The Projection Booth
The Projection Booth is a film discussion podcast that covers a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis. The show regularly features special guest talent who discuss their past cinematic gems. It has been recognized as a premier film podcast by notable publications such as The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine.
Episodes
Special Report: Marcus Heslop on Frantastic!
Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books du
Special Report: Following Harry (2025)
Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access
Special Report: Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way.Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interv
Special Report: This is Buzz (2026)
There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into
Special Report: The Squirrel (2026)
What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper an
Special Report: Galicia! (2026)
What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown F
Special Report: Big Girls Don't Cry (2026)
Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about b
Special Report: Double Trouble (2026)
Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.P
Special Report: A Prayer for the Dying (2026)
Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, w
Special Report: Donkey Princess (2026)
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fue
Special Report: Ephemera (2026)
Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Ric
Special Report: Bella Gonzales on Ted Lasso 4
Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English lo
Special Report: Family (2026)
First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor passed that script to a literary manager, how a self-shot fake trailer (made in the house he grew up i
Special Report: Never After Dark (2026)
Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix a
Special Report: The Deputy (2026)
First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocate
Special Report: Hellbilly Hollow (2026)
After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) an
Special Report: Digger (2026)
The Projection Booth and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debat
Special Report: Murder at the Movies (2026)
Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Si
Special Report: Appofeniacs (2026)
Music-video veteran Chris Marrs Piliero (The Black Keys, Kesha, Ariana Grande) traces his feature debut, Appofeniacs, to two obsessions: the ease of deepfake manipulation, and apophenia — our compulsion to find connections in things that aren't actually connected. He tells Mike White how fan theories about his own music videos (imagined hidden messages, imagined Illuminati symbolism) convinced him
Special Report: Beware Boiúna (2026)
"What if Sorcerer was a creature feature?" That question is what unlocked Beware Boiúna for director Mike P. Nelson, who tells Mike White how William Friedkin's doomed-expedition structure — immerse the audience in an environment, let it become a character, then release the beast — became his blueprint after he initially turned down a "giant snake movie" pitch from producers Jeremy Bolt and Robert
Special Report: The World of Nancy Kwan
Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Je
Special Report: Take Me Home (2026)
When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.Sargent traces her path from modern d
Special Report: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025)
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar t
Special Report: Digital Kitchen's Titles for Smoke and Spider-Noir
Digital Kitchen's Mason Nicoll and Andrew "AJ" Julien talk with Mike about designing the Emmy-nominated title sequences for Spider-Noir and Smoke. They walk through the studio's pitch process, from log-line-only briefs to full pilot screenings, and how Spider-Noir's period-accurate 1931 noir look came from surrealist photography, Man Ray, Seconds, and a Lady from Shanghai homage they didn't know t
Special Report: Girl in the Night (2026)
Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer.Marčetić traces the film from a o
Special Report: Littermates (2026)
Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse
Special Report: Lou Ferrigno on Hard Redemption (2026)
Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdow
Special Report: Sick (2026)
Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into somethin
Episode 815: The Salton Sea (2002)
Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and
Special Report: What Happened to Doris?
