F This Movie!

Weekend Open Thread

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:00:00 -0500

Review: MISS YOU, LOVE YOU

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Rob DiCristino

Light up the summer blockbuster season with a two-handed chamber drama!

Among 2024’s many underdiscussed gems was Hard Truths, the brutal and uncompromising character study from English auteur Mike Leigh and one of his most celebrated collaborators, Marianne Jean-Baptiste. In what should have been an awards-sweeping performance, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a surly and bitter wretch of a woman whose anger masks a deep sadness that only love — specifically, the love of her sister (Michele Austin as Chantelle) — can overcome. Leigh’s intimate presentation makes Hard Truths a compelling watch, but it’s the universality of Pansy’s journey that really makes it memorable: At one point or another, we’ve all hidden wounds behind resentment and rage. We’ve all withheld truths from those with the power to make us pay for them. We’ve all succumbed to doubt and insecurity. But the more unbearable Pansy’s behavior gets — and if you haven’t seen Hard Truths, then you haven’t seen just how repugnant a human being can be — the more we see the desperation and misery behind all of her fury.

Written and directed by Jim Rash — whom I got to know as the flamboyant Dean Pelton on Community before he won an Oscar for co-writing Alexander Payne’s The Descendents — the new HBO film Miss You, Love You plays in a similar realm. Just days after the unexpected death of her beloved husband, Henry, the hardheaded and irascible Diane (Allison Janney) hears a knock on the door: It’s Jamie (Andrew Rannells), who says he’s an assistant to her son, Tyler, and that he’s here to help her with Henry’s funeral arrangements while Tyler researches a new novel in some faraway land. He’s stuck there for safety reasons — or at least, that’s what Tyler would have Diane believe — and Jamie is here to guide Diane through this difficult time in his stead. Diane isn’t thrilled to welcome this substitute son, however, and she has absolutely no compunction about letting him know it. But as the preparations progress, both Diane and Jamie will confront a few shared animosities that — you’ll never believe this— reveal them to be far more alike than they initially thought.

An elegantly-staged two-hander set in an arid New Mexican desert community, Miss You, Love You is driven by the stifling weight of absence: Both Henry and Tyler are frequently spoken of but never seen in person — Henry appears in photos and voicemails, while Tyler exists only as a series of urgent chirps on Jamie’s phone — leaving Diane and Jamie to dump all kinds of displaced resentment onto each other, instead. Diane’s angry at Henry for dying, for example, for leaving her stranded in an adobe rancher when she’d rather be in a Manhattan penthouse. She’s angry at Tyler for never calling her, for using old family feuds as an excuse to keep her at a distance. And Jamie? Well, he’s just here to do his job, right? Or is he an overeager people-pleaser who hopes that handling Diane will help Tyler see Jamie the way he wants to be seen — he can’t let go of an unrealized romance between them — and force Tyler to admit that he was wrong to let him go? These recriminations quickly pile up, bonding Diane and Jamie in a mutual discontent that they can no longer ignore.

Rash’s screenplay is the kind of three-course meal that actors like West Wing alum Allison Janney and Broadway favorite Andrew Rannells chow down on with ease, but it’s the unlikely physical chemistry between them that saves Miss You, Love You from its writing whenever the sheer tonnage of dialogue — each actor has a handful of wordy, impassioned outbursts that seem to go on for ages — starts to feel too studied and exact to have come from real live human beings. It’s especially effective given the confines of the setting: Janney’s trademark imperiousness and statuesque height should reduce the more mild-mannered Rannells to a puddle on the kitchen floor, but watching Jamie hold close-ups, find his footing, and push back with hooks and jabs of his own is one of the film’s great joys. For as clumsy and overwrought as things become in the third act — Rash eventually loses patience with dramatic conceits and starts shouting his characters’ emotional subtext from the rooftops — Janney and Rannells sell the histrionics like pros.

At its best, Miss You, Love You gives its grieving leads an opportunity to test drive the conversations they might one day have with their shared tormentor, especially once they realize that their brief co-habitance is low-stakes enough that they have nothing to lose by being honest with each other. Plus, getting live feedback from someone who understands what you’re going through is a lot better than practicing self-righteous takedowns to yourself in the bathroom mirror, isn’t it? Jim Rash should also get some credit for avoiding easy cliches and neat thematic shortcuts: A worse movie might have Jamie win Diane over enough that she encourages him to go after Tyler (spoilers: she does just the opposite), or have Diane admit that all her passive-aggression is just a refusal to deal with the fact that Tyler doesn’t depend on her anymore (spoilers: it isn’t). Real life is more nuanced than that, and Miss You, Love You doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. It does help us see ourselves a little better, though, and sometimes that’s all it takes for the real healing to begin.

Miss You, Love You hits HBO on Friday, May 29th.

2K Replay: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Adam Riske

Nominated for “Choice Summer Movie: Drama/Action-Adventure” at the Teen Choice Awards. It lost to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

• Best Scene/Moment (tie): The chase through Tokyo that ends with Han (Sung Kang) crashing and Dominic Torreto's (Vin Diesel) cameo at the end.

• Best Song (tie): “Conteo” by Don Omar and “She Wants to Move” by N.E.R.D.

• Best Merch: An “Affliction Fast and Furious Bodysuit Leotard Tokyo Drift Black White XS” for $20.00. With any luck, this will be your partner’s wardrobe of choice on your wedding night. Bonus points for the eBay seller being named rowdydowdycoyootie.

• Director Grade: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was directed by Justin Lin.
Great Movies: Fast Five
Good Movies: Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, Fast and Furious 6, Star Trek Beyond
OK Movies: Annapolis, F9
Bad Movies: N/A
Unseen By Me: Shopping for Fangs, Finishing the Game, Last Days
Overall Grade: B

• Double It with This 2006 Movie: Cars

• Year 2006 Movies to Trailer Before Them: Annapolis, Find Me Guilty, Running Scared

• Ella McCay or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift? The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
• Mall Movie? 100 percent. This movie has an arcade game. You could go straight from the cinema to the arcade afterwards.

• Only in 2006: A movie about drifting.

• Scene Stealer: Sung Kang, who's still cool in this movie despite how uncool the most recent Fast movies made him. Honorable Mention: Bow Wow who brings a certain gravitas to his role as…Twink.

• I Miss: Casual, breezy, not overly stuffed Fast and the Furious movies.

• I Don’t Miss: Movies trying to pump you up with Kid Rock's “Bawitdaba.”

• 2006 Crush (tie): Nikki Griffin and Keiko Kitagawa.

• 2026 Crush (tie): Lynda Boyd and Keiko Kitagawa.

• What I Thought in 2006: I sort of checked out on the franchise after the original and didn’t catch up with Tokyo Drift until it hit DVD. I remember thinking it was better than I expected and would have classified it as a guilty pleasure back then.

• What I Think in 2026: I go back and forth between liking and really liking Tokyo Drift. The first hour is super fun and energetic but the second hour when the plot (namely the Yakuza stuff) kicks in is a little sluggish. Overall, I like that the movie embraces being about a very specific subculture of car racing and Tokyo is so photogenic that I enjoy going back to this one just for the travelogue aspect of it all.

FTM 822: THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU & THE YEAR SO FAR (2026)

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Kick off summer with Patrick and JB.

Download this episode here.

Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.

Fifty Before '50: THE PHANTOM STALLION

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by JB

Uh-oh! It’s the last of the “singing cowboy” Westerns!

“The Singing Cowboy” is a musical genre that has sadly gone the way of the horse and buggy. Carl T. Sprague is usually given credit for being the first singing cowboy on radio with his hit song, “When the Work’s All Done This Fall.” Other singing cowboys from radio and records included Jules Verne Allen, Harry McClintock, Wilford Carter, and Tex Allen. Most of these performers grew up on ranches and had real experience working as cowboys. Their songs used simple, rustic vocals; simple arrangements; and simple, stringed-instrument accompaniment. Give it a listen:

Sound films brought with them a slew of new singing cowboys: Gene Autrey, Bob Baker, Ken Curtis, Dick Foran, Vaughn Monroe, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and Rex Allen. This subgenre of film was incredibly popular from the early 1930s through the 1950s. Rex Allen is considered the last of the singing cowboys... and The Phantom Stallion the last of the singing cowboy Westerns.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Rex Allen (Rex Allen) returns to California and finds his old buddy Slim (Slim Pickens) working for curmudgeonly ranch owner Mike Reilly (Harry Shannon). Reilly has been losing prize horses, and he wonders where they have gone.

His niece Claire Reilly (Carla Balenda) and his violent foreman Gil (Don Haggerty) have been having a little ranch romance. Not incidentally, Claire is Mike Reilly's only heir.

Rex prevents someone on the ranch from being trampled to death by the titular beast, and Reilly’s adopted son Tony (Peter Price) tries to get to the bottom of all this horsey intrigue. Will Rex take Tony's side? Is there a secret brewing at the ol' ranch? Can horses dream?

ANNOYING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PAUSE: Shortly after getting married in 1987, my lovely wife and I drove into Chicago one summer day (probably to attend the Music Box Theater, but this cannot be confirmed) and ended up at an antique shop called Yesterday in the shadow of Wrigley Field. There, we found an original one-sheet poster for The Phantom Stallion and fell in love with it. We bought it. We took it home. We had it framed. We hung it in the upstairs hallway, where it remained for thirty years. We never actually saw the film.

Meanwhile, Yesterday closed in 2019 following owner Tom Boyle’s passing. His collection was liquidated. The building was demolished in the summer of 2020 to make way for a three-story residential building. This is sad. Chicago has thousands of three-story residential buildings. It will never have another Yesterday.

