Oppenheimer
Remember when Christopher Nolan made indies? We don’t either. Gone are the days of Memento and Insomnia, movies buoyed to success by raw power and word-of-mouth. Now every film Nolan makes is…
Latest Podcasts
Cocaine Bear + Summer Mailbag
On a hot summer night in June, Jon Butrin drove to Kansas City, MO to visit Tim Nelson for four days. They went swimming, ate barbecue, and watched Cocaine Bear….
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Nine years ago Guardians of the Galaxy burst on the scene like a breath of fresh air. Just as Marvel was starting to become repetitive and stale, Gunn introduced a brand new…
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the Top Gun: Maverick of 2023. A movie you go into expecting nothing and walk out from in movie heaven. How can a film based…
Babylon
Damien Chazelle burst onto the scene with 2014’s Whiplash, a perfect film and one of the most memorable theater experiences of all time. Two incredible movies followed: La La Land and First Man….
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg. The name associated with the biggest moments in movie history. From killer sharks to Oskar Schindler, Spielberg re-defined movie magic, touched our hearts, and brought out the child…
Latest Articles
The Sins of the Father and the Redemption of Indiana Jones
In anticipation of The Dial of Destiny, I have been rewatching and reconsidering the Indiana Jones franchise films. I’m a little hesitant about the extent to which James Mangold’s addition…
Steven Spielberg Made Me Believe I Could Fly
The final scene of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial remains a memorable and poignant moment for me replete with the distinct John Williams score in which the trumpets and tympanies accentuate…
Oscars 2023 — Who Should Win (Part Two)
Welcome to part two of our Oscar picks! Here’s part one if you missed it: Oscars 2023 – Who Should Win? (Part One) Remember, these aren’t the movies that will…
Oscars 2023 — Who Should Win? (Part One)
2022 will forever be known as the return to normal. After two years of our lives being frozen by Covid, 2022 was the year where old routines once again took…
Christopher Nolan in Three Acts
If you take Christopher Nolan’s work as a whole, it’s possible to discern the emergence of a common concept — what we might call a narrative MacGuffin unifying all his…
The Gospel According to Top Gun
NOTE: We just released a podcast about Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel 36 years in the making. Listen in as Jon and Tim dig in to the themes and why…
Black Lives Matter
Just Mercy
Reproductive justice. Climate justice. Food justice. Social justice. Append the word “justice” to any other word and you’ve got a ready-made brand platform for niche activism. As cultural forces shape…
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
At the end of the day, we’re all just looking for a place to call home. Movies have long wrestled with this sentiment and not just in a physical sense….
A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich
Politicians, journalists and experts rarely agree, but they have all named the current opioid situation a plague. It’s an appropriate word, with historical and biblical connotations; in every generation, our…
If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best…
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
My Spider-Man was the 1981 “Spider-Friends” version, complete with invented sidekicks, incomprehensible Saturday morning subplots, shoddy animation, and a little dog too (spoiler: they were all killed off by a…
Claudine
“I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical,…
Sapphire
“We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t…
Black Panther
I didn’t expect to feel tears stream down my face so shortly into Black Panther, but within the first few minutes of the film, I was already impacted heavily. In…
Mudbound
As a child, like many others, I loved to play in the mud. We had a “sandpile” next to our barn that was about 25% sand with the rest dirt,…
