I always wondered, how did Amadeus, an expensive period film starring two relative unknowns, get made? The answer was there in research, starting with a hilariously contentious relationship between writer Peter Shaffer and d…
ChatGPT could never write Apple+'s new TV series Silo. Take a high concept premise (the remnants of humanity living underground in a giant silo) and subvert audience expectations of how that premise would typically be execut…
Maybe the least-seen great television series, From is now available on Amazon. If you're like me and held off on watching this because you didn't have MGM+, Season 1 is currently readily accessible to stream for free if you …
If you ever wanted to know about the real-life parallels between the Roy family on HBO's Succession and Rupert Murdoch's family, look no further. I went deep into the interwebs to find all the remarkable parallels between th…
Another spin of the roulette wheel, this time on Hulu, with a star-studded war epic, Medieval, starring Ben Foster, Michael Caine, Til Schweiger, Matthew Goode, and more knife-play than a Benihana. This is a film where in th…
What director Liam O’Donnell has done with the Skyline movie franchise (Skyline, Beyond Skyline, Skylines) to my knowledge is - seriously - unprecedented in film history. This is a franchise where the first film was financia…
If you're looking for funny things to watch on Amazon Prime, look no further than Jury Duty. It's technically on Freevee, Amazon's free-ad-supported channel, so even if you don't have Amazon Prime you can still watch it for …
A seemingly gimmicky high-concept premise is surprisingly substantive in The Big Door Prize, another winning, charming, extremely watchable show from Apple+. Chris O'Dowd continues his run as film and TV's most underrated le…
Mister Police, you could have saved her. I gave you all the clues. The Snowman is based on a hit novel, produced by Martin Scorsese, directed by esteemed director Tomas Alfredson, and stars Michael Fasbender, Rebecca Ferguso…
Alliteration excitement for the return of Barry, one of my favorite television series ever at this point, now fully off the grid narratively, pushing past a conventional ending into uncharted territory. If you've seen Episod…
George Clooney contemplated suicide, writer-director Stephen Gaghan was kidnapped, and Harrison Ford almost played "Bob". Warner Brothers gave the film Syriana an unlimited research budget, and the resulting script netted on…
Everyone and their brother has demanded I watch Beef... and you were all right. Beef is incredibly engaging, really taps into some uncomfortable but I would argue universal truths about life, and is anchored by career perfor…
Can we all admit that The Night Agent is the great guilty pleasure TV series of 2023? This is an end of season discussion of Season 1 of The Night Agent (Netflix), including all the weird, silly, strange elements of the show…
Anna Kendrick stars in the ultimate your friend's boyfriend sucks movie - a psychological drama where almost everything is implied, suggested, inferred, until the end. Wisely paced at a slim 80 something minutes, this is a c…
Podcasting from the road, I decided to highlight three great road trip movies for you. Road trip movies are a great way to give direction to a plot, create opportunities for buddy stories, and function as a metaphor for life…
Denzel Washington is obviously one of the biggest movie stars in recorded human history, but despite that, some of his movies, have fallen under the radar. On this episode, I lay out three less-celebrated Denzel films you mi…
Just renewed by Netflix for Season Two, The Night Agent sees Shawn Ryan (a legendary talent, immortally great after The Shield) effectively working overqualified on what (worst case scenario) could have been a forgettable ne…
Sicario: Day Of The Soldado holds a 62% score on RottenTomatoes (vs. the first film at 92%). Roger Deakins and Josh Brolin agreed in a podcast interview that it was more action-based than character-driven. My perhaps controv…
Thanks for inviting me to your haunted house, you f**king pricks, I'm gonna be up all night. Season 2 of Mayor of Kingstown has concluded. A show that seems to live below the radar, Mayor of Kingstown became even better in S…
A remarkably clear-headed distillation of an incredibly complex true crime story, Boston Stranger does a great job of laying out the most likely case of what happened with the Boston Strangler (to say more would be to ventur…
Grab a water cup filled to the brim of vodka, your AK-47, and your kids, and let’s go shooting by the lake! On this episode, I’m joined by Matt Gerasimovich of the Tipsy Tolstoy podcast, to discuss Russia’s entry into the Ac…
Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who are basically their own French/American buddy cop film and trade jabs at each other as often as they collaborate on scripts, wrote Taken as part of a bread-and-butter of lower budget act…
What is the best movie watching experience of your life, and why? In this episode, I break down 4 of mine, from seeing a film in the largest IMAX screen in America, to a relatively obscure movie that may have led to me propo…
With the insane amount of choices in the TV landscape, it's easy for good television shows to slip through the cracks. On this episode, special guest Jess Spoll (of TV podcast "Double Take") joins me to discuss the best 3 TV…
