Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast (2023) uses all kinds of world-building and three different timelines to explore these ideas–and does so while faithfully adapting a 1903 story by Henry James. It’s the kind of film in which one could be lost in the red arrows that point out movie Easter eggs all over YouTube, but the real draw of the film is its incredible performances and how it combines intricate plotting with emotional weight. One of the many collections of James’s stories that includes “The Beast in the Jungle,” the basis for The Beast, can be found here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a film that uses the simple premise of two men sharing a meal as a vehicle for exploration of how we should live our lives. It asks fundamental questions about happiness and self-fulfillment that it doesn't wholly answer. The Trip (2010) uses the same premise as a way to dramatize two men earnestly debating who does the better impressions of Michael Caine, Al Pacino, and Sean Connery. But for all its playground sensibility, The Trip is not without ideas regarding how friendships are formed and sustained. Join us for a conversation about the real reason why men befriend each other and what they want from each other. Hint: it’s not sympathy, high regard, or a non-judgmental ear. If watching The Trip makes you want to make a reservation at your favorite spot, you may want to first read Adam Reiner’s The New Rules of Dining Out: An Insider's Guide to Enjoying Restaurants. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many movies tell us how to watch them. Whether it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Casablanca, or Rear Window, movies steer the viewers to certain reactions anticipated by their directors long before the first tickets have been sold. Michael Mann’s Miami Vice does this less often than other films (including Mann’s) with spectacular results. Almost twenty years after its release, the film seems to have found a new audience that appreciates Mann’s letting the viewer take the protagonists on their own terms. It’s not a buddy-cop movie, although the cops are friends; it’s not a tale of star-crossed lovers, although that’s plainly there; and it’s not a series of wild shoot-outs, although it culminates in a classic Michael Mann action sequence. The current colloquialism “It is what it is” seems to apply here–and what Miami Vice “is” is a great film, regardless of how it’s categorized. Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s Michael Mann:A Contemporary Retrospective examines Mann’s style, themes since he announced his presence in 1981 with Thief. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every so often, you encounter The Perfect Movie: something with a screenplay, cast, and direction that combine in a way that reminds you of what happens when everyone working on a movie gets it exactly right. History is Made at Night (1937) is one of those movies. Join us for a conversation about how a film that accelerates emotions almost to the level of farce and shifts between genres like a bored teenager with a remote control still dramatizes perfectly what it’s like to fall in love. Hervé Dumont’s 1993 book Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic offers complete coverage of Borzage's entire career: the more than 100 films he made and the effect of those films on movie audiences, especially between 1920 and 1940. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody was shocked when, in 1999, David Lynch released a G-rated film with a Norman Rockwell setting that didn’t have a dark underbelly or wild reveal; if you have a David Lynch bingo card, The Straight Story is the free space. And while The Straight Story is as wholesome a film as you can find, it's never sentimental or corny. Dan thinks it’s Lynch’s best. Join him and Mike as they talk about all the ways that the film could have gone wrong and, more importantly, all the things that Lynch gets right about aging, regret, and family. Any fan of David Lynch’s work should read Room to Dream, Lynch’s memoir that’s as unique as the man himself: the book has alternating chapters of Lynch and his official biographer telling the story of his life. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original quite like Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 film that can be called, without insult, “aggressively two-dimensional.” Join us for a conversation about how Boorman makes the experience of watching a film like the experience of reading the legends. We also talk about the two best portrayals of King Arthur: Nigel Terry and Graham Chapman. If the conversation makes you want to read the original material, you can find a great edition of Le Morte d’Arthur here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a film in which the audience buys its tickets knowing who will play the title role, what happens when you don’t have him enter the frame until a solid hour has passed? How does the focus shift from the horrific villain to the horror felt by his victims? Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) isn’t a faithful retelling of Albert DeSalvo’s crimes or an explanation of his compulsion: he’s not Raskolnikov or Buffalo Bill. Instead, the film masterfully involves its viewers in the procedure of the hunt before throwing them into what feels like a separate one-act play, a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler was the basis for the film: you can find the book here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Flannery O’Connor said that stories about pious children tend to be false. She’s right, of course, but she doesn’t even say the half of it: stories about children in general tend to be false. The kids are always too brave, self-aware, or smart; they’re like the children in medieval paintings who look like miniature adults. If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952) by the Argentine director Carlos Hugo Christensen is the exception: it’s one of the best portrayals of childhood in film history as well as a truly disturbing thriller. If this film has piqued your interest in Argentine noir, check out David George and Gizella Meneses’ Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir to read more about this fascinating genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. You can also check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw it, he sought forgiveness for the errors of his ways. That’s an appropriate theme to consider in light of a film saturated with Italian Catholicism that explores themes of sin and redemption, but with a light touch and in a celebratory mode. It’s a terrific film that couldn’t be made today; listen to the show to learn why. Ira Wells’s Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life is the 2021 biography of the director who worked with almost every A-list star but who also had to often battle the studios to pursue his projects. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love and Mercy A film by Bill Pohlad Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see Brian Wilson’s Kubrick-like devotion to getting Pet Sounds exactly like he wants it, as well as his becoming a whole person through the force of his future wife. The film is a nightmare version of Peter Pan, examining a boy who won’t grow up until he finds the two things mentioned in the title. We all know from history that he does, but the film still keeps us in suspense over whether or not Wilson will make it out of a prison he has unwittingly helped to create. Brian Wilson’s 2017 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, is a perfect companion piece to Love and Mercy. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie’s first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor’s star power ever backfire? John McCarty’s Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from too much exposition is a matter of taste (and debated by the hosts), but both agree that the movie does what only its star can do: deliver thrills that derive from both the plot and the knowledge that what they are seeing is, in some sense, real. Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, and Tom Cruise all make themselves as much of a character in the films as the fictional people they are portraying, which puts the viewer in a strange and wonderful place. Tom Cruise has saved the world yet again, and may (as Steven Spielberg told him) have saved the industry. Want to read about the first film in the franchise? Renowned film editor Paul Hersch’s memoir, A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits–Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Mission: Impossible, and More details his working with Brian DePalma on the first of the eight MI films. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed performances and of Mamet’s highly unrealistic dialogue. (Yes, you read that correctly–and we love David Mamet.) David Mamet’s short book On Directing Film is a great companion to Heist. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s our 300th episode and we honor a listener request for this milestone. The Fisher King (1991) could not be made today–not because of politics or cultural changes, but because it’s impossible to neatly classify. A love story, a tale of redemption, a disturbing study of psychosis, a romantic comedy, and an Artthurian quest, the film combines genres in ways that some audiences–or at least producers–might not appreciate. But the film is hilarious, frightening, and ultimately affirming of its two lead characters’ decisions to abandon their despair and find meaning in their lives. Interested in reading about Terry Gilliam? Check out this collection of interviews from the University of Mississippi Press. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we see demonstrated in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which boldly employs every convention of the horror film in order to achieve a stunning, authentic portrait of a disturbing mind at work. But Mark is no ordinary slasher: he’s an artist who is also a perfectionist and whose compulsion to destroy is like the compulsion to create. As Mark gives his all for the sake of his art, so did Michael Powell, whose reputation never recovered from the scandal of this film. It was released in the same year as Psycho, which it resembles, yet the two audiences across the Atlantic had very different reactions to their homegrown killers. The University Press of Mississippi offers an excellent series of collected interviews. Here’s their volume on Michael Powell. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Picasso said that art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly. Hamlet, Emma, and Citizen Kane are wonderfully constructed lies so convincing that we speak as if we knew their title characters. Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) investigates how this strange phenomena occurs. Under what conditions could something authentic arise from artifice–and what does it mean to have an authentic experience anyway? We all say that we’d be better off living in the real world instead of a fool’s paradise–such as the Matrix–but how much do we really believe that? Join us for a conversation about a great work of art that shows how the sausage of art is made. The University Press of Mississippi offers an excellent series of collected interviews. Here’s their volume on Peter Weir. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack Pages and Frames where he writes about books and movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau said he wanted to “drive life into a corner” and “reduce it to its lowest terms.” We often feel the appeal of that idea: to get away from civilization and really “live.” But would that always be a pleasurable series of epiphanies? Would the natural world always provide a backdrop against which we could explore our “real” selves? Thoureau also said that “a man is free in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.” Sounds good–unless that freedom from society and materialism reduces one to a new and worse kind of servant. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) toys with these questions while simultaneously keeping its audience surprised and off-balance. It’s a movie in which everything is buried in sand and the sand is a metaphor for everything. Woman in the Dunes is based on Kobo Ave’s novel, which you can find here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan’s substack Pages and Frames where he writes about books and movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every Western since Stagecoach seems to have been touted as “about the western.” To what degree is that true for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill’s 1969 contribution to the genre? Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about how the film wonderfully reminds its viewers why they love westerns as it also offers its more hip viewers a vision of an alternative lifestyle–think Easy Rider with horses. Tom Clavin’s Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West is a look at the real-life Butch Cassidy, Sundance, Etta, and others. You can hear Dan’s interview with Tom Clavin here on the New Books Network. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan’s substack Pages and Frames where he writes about the connections between books and movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When George V. Higgins’s first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was published in 1970, it was widely acclaimed as an insider’s look at Boston’s criminal underbelly. Three years later, Peter Yates directed Robert Mitchum in one of his best performances as the mid-level gunrunner who is tempted to help “uncle” by turning in his associates to the cops. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about how Robert Mitchum eating pie is better than a thousand bank robberies and how the dialogue for which Higgins is so rightly praised is like the kind of negotiations we make all the time at work, regardless of what we’re selling. Hide the irons inside that rustling shopping bag and give it a listen! If you’re interested in the terrific novel upon which the film is based, you can find it here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please leave us a rating or review, follow us on X and Letterboxd, email us at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com, and let us know what you’d like us to watch and discuss. Also check out Dan’s Substack site, Pages and Frames, for essays about books and films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine you’re in a bar, holding forth about the news of the day–maybe it’s 1985 and, like everyone else, you’re talking about Iran-Contra, Oliver North, and the CIA. As you signal to the bartender that you’re ready for another, an unassuming, somewhat chubby guy next to you smiles and says, “You really want to know how all of that went down?” Then he begins a two-hour monologue that gets crazier every twenty minutes. American Made is that monologue, shot with all the speed and adrenaline as its artistic model, Goodfellas. Mike and Dan talk about why the immediacy of first-person narrative works so well here and why it wouldn’t work at all with other people’s stories. So bury that duffel bag of cash and then give it a listen! Those interested in a less cinematic look at Iran-Contra may want to read Firewall by Lawrence E. Walsh or Del Hahn’s Smuggler’s End:The Life and Death of Barry Seal. Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for essays and short pieces about books and films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices