To celebrate our 200th podcast, we take a look at some of the less screened and spoken about movie masterpieces that give us "that feel". Movies like Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Forman's The Fireman's Ball, the Coens' Barton Fink, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire among many others are what Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill calls "lightning bottle movie masterpieces". Movies that give you "that feel" of electric, exciting "I want to do this" moviemaking. We discuss 15 movies in all, including asserting that Citizen Kane, as discussed as it is, is taken for granted and underrated now. Our hope here is that you'll go check out or re-watch a few of these movies and seek out cinema that gives you "that feel" to make amazing movies. 

Filmmaker Blake Winston Rice returns to the pod to talk about his most recent short, DISC, starring Victoria Ratermanis & indie phenom Jim Cummings and how it premiered at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). Blake joined us on SMC Pod #182 to talk about how his short TEA got into the Cannes Film Festival and what it was like to actually attend the world's greatest film fest in person. Now Blake returns to talk about Toronto which is in the Top 5 world film fests and often viewed as the springboard for moviemakers ahead of awards season. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill and Blake talk about what a moviemaker needs to do these days to keep the needle moving forward towards feature work, financing, and career-building. 

October is Halloween season. And Halloween season is always a good time to discover (or re-discover) some of the more hidden yet just as brilliant horror gems in the genre. From Carl Theodor Dryer's 1932 dreamlike VAMPYR to Lucio Fulci's 1971 blunt yet Hitchcockian LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN to Zach Cregger's 2022 breakthrough comedy-horror freakout BARBARIAN to Don Siegel's & Clint Eastwood's 1971 slice of Southern Gothic fever revenge THE BEGUILED to Bill Gunn's 1973 black politics, power, and sexuality art horror GANJA & HESS, these are the movies that will blow your mind. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes you on a spooky tour through the shadow galleries of the vast crypt of horror movie masterpieces. 

In the final part of our three part 2025 series, Is This Cinema?, we look at the 2010 boundary pushing shocking controversial A SERBIAN FILM co-wri & directed by Srdjan Spasojevic which has its advocates like moviemaker Eli Roth and its detractors (many many others). Actor, moviemaker, musician Andras Jones (who did NOT see the movie) and Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (who did) use the movie (which did play big festivals around the world) as the launching point for the third part of their conversation about what actually defines cinema. Andras and Craig work to dig down on what the basic elements are that define cinema. Citizen Kane and Pink Flamingos both come up. And surprisingly Andras and Craig do ultimately come to a definition that works for both of them. 

One of the greatest American movie trilogies has been right under our eyes for decades. Francis Ford Coppola's & team's The Godfather Parts 1, 2, and 3 form one of the most impressive three part movie projects ever attempted. It's easy to overlook this since The Godfather 3 came out 16 years after The Godfather 2 and is not considered at the same level as the first two movies. And yet, despite its definite shortcomings, The Godfather 3 is still one of the best movies of the 1990's and a fascinating and FITTING conclusion to the tragedy of Michael Corleone. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at what it took to make the three movies (it was always a fight) and how they fit together to form one of the few great Shakespearean level tragedies of American cinema. 

Sometimes you have to go see a movie in a theater no matter what. That's a great thing. Auteur moviemaker Paul Thomas Anderson's just released One Battle After Another, shot on the 35mm Vistavision format, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn about a stoner Dad ex-revolutionary trying to save his daughter is just such a movie. What's illuminating, for better and worse, is realizing even with a dynamite movie like this one, the 2025 theater experience needs work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks his theater experience, his admiration for Anderson's movie, and his thoughts-good, bad, ugly-about what where theater going is at in 2025. 

