To the '90s and Beyond! Film Podcast

the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince living in Rome-occupied Jerusalem, as well as his strong competitive bond with his adopted Roman brother, Messala Severus, who will come to be his main adversary in that climactic race. However, that bond is put to the test when Messala becomes a centurion in the Roman military, eventually returning to Jerusalem as a captain entrusted to command...

Kubo is set in a fantasy/folk version of medieval Japan, where we find young Kubo spending his days using his elaborate magical origami constructions to spin beautiful stories of the heroism of his legendary father, the samurai Hanzo, to the people of his village, brought to life from the magic of his shamisen, a three-stringed Japanese lute. His evenings are spent with his melancholy mother hidin...

The gentle, dreamlike film starts with some of the heavier material when we find the titular Pete as a very young boy left orphaned after a car crash, leaving him alone in the dense woods of the Pacific Northwest with seemingly no one to protect him -- that is until a kind-hearted giant green dragon, also gone astray from his own family, comes along to take the child under his wing, almost literal...

Weiner is a behind-the-scenes documentary covering the publicly disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and his bid for mayor of New York City in 2013. Carrying a great deal of baggage going in, Weiner manages to gain some traction by claiming that his indiscretions, which had to do with multiple instances of sexting, exchange of nude photographs, and phone sex with several women admirers he h...

Set in New York during the mid 1940s, Stephen Frears' film about a real-life, upper-class heiress with a zest for music and charitable works gives Meryl Streep another juicy role that taps into even more of her seemingly boundless talent as an actress, and as a singer (many of her more recent roles have utilized her vocal talent), even as a very good singer who has to sing quite badly. A former ch...

The food items at the supermarket named Shopwell's are excited about the prospects of the annual '4th of July' sale, where many of them get chosen by the 'gods' to go to the promised land of the "Great Beyond." The most excited are the members of a package of ten phallic sausages, especially Frank, who becomes enamored of what he hopes will be his future companion, Brenda, who is one of a collecti...

Birbiglia plays Miles, the eldest member of the Commune at 36, who teaches improv to younger up-and-comers in his spare time. He feed the hopes and dreams they all have, though all the while, he has grown more cynical and bitter with each passing year of finding himself exactly in the same place as he was the year before, while many of those who've learned from him are doing what he can only dream...

The Dirty Dozen-inspired plotline involves black ops ringleader, federal agent Amanda Waller, bringing together Task Force X, a group of strangers, all violently criminal super-powered sociopaths locked away in elaborately imagined high-security prisons, forced to do the government's dirty work to stave off the threat of other meta-humans that, in the wake of the death of Earth's savior, Superman,...

Viggo Mortensen stars as Ben Cash, a father of six (ages range from six to eighteen), living "off the grid" in the remote dense wilderness of the Pacific Northwest as part of some sort of self-imposed counterculture exile, where they live off mostly of what's out in nature in a ritualistic fashion -- hunting, farming, rock climbing, survivalist training, and keeping physically fit, as well as ment...

This chapter in the saga finds Jason Bourne giving up the spy game and living completely off the grid, earning his keep as a bruising slugger in the Eastern European underground fighting circuit. That's until he's pulled out by his old crony in the CIA, Nicky Parsons, who has gone rogue to deliver intel to Jason that she's hacked regarding the identity and mysterious death of his father, as well a...

Set in the 1930s, Jesse Eisenberg stars as Bobby Dorfman, a young Bronxite and aspiring writer who calls on his distant uncle Phil to hook him up with a job in his top-flight talent agency in Hollywood. Shortly after relocating, Phil sends hisassistant, the decidedly glamour-averse Vonnie, to show his young nephew around the town, and the two soon hit it off as friends. However, friendship turns t...

Mila Kunis plays 32-year old wife and mother of two, Amy, whose already stale marriage in the Chicago suburbs (filmed in New Orleans) hits an impasse when she catches her hubby having an online affair. Her best friends, spitfire sexpot single-mom Carla and mousy housewife Kiki, form a pact to be "bad moms" as a means of rebellion against having to put up with bratty, unappreciative kids and husban...