Flash forward to 2024. My lovely wife and I move to California, and we take The Phantom Stallion poster with us. It hangs proudly in our great room. Friend-of-the-site Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight pays a visit, notices the poster, and asks me if I have ever seen the film. No, I explain it has never been released on any home video format that I know of. He asks if I have checked the YouTube machine. Of course, I haven’t, because I am old and uninformed. Of course, it’s there. After 35 years, I finally get to watch The Phantom Stallion.

It's delightful! At a brisk 53 minutes, it never wears out its welcome. It’s peppy. The performances are great. As I’m watching it, I slowly realize that ranch owner Harry Shannon played Kane’s father in Citizen Kane!

It was a hoot to see a “young” Slim Pickens performance; I’m far more familiar with “old” Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, The Getaway, and 1941. (That’s Slim Pickens, not Slim Shady.) The plot is simple, but involving. The bad guys are really bad; they actually contemplate killing horses and children. They are the worst. Rex Allen towers above the whole thing with that incredible voice of his; he spent the end of his career narrating Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventure nature films.

The Phantom Stallion is perfect for our upcoming Junesploitation marathon month; you can watch it on June 7, 16, 21, 22, 26, or 29th. The choice is yours. You can watch the film right now, right here:

10 Perfect Movies That Aren't JAWS or BACK TO THE FUTURE

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Patrick Bromley

And also not The Godfather.

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, dir. Nicholas Meyer)

You don't have to be a huge Star Trek nerd to fully appreciate The Wrath of Khan, still my favorite Trek thing ever made, but it does help. The characters become more meaningful, the relationships and our connections to them deeper. But because writer/director Nicholas Meyer designed the low-budget sequel as a WWII nautical warfare adventure, it's accessible to anyone with a spirit of adventure. This is one of my favorite movies from my favorite year of movies.

2. Sorcerer (1977, dir. William Friedkin)

Confession: I have only seen this movie once, but it was a perfect screening of a perfect movie: on the big screen on 35mm with director William Friedkin introducing and doing a Q&A afterwards. I have been wary to revisit it for fear of breaking the spell. I'm going to rewatch it soon because if you ask me on the right day I might say this is my favorite Friedkin movie. The older I get the more I realize we took Roy Scheider for granted.

3. Fargo (1996, dir. Joel Coen)

The best Coen Brothers movie featuring my favorite movie character of all time. There are so many scenes and moments in Fargo that make it perfect. I won't do a recap here. It's funny and shocking and sad and beautiful in equal measure and so few movies have ever been able to be or do what Fargo does.

4. All the President's Men (1976, dir. Alan J. Pakula)

Three months ago I would not have included this movie on the list, but having just revisited it for our recent podcast I realized there's not a frame that ought to be changed in the story of Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) bringing the truth of the Watergate break-in to light. Journalism has never been more compelling on screen.

5. Observe & Report (2009, dir. Jody Hill)

I have to give credit to a film critic I used to read for his review of Jody Hill's mall copy comedy in which he wrote "Just because a movie has flaws doesn't mean it's not perfect." It was this review that turned me on to reading the critic regularly, not just for that sentiment but because the reaction to Observe & Report -- a polarizing movie, to be sure -- completely aligned with my own. This is about as dark as comedy gets, but so expertly navigates the high-wire tone that it's hard to call it anything but perfect.

6. Die Hard (1988, dir. John McTiernan)

Still the best action movie ever made. Bruce Willis became a movie star, the greatest action protagonist of all time was born, and an entire template for action films to follow was created. In his mixed pan of the movie, Roger Ebert pushed back against the Paul Gleason character and pointed out that he only existed to be wrong at every turn. His presence is not a dealbreaker for me, maybe because I love Gleason in this mode but mostly because I like how it gives John McClane one more person to push back against and one more person to prove wrong. Everyone doubts him. No one should, least of all himself.

7. The Apartment (1960, dir. Billy Wilder)

Romantic comedies are a hard thing to do correctly, but no one understood both the Sour and the Sweet of unrequited love like Billy Wilder. Jack Lemmon and Shirly MacLaine are equally adorable and heartbreaking as a pair who could be perfect for each other if they would both stop making bad decisions and mistakes. There are elements that maybe haven't aged as well -- the amazing office set that takes up the entire widescreen frame would never exist anymore -- but the emotions remain true and timeless.

8. Groundhog Day (1993, dir. Harold Ramis)

There are very few perfect movies; there are even fewer perfect comedies. We must give credit where it is due, and Groundhog Day is absolutely perfect. Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" article on Groundhog Day is one of my favorite pieces of film writing ever, so I should really just direct you there instead of even trying to articulate its unique genius. Bill Murray should have won his Oscar for this performance.

9. Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter)

I'm on record as recognizing John Carpenter's original Halloween as a perfect movie while at the same time being left a little cold by it. I prefer some of the sequels, Halloween 4 most of all. Still, I'd be lying if I tried to deny the technical skill and craftsmanship in the making of the slasher classic. It is, like Michael Myers, a perfect machine.

10. The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher)

There probably has to be a David Fincher movie somewhere on this list, as he is cinema's biggest and most exacting contemporary perfectionist. I'm not positive The Social Network is his best movie when Zodiac exists but that one is messier and more sprawling by design -- even Fincher's messy movies have to be just right. The Social Network is perfectly constructed and controlled. The cast is brilliant and the film has more to say about the modern world that most others despite being close to two decades old.

Weekend Open Thread

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:00:00 -0500

Review: TUNER

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Fri, 22 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Rob DiCristino

What if a piano tuner…was also a CRIMINAL!?

Roger Ebert taught us that there are few things in movies more satisfying than watching skilled professionals excel at their work. It’s a true joy, for example, to watch Danny Ocean and his crew robbing casinos. To watch Billy Beane trading for baseball players. To watch Paul Blart mall copping. It’s aspirational, isn’t it? Seeing Bruce Lee roundhouse kick a guy makes us feel like we, too, might one day be able to roundhouse kick a guy. That probably goes double for niche professions like piano tuning. Think about it: How many movies featuring piano tuners — only Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies comes to my mind — have you ever seen? That’s because it’s a dying art practiced only by eccentric devotees like Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) and his young apprentice, Niki White (Leo Woodall), in celebrated documentarian Daniel Roher’s (Navalny) narrative debut, Tuner. But while Roger would have lauded Tuner’s focus on such a specialized talent, he would have been even more frustrated by the rote and predictable thriller it ends up inspiring.

A former piano prodigy whose career was cut short by a debilitating case of hyperacusis — it’s like tinnitus, Niki explains; he’s essentially allergic to loud noises — Niki spends his days criss-crossing the Five Boroughs with Harry in their repair van, popping in and out of swanky mansions whose owners barely even notice that they own pianos (“They fall out of tune whether you play them or not,” Niki explains to a particularly uncooperative one-percenter) let alone appreciate his unrealized genius. That all changes when he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a type-A graduate composition student who practically quivers right out of her skivvies when Niki demonstrates his perfect pitch. What feels at first like a match made in heaven is complicated when Harry has a heart attack, forcing the OG out of commission and saddling him and his wife (Tovah Feldshuh as Marla) with $35,000 in debt. Luckily, Niki just happens to have discovered a new talent for safe-cracking, and local gangster Uri (Lior Raz) just happens to have an opening for his particular set of skills.

If that last part seems a bit perfunctory, well, it should. Structured like a rom-com that keeps being interrupted by a crime thriller, Tuner is at its best when it’s developing the bond between Harry and Niki — Niki’s late father was Harry’s partner back in the day, which Niki honors by looking out for the old man — and the unlikely romance between Niki and Ruthie: Despite catering to the upper crust, Niki’s work is decidedly working-class compared to Ruthie’s. She’s putting the finishing touches on a thesis piece that she hopes will earn her an apprenticeship with acclaimed maestro Meissner (Jean Reno, gloriously aged from human cigarette into august elder statesman). Roher’s screenplay (co-written with Robert Ramsey) tries to balance that by drawing attention to the hidden delicacy of Niki’s work — one key out of tune compromises the other eighty-seven, etc. — which in turn creates a missed opportunity to extend that metaphor to the characters themselves. Out of Tune? Out of Key? The point is that there’s a good dramedy in here, somewhere.

Instead, Tuner takes an abrupt second-act left turn and devolves into an undercooked “the-kid’s-in-over-his-head” crime thriller jammed with so many off-the-shelf tropes and clichés that you’ll actually find yourself missing the singular charm of Dustin Hoffman (!) once everyone starts screaming and shooting at each other. Roher is a talent stylist, to be sure, and his final product is about as slick as slick can be — occasional flourishes, like when Niki navigates a booming rave completely MOS, keep Tuner from feeling too Netflixy — but neither Uri nor any of his bumbling, manchildish goons (including Nissan Sakira and Gil Cohen) come anywhere close to earning the disproportionate attention the plot is required to give them. Even scattered thematic seeds about class warfare — like how Uri convinces Niki to help him rob the wealthy in part because they don’t appreciate what they have, which should have dovetailed nicely with Niki’s own regrets about his wasted potential — end up having next to no real effect on where Tuner goes in its climax.

In fairness, Tuner does close on an elegant note — literally — that hints at the depths the film might have been able to probe with more time and a different structure. Also, in a cinematic landscape full of cheapo streamers like Thrash and…wait. What was the name of the Charlize Theron thing I just watched? Oh, Apex! Anyway. In light of all that bullshit, it might be worth celebrating Roher’s technical skill and eye for specificity: The parts of Tuner that work do so because he takes the time to invest in a moment, an emotion, or a detail that nearly every other genre programmer would overlook. With that in mind, we might reframe Tuner’s two-and-a-half-star mediocrity as the efficient employment of tried-and-true technique — think of a world-renowned chef making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — and focus on what lessons he might take into his next feature effort. I hope it’s not a sequel to Tuner, though, because you can’t call it 2ner. Two-ner, maybe? No, that’s confusing. Look, Roher’s a talented guy. I’m sure he’ll come up with something.