Nick Simon talks with Mike about What Happened to Doris? (2026), his film revisiting the real case that inspired The Entity (1982). Doris Bither was a Culver City single mother whose reports of violent supernatural attacks drew paranormal investigators from UCLA and became one of the most documented hauntings in American history. Simon developed the project with the blessing of Doris's real son, B
Special Report: Peter M. Hoffman on Karmic Winds
Peter M. Hoffman talks with Mike about Karmic Winds: Reflections from the "Smartest Guy in Hollywood", his memoir written largely in pencil during an eight-month prison sentence for a tax-credit case a federal judge had already ruled legal. Hoffman traces his path from Yale tax law into the movie business, tax-engineering Superman for Alex Salkind, working with manager Albert Grossman, and untangl
Special Report: Baby Doe (2025)
Director Jessica Earnshaw talks with Mike about Baby Doe (2025), her documentary on Gail, tried decades after a newborn's 1993 death, and the phenomenon of pregnancy denial. Earnshaw traces her path from photojournalism, including a National Geographic essay on aging in prison, to her debut Jacinta, and how the film began with Emily Weaver's case before an appeals delay sent her searching for anot
Special Report: Best of the Best (2026)
Director Lena Khan talks with Mike about Best of the Best (2026), her Bollywood-fusion dance comedy for Netflix from writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Khan traces her path from UCLA activism and music videos to her debut The Tiger Hunter, and how Minhaj and Venkataramanujam brought her on after asking for script notes and liking what she said.They dig into the rewrite process, K
Special Report: Cassie Workman is Witchy AF
Cassie Workman talks with Mike about her new horror-comedy series, Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, a puppet-and-drawings deep dive into occult history that plays, in Mike's words, like "a demented kid show." Workman traces her path from stand-up in Perth, Australia, and a run as head writer on The Aaron Chen Show, to fusing comedy and the occult into a series she finally pitched after years on the ba
Special Report: Mooch (2026)
Failure becomes a creative strategy in Mooch, Jeff Ryan’s scrappy New Jersey crime comedy about a nearly thirty-year-old caddie who stumbles into private-eye work. Mike talks with the film’s writer, director, editor, and star about transforming a teenage insult into an intensely personal character, channeling Jim Carrey’s physical fearlessness and the Coen brothers’ off-kilter language, and buildi
Special Report: To Use a Mountain (2026)
When government planning turns communities into maps and statistics, whose lives disappear from the page? Mike talks with director Casey Carter about To Use a Mountain, his visually arresting journey through six American sites considered for a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Carter traces the film from his study of photography, physics, and architecture to six years of fieldwork, relationship-
Special Report: Ah Girl (2026)
A child’s inner life deserves to be taken seriously. Mike talks with writer-director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla about Ah Girl, her tender, funny feature debut set amid family fracture in 1994 Singapore. Ang traces the film’s decade-long path from painful autobiographical memories to a story of healing, explains how counseling transformed the script, and reveals how play, trust, and close observation
Special Report: Occupational Hazard - The First Coral Reefers (2026)
John H. Cunningham and Ted E. Haynes talk with Mike about Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers, their documentary on the founding members of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band. The pair met at the Key West Film Festival and set out to make a short about steel guitarist Roger Bartlett; six interviews in, they knew they had a feature, and by the time they wrapped in April 2025 they'd shot eig
Episode 814: Tombstone (1993)
Mike White is joined by El Goro and Jedidiah Ayres to discuss George P. Cosmatos's 1993 Western Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer in his career-defining turn as Doc Holliday. The conversation digs into Kevin Jarre’s ambitious original screenplay, his short-lived stint as director, Kurt Russell’s unusually hands-on role after Jarre was fired, and the material that disapp
Special Report: By Hook or By Crook (2001)
Harry Dodge and Silas Howard talk with Mike about By Hook or By Crook, their 2001 queer-cinema landmark, now touring U.S. theaters and streaming on VOD in a new 4K restoration. The pair met working at a dyke-run cafe in late-1980s San Francisco, and trace the film's origin story to an absurdly literal turning point: Dodge getting a cigarette-littering ticket that forced a thirteen-hour drive to Po
Special Report: Penny Lane is Dead (2026)
Mia-Kate Russell talks with Mike about Penny Lane Is Dead, her Ozploitation slasher debut, now streaming on Shudder. After twenty years as a film and TV makeup artist, Russell wrote and shot the film off the back of five self-funded shorts, drawing on her own delinquent 1980s Australian childhood and a long-held urge to put a genuinely awful teenage girl on screen — the impulse that became Penny's
Special Report: Splash City (2026)
Berner talks with Mike about Splash City, the crime thriller he co-wrote, co-directed, produced, and financed himself — inspired by San Francisco's real-life "bipping" (smash-and-grab) epidemic. The Bay Area rapper and Cookies cannabis founder describes handing his own outline to co-writer David to build into a full screenplay, turning over most of the directing to his creative partner Alex, and s