Emma Roberts plays venus 'Vee' Delmonico, an introverted, straight-as-an-arrow senior in a Staten Island high school. Vee is cajoled by her more outgoing and bold friend Sydney to install a popular underground ("dark web") smartphone and desktop app called 'Nerve' in which one can choose to be a Player, who participates in a customized series of 'dares' for cash deposits and follower base, or Watc...

In this film, the antics of Scrat the squirrel flying a UFO in outer space, chasing the elusive acorn, ends up inadvertently causing a massive meteor shower to hit Earth. Manny the woly mammoth and his wife Ellie forget, for a moment, their fears that their daughter Peaches will end up leaving them once she gets married to the silly-natured but loveable Julian. They see the fiery rocks hurtling in...

Batman, after some introductory scenes in which he battles some bad guys with the help of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, goes to confront The Joker at Arkham Asylum, only to discover he has made his escape and is out and about causing havoc. The Joker, out to prove that anyone can go as mad as he has given the right (or wrong) circumstances ("All it takes is one bad day", so he says), sets about commi...

The main story involves a dysfunctional family, who are particularly in dire trouble now that the depressed mother, Sophie, has begun to exhibit signs of mental illness that she thought her medications had all but completely eradicated. Sophie's first husband has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, though we get to see that hubby number two is actually brutally murdered by a supernatural...

This one showcases the third year of their five-year mission, with Captain James T. Kirk pondering a career move for the better, thanks to the heroic deeds chronicled in previous entries. Decisions can wait, when they end up picking up an escape-pod survivor, leading the Enterprise to a strange part of the galaxy on a mission to rescue the rest of her ship's crew in uncharted territory. However, t...

Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney continues his roll of crafting some of the most intriguing and topical films in recent years with Zero Days, this time taking a look at a new and different kind of international warfare. It's not one fought with bullets or bombs, but with computer scripts, some so potent that they can infect a device, stop production in a factory, and perhaps, if one were powerfu...

Julian Dennison plays Ricky Baker, a rebellious, chubby, twelve-year-old foster thug-life wanna-be who ends up dumped by an exasperated social worker to a childless couple, kind-hearted Bella and her cynical husband Hec, a last-chance effort from the foster placement, out on a remote farm in rural New Zealand. "Bad Egg" Ricky hates his new environment about as much as he's hated everyplace else he...

Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, an ambitious associate professor seeking tenure at New York's prestigious Columbia University who ends up losing that when a book she published years ago on ghosts surfaces, putting the credibility of the institution in question should she remain in the faculty. Turns out that her writing partner, Abby Yates, republished the book that had previously been out of pri...

Bryan Cranston decides to go on the other side of the drug laws from his stint on the seminal "Breaking Bad" with The Infiltrator, playing a true-life U.S. Customs agent named Robert Mazur, who, in the 1980s, would go undercover as a money launderer to bust some of the country's most wanted traffickers at the height of the Reagan-era, "War on Drugs". Set in 1986, the highly effective operative, Ma...

Max is dog living a life of relative bliss in a New York City apartment who gets all of the love and attention he needs when his owner Katie's home, but now finds himself having to compete when bleeding-heart Katie brings home a shelter pooch in the form of the big, dopey, shaggy-haired Duke, who steals that attention, as well as a good deal of the food and pet bed. Squabbles result on who is goin...

The "Purge" of the title, for those who are still unaware, is an annual "celebration" in which, for a twelve-hour period, any crime you can think of is declared legal, as the police, fire fighters, and medical services take a break and let the U.S. citizens run amok without fear of prosecution for any misdeeds committed. The "patriotic" day now faces the biggest challenge since its inception, as i...

Eat That Question offers plenty of archival footage of various interview sessions Frank Zappa did for television, combining this with clips from some of his own personal movies, as well as a number of his stage performances in front of crowds both welcoming and skeptical. Some of the delights include a clean-cut younger Frank Zappa improvising music to an audience who clearly don't get it on "The...

Based on characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexander Skarsgard stars as John Clayton III of Greystoke Manor, an earl living comfortably in London during the Victorian Era, whose past has made him something of a legend, where he was orphaned and raised by apes until adulthood. Margot Robbie plays his wife Jane, who was once saved by Tarzan while she was exploring the jungles of the Congo,...