Tuner is in limited U.S. release today and opens wide on May 29th.

Announcing Junesploitation 2026!

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Patrick Bromley
Let's f*%$ing go.

This year marks our 16th year (!!!) as a site and our 13th year of Junesploitation, our annual celebration of exploitation and genre films. What started as a selfish excuse for me to spend a few weeks watching '70s and '80s grindhouse fare has exploded into a yearly tradition with many, many participants both on our site and on social media. Thank you for that!!

Most of you know the drill by now, but for those of you new to Junesploitation, here's how it works: each day of the month has its own theme, and you're supposed to watch a movie that ties into that theme. How you interpret the connection is entirely up to you, which means if you have no interest in exploitation or genre movies that's ok and you can still join in!

We've tried to expand the categories a bit this year to be a little broader in the hopes of making Junesploitation even more inclusive. After hearing that some folks were running out of Lucio Fulci movies to watch, we've also opted to retire Fulci Day on his birthday. Maybe it will be back in the future!

Stay tuned for our annual Junesploitation Primer for help on where to find some good titles, though by now most of you know where to look.

Here is this year's schedule, as always featuring a several new categories and some returning favorites:

1 – ‘90s Action!
2 – Cartoons!
3 – Linda Blair!

4 – Blaxploitation!
5 – Teenagers!
6 – South Korea!
7 – Free Space!
8 – Zombies!
9 – Thrillers!
10 – Private Eyes!
11 – Disasters!
12 – Kung Fu!
13 – ‘90s Horror!
14 – Cannon!
15 – George Romero!
16 – Free Space!
17 – Hong Kong Action!
18 – Franco Nero!
19 – Black Filmmakers!

20 – ‘80s Sci-Fi!
21 – Free Space!
22 – Revenge!
23 – Exploitation Auteurs!
24 – Slashers!
25 – Jackie Chan!
26 – Heroes & Villains
27 – Italian Cinema!
28 – PM Entertainment!
29 – Free Space!
30 – ‘80s Comedy!

Thank you to our regular readers and commenters @JMVargas, @ACasualListener, and @Zillagord (and any others) for suggesting some of this year's new categories! And, as always, thanks to our very own Doug for designing the calendar!!

FTM 821: PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Patrick and Rob visit the basement of the Alamo.

Download this episode here.

Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.

Also discussed this episode: Green Card (1990), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Ugly Stepsister (2025), The Toxic Avenger (2025), We Bury the Dead (2026), In the Grey (2026), Marty: Life is Short (2026), Ishtar (1987)

Fifty Before '50: MONSTER MAYHEM COLLECTION

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by JB

We have here an early nominee for “Disc of the Year.”

At the beginning of April, the fine folks at Film Masters released this two-disc set that is chockablock full of cheesy monsters, budget special effects, inexplicable musical numbers, and scenes shot economically at famous Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park.

This Monster Mayhem Collection includes Frankenstein’s Daughter, Giant from the Unknown, Brain from Planet Arous, and Monster from Green Hell; the Frankenstein picture and the Brain picture are two of my particular favorites.

I must admit my first motivation for purchasing the new set was space. I am running out of room for physical media in my office, and this would allow me to replace four separate keep-cases with one. Then I saw the cornucopia of extras and I began to mentally salivate, waiting for the new discs to arrive.

LONG, POINTLESS TANGENT: For a number of reasons, I thought that relatively new boutique Blu-ray label Film Masters was an offshoot of similar boutique Blu-ray label Film Detective. I bought many of Film Detective’s early releases and loved them. Film Masters seemed to focus on the same sorts of genre titles. So, I asked the Google Machine, “Hey, what gives? Are Film Masters and Film Detective really the same company?” The answer came from friend-of-the-site Heath Holland over at Cereal at Midnight. “No, Film Masters and The Film Detective are two separate companies, but they are closely linked by the same founder. Philip Hopkins founded The Film Detective and later launched Film Masters as a brand new, separate boutique DVD and Blu-ray label focused on the preservation and restoration of classic cinema. While The Film Detective was acquired by Cinedigm in 2020 and operates largely as a streaming channel and content distributor, Hopkins moved on to establish Film Masters to focus on physical media and film restoration." A-ha!

THE PLOTS IN BRIEF: In Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), Dr. Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy) turns Trudy Morton (Sandra Knight) into a monster by plying her with secret formula fruit juice. She nightly turns hairy and ugly and runs amuck. Trudy’s friend Suzie Lawler (Sally Todd) winds up with her head grafted onto the body of Frank’s second (male) monster. Why? In a charming nod to how shitty the past really was, Dr. Frank explains, “Now we're aware the female mind is conditioned to a man's world. It therefore takes orders, where the other ones didn't.” Dr. Frank turns out to be the last living descendant of... guess who! He changed his name to “Frank” because changing it to “Stein” would just be too goddamn obvious.

Giant from the Unknown (1958) finds residents of a small California town up in arms about a recent spate of livestock mutilations. Turns out, it’s the Diablo Giant (Buddy Baer), running amuck around the outskirts of town.

In 1957's Brain from Planet Arous, Gor, a mischievous and horny brain from the titular planet, arrives on Earth and possesses the body of Steve March (John Agar). Gor falls in love with Steve’s fiancé Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows). Gor runs amuck and engages in destructive mischief. A less destructive brain, Vol, comes down to earth to vanquish Gor. To accomplish this, he possesses... another body (Arf). Vol explains to anyone who will listen that Gor is a wanted criminal on Planet Arous.

Monster from Green Hell (1957): Doctors Brady and Morgan (Jim Davis and Robert Griffith) head an experimental rocket program that sends animals into space. A rocket containing wasps is irradiated and lands in South Africa, with predictable results. Giant wasp-like creatures run amuck in an area known as Green Hell. When all seems lost, an active volcano begins to spew and conveniently kills all the radioactive bugaboos. Morgan notes wryly that nature has ways of covering up mistakes and concluding low-budget B-movies.

The transfer on Brain from Planet Arous is a tad grainy, but acceptable. The prints of Giant and Monster look fine. The transfer on Frankenstein’s Daughter is one of the best I’ve ever seen, sharp and crisp. The transfer on Frankenstein’s Daughter will make you wish that you lived back then. It will make you wish that you were best friends with John Ashley and that you drank a lot of mid-priced beer.

Film Masters has thoughtfully included the following bonus features, which really make this package a must-buy: Frankenstein's Daughter and Giant from the Unknown, full-length commentary with Tom Weaver; The Brain from Planet Arous, full-length commentary with Tom Weaver and special guests; Giant from the Unknown, archival full-length commentary with Gary Crutcher; and Monster from Green Hell, full-length commentary with Stephen R. Bissette. Featurettes include: “Richard E. Cunha: Filmmaker,” “Missouri Born: Films of Jim Davis,” “The Man Before the Brain: Director Nathan Juran,” and “The Man Behind the Brain: The World of Nathan Juran”.

THINGS I LEARNED FROM BONUS FEATURES AND FURTHER PROOF THAT EVERYTHING IN HOLLYWOOD IS CONNECTED SOMEHOW:

1) Nathan Hertz, the director of Brain from Planet Arous, was actually Nathan Juran. Juran started his career in Hollywood as an art director, winning an Oscar for John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. He later directed The Deadly Mantis at Universal, Hellcats of the Navy with future President Ronald Reagan, 20 Million Miles to Earth and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, and perennial cult favorite Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

2) Sandra Knight, female lead in Frankenstein’s Daughter, was Jack Nicholson’s first wife. Knight’s romantic interest in the film, John Ashley, later appeared in several Beach Party movies and ended his Hollywood career producing The A-Team on television. Second lead Sally Todd was Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month for February, 1957. Harry Wilson, who plays the Monster once it gets its new head, was a popular character actor who appears in The Wizard of Oz, Some Like It Hot, Guys and Dolls, and The Great Race.

3) The makeup effects in Giant from the Unknown were handled by Jack Pierce, famous for his Universal Monster makeups in the 1930s and '40s.

4) Some original release prints of Monster from Green Hell had sequences tinted green. Spooky.

These movies are just plain fun. If we judge new releases of classic and cult films using some super complicated mathematical formula that equates cost and hours of enjoyment derived, (Perhaps c = price per film/hours spent watching X rewatchability quotient2?) this release is off the charts. Not only are its pleasures multitudinous... but I JUST CAN’T DO MATH. I’m too busy rewatching Brain from Planet Arous and Frankenstein’s Daughter. Pass the brains.

2K Replay: CLICK

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Adam Riske

Nominated for “Best Makeup” at the Academy Awards. It lost to Pan’s Labyrinth.

• Best Scene/Moment: Not much to choose from so I guess anytime Christopher Walken shows up. He and Adam Sandler have good chemistry.

• Best Song: “Someday” by The Strokes.

• Best Merch: A “Click Movie Premiere Promo Baseball Black Visor New” for $29.97. It makes sense to me that there were Click visors because the type of dude who would go up to you and rave about Click probably would wear a visor -- backwards and upside down.

• Director Grade: Click was directed by Frank Coraci.
Great Movies: The Wedding Singer
Good Movies: N/A
OK Movies: The Waterboy, Around the World in 80 Days
Bad Movies: Click
Unseen By Me: Murdered Innocence, Zookeeper, Here Comes the Boom, Blended, The Ridiculous 6, Hot Air
Overall Grade: C+

• Double It with This 2006 Movie: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
• Year 2006 Movies to Trailer Before Them: The Benchwarmers, Grandma’s Boy, Underworld: Evolution

• Ella McCay or Click? Ella McCay

• Mall Movie? This is one of the classier Adam Sandler comedies but not enough to play the fancy theater in town. This would still play at the mall.

• Only in 2006: A movie about a universal remote.

• Scene Stealer: Christopher Walken.

• I Miss: 2000s comedies. In hindsight, it was a pretty great era (era).

• I Don’t Miss (tie): Rob Schneider playing ethnicities other than his own and the truly terrifying de-aging makeup on Julie Kavner and Henry Winkler.

• 2006 Crush: Kate Beckinsale.

• 2026 Crush: Kate Beckinsale.

• What I Thought in 2006: Adam Sandler comedies are usually either hilarious or bad with few in between. I remember being disappointed by Click back in 2006. It was surprisingly serious and not all that funny.

• What I Think in 2026: I was right. This movie’s ambitious so I’ll give it that, but it’s also boring and surprisingly depressing despite the happy It’s a Wonderful Life ending. I’m a fan of some 2000s Sony Adam Sandler comedies, but Click is not one of them.

Weekend Open Thread

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:00:00 -0500

Review: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Rob DiCristino

Because oligarchs are people, too.

Does anyone else remember the VH1 original movie, Two of Us? Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Let It Be) and broadcast in February of the year 2000, it dramatizes a supposedly-real-life reunion between John Lennon (Jared Harris) and Paul McCartney (Aidan Quinn) in New York City over the course of an autumn day in 1976, six years after the break-up of The Beatles. Intimate and understated, Two of Us is built around a series of conversations between the estranged friends — on everything from Wings to Yoko, from spiritualism to Saturday Night Live — and concludes on a note of optimism, a suggestion that these two blokes from Liverpool might someday rekindle the magic that defined a generation. Despite never being much of a Beatles fan (then or now), I always found Two of Us captivating: There’s just something comforting about an imagined world where Paul and John settled their differences before John’s untimely death, a world where towering figures feel more like sensitive and vulnerable human beings than unknowable icons.

Based on the 2022 Giuliano da Empoli novel of the same name, Oliver Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin tries to bring a similar degree of texture to some of the most consequential figures in modern Russian history, specifically Vladislav Surkov, former chief advisor and deputy prime minister to Vladimir Putin. Fictionalized as “Vadim Baranov” (Paul Dano), the shadowy kingmaker helps orchestrate a cultural revolution in post-Soviet Russia that sees the Federation move away from the rigid ideology of communism and toward the capitalist free-for-all that was born in the new millennium. Told in flashbacks over an interview with a Western journalist (Jeffrey Wright as Lawrence Rowland), the film recounts Baranov’s early days as a thespian-turned-theater director, his transition to state-controlled media production — working for TV mogul Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) — and eventually his doctrine of "sovereign democracy,” which would coax FSB director Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) out of the espionage sector and into the international spotlight.

Co-written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrére, The Wizard of the Kremlin parallels two key shifts in post-Cold War Russian culture: the structural collapse that took the country out of the hands of its ineffectual president (George Sogis as Boris Yeltsin) and gave it to the oligarchs, and the philosophical revolution that created an avenue for Baranov to build Putin’s strength through propaganda. Though he was born into a Soviet political family that granted him early access to the party elite, it was Baranov’s misspent youth in the ‘90s bohemian artistic scene that taught him the power of media messaging, a power that he’d wield from the shadows while Putin reasserted Russia’s influence on the world stage. Along for the ride are Baranov’s college frenemy Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) and his lover, Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose transition from performance artist to mobster arm candy symbolizes Russia’s spiritual decay and eventually inspires Baranov to retire before Putin — now firmly entrenched as de facto dictator — no longer has any use for him.

Though he’s mostly known to American audiences for enigmatic thrillers like Personal Shopper and psychological dramas like Clouds of Sils Maria, Oliver Assayas aims to inject The Wizard of the Kremlin with a cold, uncompromising realism, styling his actors as closely to their real-life equivalents as possible — Jude Law’s signature pout is given a threatening new context under his Putin makeup — and interspersing archival footage of events like the Second Chechen War and the Orange Revolution. Dano narrates his character’s rise to power with a tone of grim finality, the kind of self-effacing wisdom that comes with age and experience. His Baranov never seems entirely penitent for his role in the corruption of the Russian state, but he does seem to understand how his vision of politics as avant garde theater helped power-hungry figures like Putin and Sidorov — not to mention infamous deputies like Igor Sechine (Andrei Zayats) — shed any idealistic democratic fantasies and embrace the totalitarianism that characterizes Russia to this day.

But while Assayas’ film deserves credit for illuminating figures and events that have been largely shrouded in mystery until now, it ultimately fails to muster any lasting insight into its titular character or the system of "vertical power” he spearheaded. Paul Dano is a talented actor — despite comments to the contrary from a certain blowhard director — but his Baranov is aloof and one-note, and it’s almost impossible to believe him as a master manipulator of the human psyche. In fact, most of the film’s performances are problematic in one way or another, chiefly because each actor seems to be pulling from a grab-bag of vaguely Anglo-European accents — none of them Russian — that shift from scene to scene. This gives the already overwrought Wizard of the Kremlin a real “community theater” energy that makes it feel less like Two of Us and more like Nuremberg, another unfortunate bit of speculative fiction that asks us to sympathize with ghouls whose refusal to recognize our humanity led to the hellscape we’re all enduring today.

The Wizard of the Kremlin hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 15th.

2K Replay: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Thu, 14 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Adam Riske

Nominated for “Best Thriller” at the Empire Awards UK. It lost to The Departed.

• Best Scene/Moment: Tom Cruise running during the climactic action sequence. It’s a special effect all on its own.

• Best Song: “Best of My Love” by The Emotions. I could have been the Kanye West end credits song if that guy wasn’t such an asshole.

• Best Merch: A “Movie Mission Impossible 3 Bag…Rare Special Gift for the Crew” for $200.00. The price is ridiculous, but the bag is cool looking. I used to have a messenger bag like this. I was in college, so I believed I needed something more sophisticated looking than just a backpack. It worked and I was accepted into high society. All I’m saying is, if you buy this the IMF might recruit you, that’s all.

• Director Grade: Mission: Impossible III was directed by J.J. Abrams.
Great Movies: Star Trek (2009), Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
Good Movies: Mission: Impossible III, Super 8
OK Movies: Star Trek into Darkness
Bad Movies: Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
Unseen By Me: N/A
Overall Grade: B

• Double It with This 2006 Movie: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

• Year 2006 Movies to Trailer Before Them: Final Destination 3, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, X-Men: The Last Stand

• Ella McCay or Mission: Impossible III? Mission: Impossible III
• Mall Movie? No. A Paramount Pictures release starring Tom Cruise is fancy theater all the way.

• Only in 2006: Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q were part of the IMF team.

• Scene Stealer (tie): Laurence Fishburne and Michelle Monaghan.

• I Miss: Philip Seymour Hoffman. I can’t tell if he’s good in this or phoning it in. Maybe a little bit of both.

• I Don’t Miss: The rabbit’s foot. I know it’s just a MacGuffin, but it sounds stupid and beneath a movie with a budget of $150M. Try harder.

• 2006 Crush (tie): Michelle Monaghan and Keri Russell.

• 2026 Crush (tie): Michelle Monaghan and Maggie Q.

• What I Thought in 2006: I really liked it and didn’t understand why people thought it was disappointing, especially coming off the sluggish previous entry. I appreciated that they humanized the Ethan Hunt character, which I think was crucial for audiences giving a damn about him in later films.

• What I Think in 2026: I still like Mission: Impossible III, just not as much as I did twenty years ago. It’s still probably the most underrated in the series in my humble opinion. The action and story are good (root for two people madly in love!) and it feels refreshingly small compared to the lengthier, more set piece-driven later entries. The rabbit’s foot sucks but I’m glad the movie treats it as a nothingburger unlike “the entity” which became WAY too important to the last two Mission: Impossible movies.

FTM 820: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Patrick is going to copy Sonia's haircut.

Download this episode here.

Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.

Also discussed this episode: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), Super Mario Bros. Galaxy (2026), Night of the Juggler (1980), The Drama (2026), We Bury the Dead (2026), Where the Day Takes You (1992)

Fifty Before '50: THE ADVENTURER (1917)

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by JB

Today, let’s travel back in time to 1916... and a little place I call... Malibu, California.

After becoming the biggest movie star in the world with his pioneering work at the Keystone Studios in 1914, Charlie Chaplin next moved to Essanay Studios, where he made 14 short comedies in two years. In 1916, Chaplin became the highest paid performer in the world, signing a contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for $670,000 for 12 short films. (That’s more than $20 million in 2026 dollars.) The Adventurer was the last of these. You can watch it here.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: An escaped convict (Charlie Chaplin) evades prison guards and policemen and jumps into the ocean to escape. He ends up swimming to a seaside pier, where a rich family is cavorting. After saving one of them from drowning, he is invited back to their mansion. He poses as “Commodore Slick” and enjoys their hospitality. Unfortunately, another guest is suspicious and calls the cops, who proceed to chase the resourceful Chaplin all over the house.

So distinctive is the scenery along the Pacific Coast Highway, that while watching the film again this morning, I instantly recognized where these first scenes were filmed. Remember that ALL HOLLYWOOD FILMS TAKE PLACE IN THE SAME META-VERSE. As you watch the film on the YouTube machine, imagine the camera panning slightly to the right as the coppers chase Charlie on the beach. The camera picks up a man on horseback far in the distance. He follows the shoreline until something in his line of sight makes him pause and dismount.