Special Report: Teenage Wasteland (2025)
Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine talk with Mike about Teenage Wasteland, their documentary premiering on Netflix September 4th. The film resurrects five hundred hours of decaying VHS tape shot between 1991 and 1997 by English teacher Fred Isseks and his Middletown, New York, students as they investigated a toxic dump — and stumbled into a conspiracy involving organized crime and cover-ups reaching th
Special Report: Music Editor Ben Schor
Music can build suspense, reveal emotion, and reshape a scene—but who ensures that it works in harmony with the picture? Mike talks with Emmy-winning music editor Ben Schor about the often-invisible craft of guiding a production’s score from the earliest temp tracks through recording and the final mix. Schor traces his path from singer-songwriter to film and television, beginning with Gigli and de
Special Report: Hot Spot (2026)
Mike talks to director Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure) along with stars Andrzej Konopka and Noomi Rapace about their new film Hot Spot (2026). It's a dystopian detective story about where Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) investigates a murder at a refugee camp at the behest of a sentient A.I. where he encounters a witch named Rana (Noomi Rapace).Find out more at https://www.focusfeatures.com/hot-spotBecom
Episode 813: Kill Me Again (1989)
Rob Spencer joins Mike and Jedidiah Ayres -- our full-time co-host for this Val-halla series -- as we discuss some Val Kilmer films. We start with the neo-noir Kill Me Again (1989). Written by David Warfield and John Dahl (who also directed), it stars Kilmer as a private detective who's hired by the two-timing Fay (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) who's on the run from the psychotic Vince "Vega" Miller (Mic
Special Report: Saving Ferris Butler (2026)
DB Frick and director Julius Olivas talk with Mike about Saving Ferris Butler, their scrappy, sub-$30,000 documentary chasing down the wildest claim in comedy history: that Ferris Butler, a fired 1980-81 Saturday Night Live writer and the mind behind the underground cable-access sketch show Waste Meat News, is the real inspiration for John Hughes's Ferris Bueller. Frick met Butler at a New York op
Special Report: A Safe Distance (2026)
Gloria Mercer and Aidan West talk with Mike about A Safe Distance (2026), their scrappy, off-grid Canadian crime thriller that started as a pandemic-era proof-of-concept short and grew into a full-blown Bonnie-and-Clyde riff shot on borrowed forest properties outside Vancouver. Mercer directs and West writes, and the two — longtime collaborators since their Simon Fraser University film school days
Special Report: Permanent Damage (2026)
Director Seth A. Smith joins Mike for a Special Report from the Fantasia International Film Festival on Permanent Damage (2026), his fairy-tale crime comedy about escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald), who holes up in a condemned Halifax housing complex and falls for Joe (Olivia Scriven), niece of the brutal landlord (Stephen Dorff) whose "golden goose" the two of them plan to steal.Smith t
Special Report: Ancestral Beasts (2026)
Writer-director Tim Riedel joins Mike for Ancestral Beasts (2026), a Red River Métis horror feature in which Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) retreats to a remote family cabin after her mother's death and finds something in the woods that feeds on everything she won't face.Riedel traces the film back to his mother's Sixties Scoop childhood and her later borderline personality disorder diagnosis — the crea
Episode 808: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Rob St. Mary and Josh Hadley join Mike for The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked western about Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his aging outlaws chasing one last job against Robert Ryan's bounty hunter (and former member of the gang). When one of their own, Angel, is taken by Mexican warlord Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), the gang has to decide if they're going to abandon or rescue the
Special Report: Spider-Man - Brand New Day (2026)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day argues a hero can be both the mask and the man, no universe reset required. Mike welcomes Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast for a crossover dissecting Destin Daniel Cretton's grounded, detective-flavored entry in the Tom Holland era, one that ditches multiverse noise for a genuine emotional throughline between Peter Parker and a scene-stealing Sadie Sink.Mike and Chris unp
Special Report: Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light (2024)
How do you make a documentary about an artist so iconic she's practically wallpaper — flowers, bones, desert light, done to death? Filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner set out to demythologize Georgia O'Keeffe instead, and Mike sits down with the married directing team to talk about it. They trace the project from a small University of Virginia exhibit revealing O'Keeffe's forgotten Charl
Episode 812: Cut-Throats Nine (1972)
A gold-plated chain gang, a snowbound death march, and a father hunting a killer who's already survived the trip: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent closed out his western career with Cut-Throats Nine (1972), still cited as the goriest Spanish western ever made.Mike talks with Nick Schlegel and Heather Drain about how Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and daughter Cathy (Emma Cohen) end up stranded with se
Special Report: Never Change (2026)
