something else entirely, a member-voted addition to The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Natalie Erika James directs her feature debut, starring Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, and Bella Heathcote. Pete and Andy dig into how Ja...

Nobody warned this mother and son that the monster in their new picture book was real. "The Babadook" follows a grieving single mother whose troubled young son becomes convinced a storybook creature has come for them, continuing The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Jennifer Kent writes and directs her feature debut, starring Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman. Pete and Andy dig into the film's overt gr...

A lonesome vampire. A stolen skateboard. One unforgettable ghost town. "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" follows a chador-clad vampire who preys on bad men in the fictional Iranian town of Bad City, continuing The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Ana Lily Amirpour writes and directs her black-and-white feature debut, starring Sheila Vand and Arash Marandi. Pete and Andy dig into Amirpour as a fi...

An aunt-and-nephew directing team. One unforgettable horror debut. Twin brothers begin to suspect the bandaged woman recovering from surgery in their isolated countryside home isn't really their mother in "Goodnight Mommy," continuing The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala direct their narrative feature debut, with Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, and Lukas Schwarz sta...

Before "American Graffiti," before "Howard the Duck" there was "Messiah of Evil"—a hallucinatory, half-finished cult curiosity from Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, made years before Hollywood knew their names. A woman arrives in a cursed coastal town searching for her missing father and finds a cannibalistic cult awaiting a blood moon. Pete and Andy open The Next Reel's Horror Debuts series, with M...

"So you’re the one that’s been kicking me.” How Does Heckerling’s Biggest Hit Hold Up 30+ Years Later? It’s funny looking back on writer/director Amy Heckerling’s 1989 romantic comedy Look Who’s Talking now and thinking that studios thought it was too sexual for the genre or that women couldn’t carry a comedy like this. Heckerling has said that she had to pitch the film as a talking baby voiced by...

“Compared to you, most people have the IQ of a carrot.” We're Fans of Martha Coolidge's 1985 Film  Real Genius The producer of Real Genius , Brian Grazer, approached director Martha Coolidge a number of times, trying to convince her to direct the film. From Coolidge’s perspective, the script just wasn’t there. It was a juvenile, teen male-oriented comedy and just wasn’t her thing. But Grazer would...

“You fargin sneaky bastige!” Director Amy Heckerling obviously did something right with her first feature film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High . For Heckerling’s second feature film, she had almost double the budget that she had before. Considering her second film was a period film, that likely helped. Now it may seem that Johnny Dangerously was a strange choice after her first film captured modern...

"I’m so sure!” The story of Valley Girl is simply another Romeo & Juliet type of tale, but director Martha Coolidge captured a lot more in her film. The movie depicts an authentic look at life as a teenager in the early 80s, particularly the culture that grew out of Valley Speak and the whole concept of what a ‘valley girl’ represented, not just in the San Fernando Valley but anywhere in the c...