The man is Charlton Heston. He walks along the sand, shouting, “"Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it. YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!” As Heston squats in the sand, the camera continues to pan right and we see teenagers driving various funny cars down the Pacific Coast Highway; they are singing “Beach Party.” The happy couple in the lead car is Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The camera finally pans left, and we see two new teenagers cavorting in the surf. These teenagers look older, like the boy might be 24 and the girl could be 30. They are saying goodbye to each other after an eventful summer. Their names are Danny and Sandy. These disparate movies were all filmed in Malibu within a few miles of each other. Thus, the singularity is achieved.

ASTOUNDING FACT: Chaplin’s The Adventurer was filmed twelve years before the Pacific Coast Highway was ever built. How did the film crew get to the location? Mules?

I have been watching Chaplin’s Mutual comedies since I was a teenager, and it’s always very comforting to see him interacting with his stock company. Edna Purviance plays the female lead; Chaplin would later write and direct A Woman of Paris in 1923, a film designed to make her a star. Eric Campbell was Chaplin’s reliable heavy, a mountain of a man who made Chaplin look tiny and sympathetic in comparison. Albert Austin plays both one of the prison guards at the beginning of the film and Purviance’s butler at the end; he was a multi-talented utility player. Purviance’s father is Henry Bergman, another all-purpose actor who prided himself on being able to play any part. He would be a member of Chaplin’s stock company for more than twenty years.

Most critics opine that The Adventurer, the last of Chaplin’s 12 Mutual comedies, harkens back to Chaplin’s earlier Keystone days, as if the strain of producing 11 of the greatest short comedies was too much for the comedy genius, and so Chaplin “rested on his laurels” for the last one in the series.

I disagree. While Mutual comedies like The Vagabond, The Pawnbroker, and Easy Street may feature more sophisticated themes and narratives, it’s not as if the intricate slapstick of The Adventurer were somehow easier to pull off than more complex story elements. The chase at the end of The Adventurer is so elaborate and so dependent on perfect timing that it hides its own artistry. It must have been incredibly tricky to pull it off at all! As for matters of theme, Chaplin was pretty consistent in championing the little guy in all his films, whether said little guy is a waiter, a firefighter, a police officer... or a prison inmate.

It’s worth noting that many of the Mutual films have job descriptions as titles: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Count, The Immigrant... but does Chaplin title this one The Convict? The Escaped Crook? Tramp on the Lam?

No, he is... The Adventurer!

Director Essentials: Joe Johnston

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Mon, 11 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Patrick Bromley

It's a Hidalgo-less list.

Joe Johnston is such a specific filmmaker. He comes from an effects background, meaning his early work is characterized by visual effects and genre elements. When he has veered from that course to make more personal projects, he hasn't enjoyed the same kind of success. Here are some of the essential films of his (admittedly limited) filmography.

1. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)

Joe Johnston's debut as a director showcases a lot of what he does so well, combining impressive visual effects with an emphasis on story and heart. Rick Moranis plays an absent-minded inventor who accidentally shrinks his kids (and the neighbor kids) down to miniature size; they then have to traverse an adventure in the backyard to be restored to their original size. This is a pretty good family adventure film, one that doesn't insult the intelligence of either kids or adults, but the effects are the big sell here, which Johnston (a former effects artist himself) executes pretty brilliantly using a combination of techniques. It's interesting that he wasn't the first choice to direct this one, as the movie began its life as a Stuart Gordon project. This would be a recurring theme in Joe Johnston's filmography.

2. The Rocketeer (1991)

Still my favorite of all Joe Johnston's films and the one I suspect for which he'll be best remembered because it's his most special. His sophomore outing behind the camera is an adaptation of the Dave Stevens comic book about a 1930s stunt pilot (Billy Campbell) who finds a jet pack and uses it to become a superhero. Alan Arkin and Jennifer Connelly also star, while Timothy Dalton steals the entire movie as a Hollywood star and secret Nazi back when you had to keep that kind of thing secret. This is the kind of thrilling pulp adventure for which Joe Johnston seems perfectly suited, a movie we only got because Batman was a hit and everyone wanted the next Batman. This was probably never going to be that (it was famously a disappointment at the box office) but I wish it would have been because maybe Joe Johnston could have made another Rocketeer movie.

3. Jumanji (1995)

Joe Johnston's bounced back after the box office disappointments of both The Rocketeer and The Pagemaster (for which he directed the live action segments) with this massive family hit about a jungle adventure board game that comes to life and spills out into the real world. Because Johnston is relying on a lot of digital effects for the first time, I don't think they work nearly as well as his past and later efforts (dem monkeys) The story is fun enough, though, and it's better family entertainment than the later legasequels if only because it's not afraid to be dark and a little scary (Kiki Dunst almost dies!), qualities that were quite common in these kinds of movies in the 1980s when Johnston was coming up but which have been completely sanded out of family movies these days.

4. October Sky (1999)

This one feels like Johnston trying to break out -- the one I would swear was a longtime pet project if I didn't also know that the book on which its based came out only a year before the movie. Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this adaptation of Homer Hickam's 1998 memoir Rocket Boys as a kid who stars a rocketry club with his friends. I suspect Johnston's career might have taken a different direction had this one been a bigger hit. It's mostly beloved now but only did ok at the box office in 1999.

5. Jurassic Park III (2001)

When your nostalgic coming of age period piece doesn't totally connect with audiences, you go back to working for the Big Guy and become the first non-Spielberg filmmaker to make a Jurassic Park sequel. That would be noteworthy in and of itself, but what makes JPIII stand out is that it's just about the only sequel in the entire misbegotten franchise that bothers to be its own thing and have its own personality. Johnston isn't trying to do a massive scale summer blockbuster, but instead a throwback to the kind of stripped-down B-movies that would have been made with stop-motion in the '30s and '40s. On that level, he succeeds. The characters (save for a returning Alan Grant) aren't great and the movie fails to be about anything more than just OMG RUN but it achieves its modest goals and Johnston once again proves to be workmanlike, dependable, and good with effects-driven entertainment.

6. The Wolfman (2010)

I swear I want to like this movie. It's a period monster movie in love with being a monster movie and a totally straightforward attempt to make the wolfman horrifying after years of more comic approaches. The cast is solid, the scenery is gorgeous, the wolfman makeup is awesome. I'm just not sure it ever stood a chance of succeeding once original director Mark Romanek quit prior to production and Joe Johnston inherited a mess, plus a great deal of studio interference that included reshoots, new endings, and shitcanning the work of Oscar-winning makeup effects designer (and basically the inventor of the practical werewolf transformation) Rick Baker in favor of some CG bullshit. There are great elements here that don't quite add up to a great movie, but it's not for lack of trying. It wouldn't be the last time that Joe Johnston was brought on to "fix" the work of another filmmaker.

7. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

There was a real lack of imagination on Marvel's part back in 2011 to hire a guy who had made one retro period superhero movie to make a retro period superhero movie, but it turns out that Joe Johnston was exactly the right person to bring Captain America to the screen for the first time. I'm guessing The Rocketeer helped him get this gig, because it does a lot of things that The First Avenger is trying to do only on a larger scale. Yes, it does the period setting, but the two films also share an optimism and a sincerity that feels pure and genuine. Fifteen years later, this remains one of the best of all the Marvel movies.

Weekend Open Thread

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Sat, 9 May 2026 02:00:00 -0500

Review: TWO WOMEN

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Fri, 8 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Rob DiCristino

More like Two Horny Women.

Summer movie season is here! Meryl Streep’s autocratic Miranda Priestly returns in The Devil Wears Prada 2! Star Wars’ newest pint-sized star makes his big-screen debut in The Mandalorian and Grogu! Christopher Nolan brings civilization’s most enduring heroic narrative to life in The Odyssey! And, of course, Canadian writer/director Chloé Robichaud remakes the ‘70s sex farce, Two Women in Gold! Adapted by Catherine Léger from her stage play — itself adapted from the original film; try to keep up — Two Women follows Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf), a pair of restless housewives who embark on a shared journey of sexual rejuvenation. As they bone their way through every plumber and handyman in Quebec, they’ll rekindle the joie de vivre that domesticity once stripped away. And while it may lack the intellectual heft of cousins like Jean-Luc Goddard’s Masculine Féminin or Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Robichaud’s film is witty and charming enough to break up the coming onslaught of blockbuster tentpoles.

We begin with Violette, home on maternity leave and desperate to convince her husband (Félix Moati as Benoit) that the mysterious cawing sound she’s hearing — which evolves into one of the film’s better running gags — is the couple next door having performatively loud intercourse. The truth is way less sexy, unfortunately, as Florence reveals that she and her partner (Mani Soleymanlou as David) haven’t been at it in over a year. Florence’s libido has been dulled by anti-depressants, and David has been happy to trade less action in the bedroom for a more stable and emotionally balanced partner. It turns out Violette can relate: She and Benoit haven’t made inroads in that department since the birth of their daughter, most likely because Benoit’s been having an affair with his colleague, Eli (Juliette Gariépy). As David busies himself with their co-op’s greenhouse — the source of some jokes about carbon neutrality trends that would have been funnier around 2014 — Florence sets about getting her groove back. Vivian follows her lead, and middle-aged sex hijinks ensure.

Anchored by performances endearing enough to make us sympathize with a pair of serial philanderers and their dim-witted husbands, Two Women explores everything from double standards in gender dynamics to the “unnatural” arrangement that is sexual monogamy. Léger’s screenplay — presumably borrowed in part from Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond’s original — is brisk and upbeat, loaded with clever and disarming observations about modern marriage. There’s a blunt pragmatism to each character’s sensibilities that helps the film avoid many of the melodramatic confrontations typical of the genre, which becomes a more impressive — and infinitely funnier — accomplishment as each of their perversions is ultimately dismissed as an acceptable human weakness. Even the strumpet Eli resists easy stereotyping: One of the film’s best moments comes when she scoffs at Benoit’s insistence that he’d leave his wife for her if she asked, reassuring him that she has no real feelings for him and is simply using him for his pleasantly-shaped manhood.

It’s that kind of unsentimental comedy that keeps Two Women delightfully light and airy, but it’s hard not to feel like a film that hums as vibrantly as this one couldn’t do with a bit more hard-nosed dissection of the human nature it clearly understands so well. There’s a flippancy to its handling of heavier topics like suicide and sexual assault where a more socially-contentious approach might have helped elevate things just a tad. To wit: Florence and Vivian’s karaoke night out is interrupted when one of them slashes her wrist with a broken beer bottle, and a later sequence finds Daniel mixing anti-depressants with alcohol in what his emergency room doctor describes as a “cry for help.” Both incidents are dismissed without too much interrogation. That said, perhaps Two Women deserves some credit for not overextending itself for the sake of lofty ambitions. If you’re wondering whether or not I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth on this one, you’d be right! Perhaps I’m just as fickle and contradictory as the hot messes that make up the cast of this film. Go figure.

Yeah, I’ve rethought it, and I’m actually okay with where Two Women lands: There are no self-righteous proclamations about right and wrong, no short-sighted dismissals of any one way of life or another, and no second act misunderstandings that reduce the whole thing to a half-hearted genre exercise. See? You just watched me self-correct in real time. Okay. Let’s reset: While there’s very little about Two Women that will stick with you the next day — we need a term for a movie that holds a spot in your Letterboxd diary that you’ve completely memory-holed by the time you’re making your year-end lists — it’s perfectly acceptable for an evening’s diversion. In a summer movie season sure to be defined by high-stakes franchise IP like Toy Story 5 and Supergirl, Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction in Disclosure Day, and, I don’t know, whatever the hell Insidious: Out of the Further is (I’ll admit I lost track of that series a few movies ago; is “the Further” like the Upside-Down? I lost track of Stranger Things, too), there’s nothing wrong with an evening’s diversion.

Two Women hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 8th.

24 Hours of Movies: 24-Hour Movies!

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Thu, 7 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Patrick Bromley
Let's spend the day watching movies that take place in a day.

10am - His Girl Friday (1940, dir. Howard Hawks)

We'll kick things off with what might be the greatest (certainly the fastest) screwball comedy of all time, in which Cary Grant attempts to win back ex-wife Rosalind Russell over the course of a day while both use the Power of the Press to stop a convicted man from being unfairly executed. This was one of the movies that first made me fall in love with classic comedies and it's never lost its power no matter how many times I see it. It's always still just as fast-paced and funny as it always was, only now I get to pick out a new favorite line or delivery each time I see it. When Erika threw me a real-deal 24-hour movie festival for my 40th birthday, I made the mistake of programming this one in the morning when I was already too tired to keep up with it. Better to let it start us out.

11:45am - Quick Change (1990, dir. Bill Murray & Howard Franklin)

One of the great unsung comedies of the early '90s, this poison love letter to New York stars Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Randy Quaid as a group of bank robbers who can't seem to get out of the city no matter how hard they try. Like Martin Scorsese's After Hours (the best One Crazy Night movie), this one has our characters encountering a bunch of colorful characters, most memorably Tony Shaloub's cab driver. Quick Change is such a masterpiece of deadpan absurdity that I know it's going to keep the energy and laughs of His Girl Friday rolling along.

1:30pm - Training Day (2001, dir. Antoine Fuqua

Antoine Fuqua's best movie follows a day in the life of corrupt cop Denzel Washington (who won the Oscar for his work here) and new trainee Ethan Hawke as they do all kinds of potentially shady shit together. This is screenwriter David Ayer mining familiar territory about Los Angeles and bad cops but it's sold more effectively than usual thanks to good location photography, Fuqua's direction, and especially Washington and Hawke (who was also nominated for an Oscar) at the center. For whatever reason I'm still rocking my standard def snapcase DVD for this one; I should probably upgrade to the 4K at some point.

3:30pm - Clerks (1994, dir. Kevin Smith)

In the interest of lightening things up after Training Day, let's watch Kevin Smith's first (and still best?) movie, following the day in the life and work of a put-upon convenience store worker and his best friend. Smith tries his hardest to be edgy and there's obviously some button-pushing stuff that hasn't aged great -- this is a 30-year old movie, after all -- but at its center is an ultimately sweet movie about male friendship. It's also helped by the fact that this is the movie in which Smith leans hardest into his lack of visual sense, meaning the form actually suits the material. The kid in me who first fell in love with Smith and his work via this movie will never not love it.

5:30pm - Barbershop (2002, dir. Tim Story)

One of the great hangout movies of the early 2000s, Tim Story's original Barbershop puts together a fantastic ensemble cast for a day in the life and business of a Chicago barbershop as its owner (Ice Cube) debates selling it. There's a really fun group of characters and a real hangout vibe that makes this one easy to revisit, as evidenced by the multiple sequels that return to the barbershop without ever working as well as the original. I actually think Barbershop will be a good lead-in for our next movie.

7:30pm - Do the Right Thing (1989, dir. Spike Lee)

The true Best Picture of 1989 is maybe the greatest 24-hour movie of all time. Sure, it gets pretty heavy for a Primetime Pizza slot but just because there is tragedy at the end of the film shouldn't discount how entertaining it is. That's a big part of what makes Do the Right Thing such a masterpiece: it's more alive than almost any other movie. That there's any debate as to whether or not this is Spike Lee's greatest movie -- it's between this and Malcolm X -- is proof that he's one of the all-time greats.

9:30pm - Crank (2006, dir. Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor)

We're not going to do a traditional overnight full of weird stuff and Italian horror, but that doesn't mean we can't program some mindless trash as we head into that section of our marathon. That brings us to Crank, the Neveldine/Taylor joint that would probably be my favorite Jason Statham action movie if not for Crank 2 and Wrath of Man. He plays a hit man who's been poisoned and has to keep his heart rate up so he doesn't die; somehow the movie is four times stupider than it sounds, but in a sublime and often offensive way. That there aren't more movies like Crank is both a shame and proof that there absolutely should not be more movies like Crank.

11pm - Take Me Home Tonight (2011, dir. Michael Dowse)

A good excuse to program a Brian Saur favorite. Really just Can't Hardly Wait for a slightly older set, the movie focuses on a college graduate (Topher Grace) who gets invited to what is a party doubling as a high school reunion in the 1988, I'm assuming so there can be a bunch of '80s music on the soundtrack and jokes about the fashion. This is almost one of those CastMaker movies, with early roles for Theresa Palmer, Chris Pratt, Demetri Martin, and Seth Gabel, plus more recognizable faces like Grace, Anna Faris, Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP), Dan Fogler, and Lucy Punch. The movie didn't make enough of a dent to launch anyone to stardom, but it's the perfect sort of breezy comedy that will go down easy as exhaustion sets in.

12:45am - Night of the Living Dead (1990, dir. Tom Savini)

We should still watch some horror during our overnight, and while I could probably program George A. Romero's original zombie classic into this spot I'd kind of like to rewatch Tom Savini's 1990 remake, which I checked out back in October when Sony released the uncut 4K (it's not very different) and liked way more than I remembered. Tony Todd (RIP) is a particular standout as he so often was. The added gore doesn't amount to much, but there's a cool fade from black and white into color at the opening that has been restored and I'm happy to have a version closer to what Savini intended.

2:30am - Judgment Night (1993, dir. Stephen Hopkins)

During the overnight section of our marathon, we should watch a movie about one of the worst overnights imaginable: being hunted down by Denis Leary in the scariest parts of Chicago and being friends with Jeremy Piven. This movie, once famous only for its soundtrack, has been rediscovered by the right kinds of audiences over the last 10 years and gained appreciated for what a effective thriller it is. It would probably be Stephen Hopkins' best movie if not for Predator 2. Hopkins bump!

4:30am - The Warriors (1979, dir. Walter Hill)

One of the best One Night Only movies ever made, Walter Hill's dystopian street gang epic focuses on The Warriors, a gang framed for murder who have to get back to their turf in NYC as every other gang in the city hunts them down. It's literally one of the best premises for a movie ever, probably because it's based on a classical Greek text. The scene with Michael Beck and Deborah Van Valkenburgh on the train is one of my absolute favorites.

6am - Wet Hot American Summer (2001, dir. David Wain)

This one doesn't need to take place over the span of a single day -- there's enough here to fill an entire summer -- but one of the jokes is that it does. Made mostly with members of the MTV sketch comedy group The State but adding heavy hitters like Janeane Garofalo, Amy Poehler, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Rudd (this was the movie that taught us all how funny he is), Wet Hot is, joke for joke, performance for performance, still the funniest comedy of the 2000s. We'll be laughing even harder than usual because we should, by now, be delirious.

7:30am - The Paper (1994, dir. Ron Howard)

Ron Howard's most underrated movie, The Paper focus on a manic 24 hours in the life of an editor at the New York Sun (Michael Keaton) and the various people with whom he works (Glenn Close, Robert Duvall) and lives (Marisa Tomei). The 24-hour ticking clock isn't just a gimmick here but actually part of the plot, which involves Keaton desperately trying not just to get a story, but to get it right for the morning edition. While not one of the great journalism movies, Ron Howard does manage to conjure up a kind of electric energy and maintain it for the length of the film. It will be like starting our morning by chugging three Monster energy drinks, which doesn't sound half bad.

