To the '90s and Beyond! Film Podcast

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne return as married couple Mac and Kelly Radner, set to find a bigger home in a nicer neighborhood to live in after Kelly finds that she has another baby on the way. After putting down for their new abode, they find a buyer for their current one, but it's still in escrow, which, overly simplified for the purpose of this film, means that the buyer can swing by anytime within...

Set in 1977, we watch an opening sequence in which a hot young porn star named Misty Mountains ends up killed. Ryan Gosling plays widower private dick Holland March, whose been recently hired to find Amelia, a young woman who many think is dead, despite a few claiming to have recently seen her. Holland soon has a run-in with a tough-as-nails thug-for-hire named Jackson Healy, who happens to be pro...

The film covers about eight years of the life of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé (a name borne from a youthful insult he would later embrace), from his young childhood as a nine-year-old boy from an poor family in 1950, through his debut on the biggest stage of all for fans of soccer (aka, football to most of the world outside of the United States), in the 1958 World Cup where he...

The Man Who Knew Infinity looks at the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematician from India who would become famous in the math world for his prodigious work in the early part of the 20th Century. Ramanujan had a gift for mathematics that was seemingly ahead of what anyone else had been dealing with at the time, claiming that the numbers and formulas just come to him out of divine origin. His w...

As adults, siblings Annie and Baxter Fang are played by Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman, respectively. Annie is a famous actress who has recently become a tabloid sensation after going topless in her latest film role, while Baxter is a struggling writer and journalist who still hasn't found great success. Their parents, Caleb and Camille Fang, played in their older form by Christopher Walken and M...

George Clooney stars as Lee Gates, a flashy Jim Kramer-ish cable television network host of a financial advice program called "Money Monster", happy to dole out stock advice in a snarky, cocky manner, drawing more out of entertainment and spectacle than in how it might affect those on the other side should any of his "rock-solid" tips prove wrong. Someone it has affected finally forces him to lear...

Gabriel Byrne stars as Gene, a widower high school teacher trying to establish a firm connection again with his two sons, Conrad and Jonah, over two years after the death of his award-winning war photojournalist wife's death in a fatal car accident. A museum gallery wants to show some of her previously unpublished work she may have left behind, and her former colleague Richard at the New York Time...

Jonathan Pryce stars as elderly widower Nat, the current owner of the family's century-old Jewish bakery that's just barely been scraping by of late, mostly because his predominantly Jewish clientele are moving away from the East End London neighborhood (filmed mostly in Budapest) or dying off. When Nat's only assistant leaves for a better paying job, he's stuck having to do it all himself, unsucc...

Loosely taking off from an idea borne of the giant crossover storyline mostly under the direction of comics writer Mark Millar, Civil War is a movie that addresses something that is not often remarked upon in superhero stories, and that is the cost of the collateral damage, especially in human lives, when super-powered humans battle one another over an urban landscape. The beginning of the film sh...

Set in 1975, Tom Hiddleston stars as successful physiologist, Dr. Robert Laing, who has recently moved in to the 25th floor of one of several new high-rise buildings in a not-quite-finished avant-garde apartment complex in London. The architect of the complex, an eccentric architect on the uppermost floor named Anthony Royal, has designed the buildings to never need to be part of the ground-level...

Set mainly during the course of about a day in the musician's life in New York's Upper West Side (Cincinnati substitutes) in the 1979, when creatively burnt-out Miles had taken a self-imposed five-years-and-counting break from releasing new music. Columbia Records had grown increasingly challenged in their relationship with their most eccentric and erratic recording artist, who claims he would giv...

Touring the Pacific Northwest, the D.C.-based punk quartet known as the Ain't Rights haven't quite taken this part of the country by storm, ending up taking a bit of a detour from their tour to secure some much-needed gas money for the cross-country trip home by playing in a backwoods Oregon roadhouse for skinhead neo-Nazis. After the gig, they stumble into a room backstage and discover a young wo...

Key stars as Clarence, a straight-laced suburbanite who is lured by his recently broken-up slacker cousin Rell, played by Peele, to finally cut loose with his wife away for the weekend. Little do they know that this 'cutting a little loose' might involve strippers, drugs and murder, as Rell's adorable kitty, which has given him his long-lost mojo back, has been taken in a mistaken-identity burglar...