It's one thing to be scared by a ghost story, vampires, or masked killers menacing horny teens in summer camps. It's another thing when you see a movie that forces you to confront horrors that happen everyday around the world. Movies like Hector Babenco's 1981 Brazillian neorealist Pixote about a 10 year old juvenile delinquent struggling in the corrupt reform schools and even more brutal streets. Movies like Elem Klimov's 1985 Come & See which follows wide-eyed Florya as he joins Belurusian partisans in World War II to fight invading nazis only to witness humanity's capacity for limitless atrocities. Movies like Lee Daniel's Precious about a teen girl who has to assert her own dignity in the face of rape, incest, and societal neglect. Movies like Lucas Moodysson's Lilya-4-Ever about how teens can suddenly find themselves being sex-trafficked. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at these and other movies in a search to define what exactly makes these movies so powerful and unbearable. 

A movie star has "it". You can't learn it. You can't fake it. The camera loves you. The audience wants you. Great actors may never be movie stars but they often have long, rewarding careers filled with powerful work even if they never get that huge paycheck. What's interesting though is how often big stars are determined to be recognized as great actors or vice versa.  And it's that grain of sand that often makes a dynamic career. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at movie stars, great actors, and everything in between like Louise Brooks, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Paul Newman among others and tries to figure out. . .what exactly makes a movie star.

One of the fascinating ironies about Los Angeles is that it is often movies in heightened genres like noir that best capture what the city really feels like to those born and raised in it (like this podcaster). Movies like Billy Wilder's acidic Hollywood takedown classic Sunset Boulevard and Roman Polanski's & Robert Towne's 70's new cinema classic Chinatown show sides of the city with a denizen's inside baseball knowledge. But there's also a neorealist strain in the films of John Cassavettes, Charles Burnett, and others that shows Los Angeles from a working class and middle class ground level. The way we actually live our life here. And finally, oddly, 60's and 70's B movies like 1977's totally couldn't be made today "The Van" show LA as it is because the moviemakers couldn't afford a budget to dress it up. They just shot what they could and captured LA without any soft lighting or makeup.  Join Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (a 4th generation Los Angelino) as we discuss some of the known and underground gems that shine a real light on the city we who live here love. 

The Impressario is an archetype the movie industry sorely needs right now. Lorne Michaels, co-creator and longtime producer of Saturday Night Live offers a template and some surprising subtle lessons in what characteristics are needed to thrive in the long game. Michaels is one of the last of a breed that started at the very beginning with boy genius MGM studio head Irving Thalberg and includes folks like agent Sue Mengers, producer Kathleen Kennedy, manager Bernie Brillstein among others. Folks who can aggregate talent, people, power to make a mind boggling body of work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the characteristics these folks share in the hopes we can learn something for the next chapter of cinema. 

1920's German expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did more than inspire a whole kind of cinema-it also became the great-grandparent of a genre. The mind-bending dive into the psyche genre that saw three of its greatest examples all influence each other: Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona which begat in many ways Robert Altman's 1977 3 Women. And all those movies consciously or unconsciously begat David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the journey of inspiration of all these movies as well as side trips to other great examples of the genre like David Fincher's Fight Club, Roman Polanski's Repulsion, and Darren Aronovsky's Black Swan. 

RKO needed money fast in 1943 and they brought on David O Selznick protege Val Lewton to head a unit devoted to cheapie horror movies. The rules-use their titles like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man-then figure out the rest. Lewton miraculously created a cycle of incredible atmospheric literate horror movies, several masterfully directed by genre master Jacques Tourneur, that helped revive the career of Boris Karloff, introduce subtexts like repressed sexuality, acceptance of death, compulsion, and influence many artists like Martin Scorsese and Harlan Ellison. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive into a cycle of movies that prove you can make greatness if you accept your limitations and turn that into the engine of your creativity. 

The Western genre is a home grown art form like jazz and rock and roll. And it occasionally produces really strange and wild movies.  Marlon Brando's incredible 1961 One Eyed Jacks is a western that takes place on California beaches with a psycho-sexual Oedipal focus on a rebel, a father figure, and a step-daughter. Other eccentric westerns like Budd Boetticher's minimalist 1956 Seven Men From Now, John Huston's & John Milius's counter-culture The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, Clint Eastwood's supernatural revenge High Plains Drifter, and S. Craig Lawler's near Cormac McCarthy unbelievably gory yet gripping Bone Tomahawk are all beautiful bizarre outliers. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive and looks at around a dozen of the most eccentric westerns ever made. 