You don't usually think about the editor when a comedy lands its jokes, but editor Whit Conway is exactly why Never Change! moves the way it does. Mike talks with Conway about a career built on doing a little bit of everything — Chicago advertising work, Second City, SNL's pre-tape department, DP'ing for The Late Show, directing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! — and how that generalist grounding prepared h
Special Report: Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer
What if America's most famous uncaught serial killer was never one man at all? Eddie McNamara — former NYPD officer, 9/11 first responder, and author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer — joins Mike to argue the Zodiac wasn't a criminal mastermind but a myth stitched together from unrelated crimes, media hunger, and one compromised homicide detective. Drawing on police files, F
Episode 811: The Outfit (1973)
Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — said only one movie made from a Parker novel "got the feeling right." That's John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin, out of prison to find his brother murdered by the mob over a bank job. Rather than run, Macklin runs at them, hitting every vulnerable Outfit operation until they pay. Joe Don Baker and Karen Black co-star
Special Report: A Century of Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock remains cinema's Master of Suspense a century after directing his first film, but decades of biography have blurred the line between the man and the myth. Mike talks with author Tony Lee Moral about his sixth Hitchcock book, A Century of Hitchcock, and the archival discovery that reshaped it: a 36-page 1980 transcript of biographer Donald Spoto's own interview with Tippi Hedren.Mo
Special Report: Rubberhead (2026)
Nick Taylor built The Nick Taylor Horror Show by asking filmmakers how they actually got their movies made — an unofficial film school he later put to use directing his own feature. Mike talks with Taylor about turning that same curiosity on Steve Johnson, the special makeup effects legend behind Slimer, the Fright Night vampires, and the Howling werewolves, and a childhood hero whose success vali
Episode 810: Deadlock (1970)
Roland Klick's Deadlock (1978) strips the spaghetti western down to its bones — no horses, no heroism, just three men and a suitcase in the Negev. When the wounded Kid (Marquard Bohm) staggers out of the desert clutching stolen cash, Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) sees an opportunity. When the cold-eyed Mr. Sunshine (Anthony Dawson) arrives to collect, the triangle tightens. Klick shoots it all like a
Episode 809: Cemetery Without Crosses (1969)
Vengeance never ends — that's the warning Manuel issues early in Robert Hossein's 1969 Cemetery Without Crosses , and the film spends the next ninety minutes proving him right. When the widow Maria hires the black-gloved, spiritually exhausted gunslinger to avenge her husband's murder at the hands of the powerful Rogers family, she sets in motion a cycle of brutality that punishes the innocent alo
Special Report: We Are Pat (2025)
Thirty years ago, Saturday Night Live's "It's Pat" turned gender ambiguity into a recurring punchline. Today, the question of what to do with that legacy — and who gets to answer it — is anything but simple.Mike talks with director Ro Haber about We Are Pat, their feature documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it earned a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Direct
Special Report: Fantasia 2026
July in Montreal means Fantasia is back. Mike offers his annual curtain raiser for the Fantasia International Film Festival — one of the great genre film festivals on the planet — running July 16th through August 2nd, 2026.This year's lineup spans Nicolas Winding Refn's mist-shrouded sci-fi nightmare Her Private Hell (opening night), a 147-minute samurai epic from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Agnieszka Smocz
Special Report: Mortal Kombat II (2026)
Finish him. Or at least finish the plot. Mortal Kombat II arrives with the promise of the full tournament, a new roster of fighters, and the long-awaited arrival of Johnny Cage — played by Karl Urban — as the wisecracking Earthrealm champion fans have been demanding since 2021.Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast take on Simon McQuoid's sequel to the 2021 reboot, written by Jeremy Slate
Special Report: We Are Guardians (2023)
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous forest guardians risk their lives to defend ancestral lands from illegal loggers — and the fate of the entire rainforest hangs in the balance. We Are Guardians follows indigenous guardian Marçal Guajajara and indigenous leader Puyr Tembé as they stand at the frontlines of this fight, while on the other side, illegal logger Valdir struggles to survive and se
Special Report: Supergirl (2026)
She's not her cousin. Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) arrived on screen in Supergirl with a chip on her shoulder and a body count on her conscience — a cosmic revenge story light-years removed from the sunnier mythology of Superman. Whether the DCU's second theatrical outing delivered on that premise is another question entirely.Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast dig into Craig Gillespie's
Special Report: King Kong - The History of a Movie Icon
From his 1933 debut as a tragic fairy-tale monster to his current reign over an ever-expanding Monsterverse, King Kong has spent more than ninety years proving that beauty isn't the only thing capable of killing the beast — time certainly hasn't.Mike talks with film historian and self-described Kongophile Ray Morton about the revised and updated edition of his book King Kong: The History of a Movi