In this semi-fictional yarn, the impetus for Elvis wanting to meet with either J. Edgar Hoover or Nixon is born from his growing discontent at seeing where America has been headed, particularly in the growing cultural unrest among its people, from the hippie movement, to the pot smokers, to the war protestors, to the Black Panthers. The King decides that he can actually help the country if he can...

Neel Sethi stars as young Mowgli, raised in the jungles of (presumably) India by a pack of wolves after his father is slain by the power-hungry tiger Shere Khan, who does not like humans one bit, fearing that the older Mowgli gets, the more he will threaten their way of life. Sensing the danger from the lurking tiger, Mowgli's savior and mentor, a panther named Bagheera, decides that the young "ma...

On the prequel front, we find that the wicked Queen Ravenna (Theron) has a sister named Freya (Blunt), a more benevolent (at least at first) younger sibling who is seemingly always in the eldest's shadow. Freya ends up in an affair with a handsome duke and soon has his child, but instead of starting a new life with her, the duke destroys their future by killing the baby. The resultant grief Freya...

Tom Hanks plays Alan Clay, a recently divorced IT salesman, down on his luck in both his personal and professional life, called out on a rare assignment to Saudi Arabia in order to try to peddle his company's pricey holographic technology to the king for use in their rich country.  Many missteps occur as Alan is never quite able to get his bearings there either, persistently having to call for a r...

Comic book legend Jacques Tardi's graphic novel provides the inspiration for this loose big screen adaptation from France, from screenwriters Franck Ekinci (who-codirects with Christian Desmares) and Benjamin Legrand, with graphic design work on the film by Tardi himself.  It's a steampunk alternate world where Earth's has progressed little scientifically since the Industrial Revolution, primarily...

Criminal starts with Ryan Reynolds as a CIA superspy named Bill Pope, on assignment in London, soon finding himself surrounded by murderous assassins working for an international super-terrorist from Spain named Xavier "The Anarchist" Heimbahl.  Heimbahl is looking for a man named, Jan "The Dutchman" Stroop, who is a genius hacker who has managed to infiltrate American defense systems that control...

The film starts with Baker playing himself in a film that was planned, but never actually made, about his own life. Born to be Blue utilizes this film-in-a-film approach to draw out the glamorized, black-and-white version of Chet Baker with the so-called reality of the situation, even with the very unsavory issue of his womanizing and his own addiction to heroin. Also included is the love affair h...

Set in Dublin in 1985, teenage dreamer Conor is a new student in a Christian Brothers school that writer-director John Carney also attended during the same year, Synge Street, whose hard-knocks with bullies and over-petulant Catholic headmasters equally as turbulent as his home life with his parents who are struggling with a lack of finances and a drift apart in their relationship. Conor soon meet...

A much-belated comedy sequel, coming about twelve years after the previous Barbershop entry (not counting the female-centric spin-off, Beauty Shop), Barbershop 2: Back in Business, Barbershop: The Next Cut picks up mostly where we left off, even if it's a decade later, with a barbershop/salon run by Calvin Palmer Jr. in Chicago's South Side, serving the community with the best in style and the cho...

At the beginning of the film, we find the Henry of the title having been all but entirely killed from a brutal attack that sees his eyes, one of his arms, and one of his legs replaced by powerful robotic counterparts from a scientist who tells Henry, who is suffering from severe memory loss, that she is Estelle, his wife. After undergoing the rehabilitative operation, Henry and Estelle find themse...

Midnight Special is an intriguing straight-faced science fiction-thriller which immediately shows us two armed and anxious men who've seemingly abducted an eight-year-old boy for reasons that are increasingly made clear as we course through the story. One of the men is Roy Tomlin (Shannon), who has a stronger bond to the odd duck of a boy, Alton Meyer, and the other is seemingly more along for the...

Melissa McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, an unwanted orphan who channels her despondent feelings into making something of her self as an adult, eventually emerging as a wildly successful financial tycoon (the 47th wealthiest woman in the country, according to her), a go-to guru spreading her secret-to-success in the form of arena-filling seminars with the sparkling spectacle of a metal concert. Af...