On any given day, you could pick 20 American movies that would show a different cross section of the complex contradictory conflicting aspects of the American character. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill picks 20 including 1928's King Vidor directed The Crowd, the biting 50's satire Ace in the Hole, 70's masterworks like Husbands, Girlfriends, Nashville, Killer of Sheep, Black Caesar, and more recent works that wrestle with American identity like He Got Game, Better Luck Tomorrow, Nomadland, and Killers of the Flower Moon (+many more). On this 4th of July, Secret Movie Club tries to aid the American experiment by taking a look at how our national character has expressed itself in our cinema. 

Thematic trilogies are fascinating and exciting. Though characters may reappear, they are really trilogies around a theme or fascination or concern. Italian master Roberto Rossellini rose to the top of world cinema in the 1940's with his trilogy of movies focused on World War II and its immediate after effects: Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).  The first two movies deal with the war and the occupation of Italy first by Nazis then by American soldiers. The last movie suddenly jumps into the belly of the beast and examines immediate post-WWII deprivation from the point of view of a German boy and his struggling family in a bombed out Berlin.  These movies helped create and define Italian neo-realism and shared a singular focus on war's effects on everyday people. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about these movies and other interesting thematic trilogies like Wong Kar Wai's Love trilogy and Steven Spielberg's 9/11 trilogy along the way.  

As everyone and their cousin is telling you these days, it's the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's classic monster movie blockbuster Jaws (1975). Directed by wunderkind Spielberg when he was only 28 years old (yet had already been a professional director in the TV & movie game at least 8 years), Jaws set the template Hollywood is still chasing: promising young director, huge recognition with a pre-existing IP (intellectual property), massive opening weekend on the most amount of screens, etc. Yet Jaws is still a classic 50 years later (unlike the majority of summer blockbusters) because of how it differs from the rules it established. Secret Movie Club programmer Craig Hammill waxes rhapsodic and caustic about the moviemaker, the movie, the team, and the phenomenon that casts a shadow on the ocean floor over everything so many decades later. 

That's a mouthful! Today, Secret Movie Club programmer talks about the wonders and possibilities of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres and how those wonders/possibilities are beautifully realized in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. To narrow it down, Craig explores 1939's The Wizard of Oz (fantasy), 1972's Solaris (sci-fi), and 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then Craig takes an element from each genre and how it affected or was expressed through Peter Jackson's genius in LOTR. This podcast was a lot to bite off and chew so Craig decided to focus in on three movies.

Every now and then, you have to deep dive an amazing movie to celebrate it. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill sings the praises of journalist turned moviemaker Francesco Rosi's 1962 Italian masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano. It tells the story of famed Sicilian outlaw Giuliano not from his POV but from the POV's of everyone around him-townspeople, police, the Italian government. Shot by master cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo (Fellini's 8 1/2), Giuliano is a cubist Citizen Kane, using film form to tell a political story. Filmmaker Rosi makes a damning movie about political power without being simplistic. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg have all been deeply influenced by this must-see world classic. 

Blake Winston Rice @blakewrice had his life turned inside out when he found out his short film Tea had been accepted for competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Suddenly after years of shorts submissions and rejections, he had less than a month to get ready for the biggest opportunity of his life. Blake talks with Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill about the crazy ride he had last year, what Cannes is really like for those who experience it, and advice he has for everyone fighting the good fight. 

Recent movies like the Latvian animated instant masterpiece Flow, the hilarious and well thought out parody.satire.personal journey indie The People's Joker, the formally daring subjective POV two-hander Nickel Boys, the Romanian dark comedy of the moment Do Not Expect Too Much From the End Of the World, and the musical political horror of the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat among many others show that cinema still has new frontiers to cross, new voices to regenerate the medium, a new chapter for all of us. Secret Movie Club founder.progammer Craig Hammill digs into why these movies feel like beacons of light in the wilderness. And also what may need to happen on the marketing.advertising.exhibition side to re-ignite cinema as pop culture necessity.