Special Report: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
This is the Way — but is it the right way to bring the galaxy's most beloved odd couple to the big screen? After three seasons on Disney+, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu trade the small screen for an IMAX-sized adventure, with the stakes raised and the runtime expanded accordingly.Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast discuss Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Fav
Episode 807: Massacre Time (1966)
Western month begins here. Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966)) arrived in the wake of Django riding a wave of Italian genre fever, and it announced something different lurking inside the spaghetti Western: a director with a genuine appetite for cruelty. Franco Nero plays Tom Corbett, a gold prospector summoned back to a hometown now wholly owned by the Scott family — their name on every building,
Special Report: Disclosure Day (2026)
The truth belongs to seven billion people. That's the promise of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction and to the extraterrestrial obsessions that have haunted his work since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Whether audiences are ready to believe is a different matter.Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast sit down with the summer's most buzzy Spielberg event fil
Special Report: Doc Meets World (2026)
Thirty years after Boy Meets World made them household names, Danielle Fishel (Topanga), Rider Strong (Shawn), and Will Friedle (Eric) launched a rewatch podcast and hit the road — and directors Chris Levitus and Zane Rubin were there to capture it all. Mike talks with Levitus and Rubin about Doc Meets World, their feature documentary premiering at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival.The two filmmakers
Special Report: Jackass: Best and Last (2026)
Twenty-five years ago, a group of idiots convinced MTV to let them hurt themselves on television. Now, Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew are back one last time — older, creakier, and somehow still willing to do things that no sane human being would consider.Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast pay their respects to Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and final installment in the franc
Special Report: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2025)
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver inspired millions with her celebrations of nature, attention, and the examined life — yet she remained one of American literature's most intensely private figures. Filmmaker Sasha Waters spent years building an intimate portrait of Oliver from the inside out: sifting through thirty to forty boxes of correspondence, notebooks, and personal photographs before
Special Report: Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror (2025)
Fifty years on, The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history — and it shows no signs of stopping. Linus O'Brien, son of creator Richard O'Brien, joins Mike to discuss Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, his feature documentary tracing Rocky's unlikely journey from a Royal Court Theatre upstairs production to a global midnight-screening phen
Episode 806: The Postman (1997)
Sci-fi month concludes with one of the great cinematic boondoggles of the '90s. Kevin Costner directs and stars in The Postman (1997), playing a wandering drifter who stumbles into a postal uniform and accidentally becomes the savior of a shattered America, restoring hope and democracy one undelivered letter at a time. Standing in his way: General Bethlehem (Will Patton), a Shakespeare-quoting war
Special Report: Boy George and Culture Club (2025)
Few bands burned brighter—or more colorfully—than Culture Club, and director Alison Ellwood joins Mike to unpack the making of her acclaimed documentary Boy George & Culture Club. From the group's improbable formation and meteoric rise to the personal relationships, creative tensions, and heartbreak that shaped their music, Ellwood reveals how she crafted an intimate portrait using the voices
Episode 805: I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
What kind of man doesn't drink, avoids women, and prefers the company of other strange men in the park? Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) plays the alien-infiltration premise with surprising melancholy and remarkable restraint for a film with such a lurid title. Mike, Bill Ackerman, and Ben Buckingham dig into the film's overlapping readings — Cold War paranoia, the Lav
Special Report: Dear Upstairs Neighbors (2026)
Editor Sarah Affleck pulls back the curtain on one of filmmaking's most invisible—and essential—arts. From cutting reality television to shaping animated features at LAIKA and Pixar, Affleck traces her journey through the editing room while explaining why animation offers creative possibilities unlike any other medium.The conversation dives into her work on the acclaimed animated short Dear Upstai
Special Report: Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul (2026)
Gregg Allman lived inside the central contradiction of American music — a white Southern kid who built his art on the blues, fled his demons while pouring them into song, and emerged as one of rock's most essential voices. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces that journey from a childhood shattered by his father's murder to the soulful authority the Allman Brothers Band carved out through rel
Episode 804: Dark City (1998)
Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Alex Proyas's Dark City (1998), the tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-ro