9:30am - Dazed and Confused (1993, dir. Richard Linklater)

Showing this to one of my film classes recently is what inspired this list. Richard Linklater's ode to growing up in the late 1970s might possibly be the greatest hangout movie of all time. I resisted it for years because I thought it was little more than a stoner comedy, and while there is a lot of weed smoking in the film (a fact of which I became acutely aware while showing it to a class), that's more a period detail than a source of humor in the movie. The cast of future stars and familiar faces is insane, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall bangers (at least in the context of the movie; I wouldn't listen to a lot of these songs on their own), the details perfectly observed. The ending of this movie captures exactly the feeling I want to evoke at the end of our 24-hour marathon. Let's go get Aerosmith tickets.

FTM 819: MOBSTERS

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Wed, 6 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Patrick and Adam Riske rose from nothing to rule everything.

Download this episode here.

Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.

Also discussed this episode: The Drama (2026), Firewall (2006), Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006), Big Night (1996), As Good As It Gets (1997), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Fly Away Home (1996), Happily Ever After (1993), The Bride! (2026), The Face With Two Left Feet (1979), Dolly (2026)

Fifty Before '50: HOLD THAT GHOST (1941)

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Tue, 5 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by JB

Another seminal film has slipped through my brain cracks...

Although I count Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein among my very favorite horror films—I usually begin every Scary Movie Month with a rewatch—I remained in the dark about Hold That Ghost, the film every A&C book and documentary claimed as the inspiration for much of the “Lou Costello is so funny when he is scared” shtick in the Frankenstein picture.

Because I have seen ...Meet Frankenstein so many times, the earlier Hold That Ghost came across as a sort of "alternate dimension" version: In Hold That Ghost, the Bud Abbott character is named Chuck, leading to scene after scene of Costello yelling for his friend to come to his aid with “Oh, Chuck!” In ...Meet Frankenstein, Abbott's character is named Chick, leading to a similar chorus of Costello screaming, “Oh, Chick!” This similarity has to have been intentional.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Chuck Murray and Ferdy Jones (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) are gas station attendants who work a one-night only gig as waiters at a fancy nightclub. The nightclub is frequented by gangsters like Moose Matson (William B. Davidson) and features top-notch entertainment, including bandleader Ted Lewis and the Andrews Sisters.

The next day, Moose stops at Chuck and Ferdy’s service station for gas and a wash. He is spotted by authorities who give chase; Moose is fatally shot. An odd codicil in his will bequeaths his entire estate to whoever is with him when he dies. Guess who is hiding in the backseat of the car? Chuck and Ferdy inherit Moose’s rundown tavern where, it is rumored, he hid his fortune. The tavern seems to be haunted. Other gangsters arrive. Will Chuck and Ferdy find the money before they are killed?

There’s a lot to like in this modest little film. Abbott & Costello are at the top of their game, especially in the bits involving physical comedy: At one point, Costello does a comic dance on a wet floor that is a highlight of the film. The supporting cast is also terrific: Mischa Auer shows up as an insufferable head waiter. Richard Carlson, still twelve years from making It Came from Outer Space and The Creature from the Black Lagoon at Universal, plays a nerdy doctor. Evelyn Ankers, who costarred in Universal’s The Wolf Man that same year, is featured as Carlson’s love interest. And Joan Davis, later to star in television’s I Married Joan, appears as an accident-prone waitress and Costello’s love interest. This is a great cast.

The production history of Hold That Ghost is fascinating. Earlier in 1941, the duo made Buck Privates for Universal Pictures, which became one of the studio’s highest grossing pictures to date. Although Abbott & Costello had nearly completed Hold That Ghost, that film was shelved so that Universal could cash in on Buck Privates’ success with another service comedy, In the Navy, which was also a big moneymaker. Both Buck Privates and In the Navy featured the Andrews Sisters. Preview audiences for Hold That Ghost asked why the film didn’t also feature the singing trio, so Universal put Hold That Ghost back into production, spending an additional $150,000 to add “bookend” scenes in a nightclub... featuring the Andrews Sisters.

It seems significant that Abbott & Costello made this movie, a horror comedy, for Universal in 1941 because, at that time, Universal had reached an impasse. Except for The Wolf Man, which would be released later in 1941, their famous horror films had run their course with sequel after sequel. Also, England responded negatively to American horror films and briefly banned them. Universal and other studios started to downplay the horror content of their horror films, focusing instead on newspaper movies (dogged reporters investigating something fishy), gangster pictures (criminals swindling people under the guise of monsters and ghosts), and horror comedies (tongue-in-cheek haunted house pictures like the Bob Hope remake of The Cat and the Canary). This trend reaches its head-scratching apotheosis in Hold That Ghost: Is it a comedy? A musical? A gangster movie? A haunted house picture? Is it a documentary about gas stations and the brave men who work there?

The answer is yes.

The new Kino-Lorber 4K disc looks great and contains two terrific audio commentaries, which complement each other nicely: Alan K. Rode focuses on production history and Samm Deighan focuses on the film as a whole. This is my first commentary by Deighan, but I was very impressed. She is both knowledgeable and conversational, two qualities that are sometimes at odds in other audio commentaries. I see here that Deighan produces special features for Vinegar Syndrome and hosts the “Twitch of the Death Nerve” podcast. I look forward to listening to more of her commentaries.

Friday Night Double Features Vol. 66

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Mon, 4 May 2026 05:00:00 -0500

by Adam Riske and Patrick Bromley

Ten new double features to watch after your team is eliminated from the NBA Playoffs.

Double Feature 1:

Adam: #1: American Graffiti (1973)
Patrick: #2: Dazed and Confused (1993)
Patrick: Trailers/Shorts: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Can’t Hardly Wait, The Outsiders
Patrick: Theme: Castmakers

Patrick: I like these movies in which the cast is totally stacked with up-and-comers, but no one quite knows it yet except maybe a casting agent who is very, very good at his or her job. I haven’t seen American Graffiti in a number of years so I’m excited to revisit it at our theater. It’s a movie I’ve always respected more than actually liked, but I get smarter (in some ways) as I get older and I learn to see things in older movies that maybe I didn’t see the first time or two. Dazed and Confused is a movie I kind of rejected early on because I thought I was rejecting the fan base, but it gets better every time I see it. Maybe the best hangout movie ever?

Adam: This is an amazing, perfect double feature with two movies I love. On my last viewing of American Graffiti, I realized it’s one of my favorite movies (probably top 25 or somewhere in that range). I have a real soft spot for movies set in the early '60s like that and Dogfight. Plus, the wall-to-wall soundtrack omg. Dazed and Confused is a great pairing with it since they’re both up all night hangout movies. I understand what you’re saying about rejecting the fan base initially for Dazed and Confused. I always loved the movie but also didn’t think I was hip enough for it until I finally saw the movie in my late teens. It came out when I was in middle school and I remember my first awareness of it was seeing the trailer before Rookie of the Year, oddly enough. The joke about Martha Washington having a big bowl waiting for George went way over my head. I thought they were talking about soup or chili or something. Fun fact: When I worked at Blockbuster, our copy of Dazed and Confused was never in because it was repeatedly stolen.

Patrick: Same for my Blockbuster!! It must have been a national phenomenon.

Double Feature 2:

Patrick: #1: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Adam: #2: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)
Adam: Trailers/Shorts: Serenity, Veronica Mars, Downton Abbey
Adam: Theme: I’m Lost Because I Didn’t Watch the TV Show

Adam: I’ve seen Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and admire it at arm’s length. I know enough about the show through osmosis and am familiar enough with David Lynch’s vibe to “get it” kinda? I don’t know. I’m sure I’m still missing a lot. I thought this would be a fun theme because I remember my friends back in 1998 wanting to see The X-Files movie on opening night but I suggested we see The Truman Show a second time because I hadn’t seen any episodes of The X-Files. That was rude of me. Besides, it was opening night of Mulan so we should’ve gone to that. Is The X-Files: Fight the Future a movie a novice could get anything out of? I’ve always wanted to see it but not enough to watch the television show. P.S. I don’t like the subtitle Fight the Future. It reminds me of the moment in Saturday Night Fever where Travolta says “Fuck the Future” and his boss is all “No, Tony, the future fucks you.”

Patrick: The girl I was dating in high school took me to Fire Walk With Me opening night and I had never seen the show and felt completely lost. Now I’ve seen the show multiple times but that’s not why I’ve grown to love FWWM; I think that has more to do with seeing more David Lynch and vibing with it in a way I couldn’t have as a kid. X-Files: Fight the Future is a different thing because the show is more of a blind spot for me, despite always wanting to watch it and working through the first season more than once. I skipped it in theaters and watched it on video, where it did almost nothing for me. I’ve seen it a couple of times since and it hasn’t really grown much for me. Maybe this will be the magic viewing! I’d love to use it as an excuse to marathon the series ahead of time but I’m enough of a realist to know that won’t happen. Also Fight the Future is kind of a dumb name. I always just called it The X-Files Movie, which got harder when they made a second X-Files Movie with the equally bad subtitle of I Want to Believe. I don’t hate that movie but I know I’m supposed to.

Double Feature 3:
Adam: #1: Easy A (2010)
Patrick: #2: Indecent Proposal (1993)
Patrick: Trailers/Shorts: Friends with Benefits, The Piano, Fired Up!, Unfaithful
Patrick: Theme: Gluck and a Cuck

Patrick: I really don’t like Indecent Proposal, but I couldn’t resist this theme and thought of all the cuck movies I programmed, this one felt right because Robert Redford passed and this seemed respectful. Lol. I like some Will Gluck movies! Maybe more so early on before he became the only filmmaker allowed to make romantic comedies. I don’t know how to feel about One Night Only. I get that the premise is a hard sell in a trailer but they’re not even trying to sell it as a comedy. I’ll totally see it for the Barbaro of it all but I might have a Callum Turner allergy. Stop trying to insist he’s a thing, movies. Do you have a favorite Gluck? Mine’s probably Easy A or Fired Up!. Eric Christian Olson just sinks three pointers in that one.

Adam: This is such a Cinemarink double feature/theme. I love it. I don’t like Indecent Proposal either, but we’ve joked so much about cucking that I have affection now for…cucking??! What’s wrong with me? It’s gotten to the point where when I saw the Super Troopers 3 trailer and there was a “pull up a cuck chair” joke I was ready to text you. You know what’s crazy? I have never seen Easy A despite Emma Stone being one of my favorite actors working today. Yeah, that One Night Only trailer stinks. I too like Barbaro, but she doesn’t strike me as funny so I dunno I hope for the best. I haven’t seen some essential Glucks (like Fired Up!) so for now my favorite is Friends with Benefits, which I remember enjoying the one time I saw it. I liked it better than No Strings Attached.

Double Feature 4:

Patrick: #1: It’s Complicated (2009)
Adam: #2: Defending Your Life (1991)
Adam: Trailers/Shorts: She-Devil, Postcards from the Edge, Death Becomes Her
Adam: Theme: Meryl Streep Comedies

Adam: Not really creative of a theme but it’s a good pairing and would play well with these two movies back-to-back. I haven’t seen It’s Complicated since the mail physical media Netflix days but would like to revisit it (just not now…in 2029…you understand why). I also haven’t seen Defending Your Life in a long time and it’s beloved so I’m sure people would leave the Cinemarink happy with this double feature. My most lasting memory of Defending Your Life is not to take your eyes off the road to insert a new CD.

Patrick: This might be the best double of the month so far. It’s Complicated is more comforting than good in a Nancy Meyers way, but Defending Your Life is pretty great and Meryl Streep is kind of magical in it. I like her in comedies more than in dramas because I always feel like I’m supposed to be knocked out by everything she does but she’s so loose and likable in her comedies that I remember she doesn’t take herself too seriously. I listened to the Meryl Streep draft on The Big Picture and they left out her big Bonnie & Clyde musical number in Stuck On You, a movie I’m not crazy about but during which I think I first realized that Meryl Streep seems like a great sport and has a sense of humor about herself. It should have been when I saw The River Wild in the ‘90s but I only saw that one a year or two ago.

Double Feature 5:
Adam: #1: The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

Patrick: #2: Heavy Metal (1981)
Patrick: Trailers/Shorts: Hot to Trot, Camp Candy “The Forest’s Prime Evil” episode
Patrick: Theme: Voiced by John Candy

Patrick: I was stuck here because I’ve never seen Rescuers Down Under, but I know John Candy voices a bird or some shit? I liked the idea of pairing a Disney cartoon with a more “adult” animated movie like Heavy Metal. Plus, it’s an excuse to see Heavy Metal on the big screen again. John Candy’s line deliveries as Den always crack me up. Plus, an episode of Camp Candy! I’m sure that shit will play.

Adam: Candy does play a bird or some shit in RDU! I really like The Rescuers Down Under. I rewatched it for a ‘90s Kid Movie Club not too long ago and it held up for me. I have a lot of nostalgia for it because I remember it was a movie my Mom took me to and I was really excited it was preceded with The Prince and the Pauper as a short and an intermission in between, which was a novel concept to me as a kid. I love this theme as a big John Candy fan. I should thank you and Smash Cut for getting me to finally watch Heavy Metal, which I really liked and bought on Blu-ray right afterwards. This night rules. I’m so excited to watch an episode of Camp Candy on the big screen. That’s a “Pancake Show,” i.e. a show you watch while eating a short stack when you’re a short stack. By short stack I mean when you were a kid -- or Danny DeVito in The Rainmaker. Great pancake scene. You should do a 24-hour marathon article on movies with pancake scenes.

Double Feature 6:

Patrick: #1: Colors (1988)
Adam: #2: Hamburger Hill (1987)
Adam: Trailers/Shorts: Moving Violations, The Meteor Man, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead
Adam: Theme: Pre-Fame Don Cheadle

Adam: I was surprised to see Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead in Cheadle’s filmography. Do you remember him in that movie? #BoatDrinks. Anyways, I thought it would be fun to highlight his early career here before his breakout in 1995’s Devil in a Blue Dress. I haven’t seen either Colors or Hamburger Hill but have always meant to get around to them so this would be a good excuse to finally catch both, especially with the recent passing of Robert Duvall. Have you seen either of them? Any good? I vaguely remember hearing Sean Penn was kinda nuts on the set of Colors. (Checks Internet) Yes, yes he was.

Patrick: Sean Penn? Nuts? An asshole? Not MY Sean Penn. I literally rewatched Things to Do In Denver a few months ago – don’t ask my why, it’s Cherry 7-Up – and still have no memory of Don Cheadle being in it. That’s how big an impression both he and that movie made on me. I remember liking Hamburger Hill as a grungy Vietnam movie (a genre I like more than I should). Steven Weber is in it and he just got added to Flashback! You think some real Hill heads are gonna come out? I’m literally watching Colors for the first time as I’m typing this. It’s a movie I’ve wanted to see since it came out in 1988 and just haven’t. I like the Ice-T theme song, though. Think he’ll come perform it live? Should we have Cheadle do it?

Double Feature 7:
Adam: #1: Nope (2022)

Patrick: #2: Super 8 (2011)

Patrick: Trailers/Shorts: The Big Picture, Aliens, “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” segment from V/H/S/2
Patrick: Theme: When Filmmaking Meets Aliens

Patrick: I was recently showing Super 8 to a class and realized just how much it has in common with Jordan Peele’s Nope, which I started out by showing this semester. Both are movies about filmmaking that get interrupted by the arrival of an extraterrestrial monster. Nope treats it more as adult horror, while Super 8 is much more of a family adventure film. I prefer the latter because I am an infantilized manchild. I thought maybe it would be cool to do a night devoted to both movies and aliens, but I recognize that the theme is a stretch.

Adam: I really like this double. The theme’s clever. You’re being too critical of yourself. Plus, I get to revisit Nope, which I suspect I’d like more on a second viewing and Super 8, which is a movie I really like/almost love but haven’t seen in many years. You can’t go wrong with a night of movies featuring Keke Palmer and Elle Fanning. Production Value!

Double Feature 8:

Patrick: #1: Heat (1995)
Adam: #2: Chill Factor (1999)
Adam: Trailers/Shorts: Batman (1989), The Hot Spot, Poison Ivy, Diamonds, Ice Age, The Cooler
Adam: Theme: Mr. Freeze’s Pros and Cons

Adam: This theme is just me being dumb, but I couldn’t resist. Also, following up Heat with Chill Factor seems funny to me.

Patrick: OMG I love it. There can be no better way to follow up Heat. The trailer block alone has me excited for this one.

Double Feature 9:
Adam: #1: Frances Ha (2012)
Patrick: #2: Barbie (2023)
Patrick: Trailers/Shorts: Greenberg, Mistress America, Jay Kelly
Patrick: Theme: Gerwig/Baumbach

Patrick: I thought it might be fun to do a night devoted to Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach with two movies written by the pair but one directed by each of them. The two movies are different enough that we’ll get totally unique experiences despite being from the same creative team. I’m also hoping to have a magic viewing of Barbie because I've had them for both Lady Bird and Frances Ha in the last year.

Adam: I’m with you on needing the magic viewing on Barbie. I liked it enough when I saw it during my own personal Barbenheimer Night, but I didn’t get into it as much as most people did. This is a great opportunity to give it another shot. I was really annoyed by Frances Ha the first time I saw it and then revisited it years later and absolutely loved it. It might be the biggest turnaround for me of a new movie I watched during my time at F This Movie! I like that lead character so much. She’s messy but in the best possible way and I love that she goes on vacation to Paris just to cave and go see Puss in Boots. I miss Gerwig acting. The directing thing is cool but she’s such a unique personality that I wish she still had star vehicles.

Double Feature 10:

Patrick: #1: Swordfish (2001)
Adam: #2: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Adam: Trailers/Shorts: The Mummy Returns, Planet of the Apes, Ghosts of Mars
Adam: Theme: Summer 2001 Action Movies That Suck

Adam: I have enough nostalgia for Summer 2001 (a summer movie season that seemed to love being a summer movie season) that I even kinda have a soft spot for the bad movies. Swordfish bums me out because it’s one of too many examples of movies where John Travolta overestimates how cool he is. He’s certainly cool up to a time, but 2001 was not one of those years. I remember being bored out of my mind during Lara Croft: Tomb Raider but I would like to revisit it now that I know who Daniel Craig is, which I didn’t in 2001.

Patrick: I have never hated Swordfish but I probably should, right? Like why do I have a soft spot for that movie? I love that you call out Summer 2001 because I have the same affection for even the bad movies, though I have to admit that affection doesn’t quite extend to Tomb Raider. Maybe it’s because I never played the game. I rewatched it maybe a year ago and still found it to be pretty boring. Should I do a Summer 2001 24 Hours of Movies? It would just be an excuse to rewatch a bunch of stuff.

Adam: Yes, I want to read that.

Weekend Open Thread

fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com (fthismovie.com) — Sat, 2 May 2026 02:00:00 -0500