A podcast from Bright Wall/Dark Room, engaging with the business of being alive, one movie at a time. Hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman.
A podcast from Bright Wall/Dark Room, engaging with the business of being alive, one movie at a time. Hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman.
It’s officially fall when the NYFF finally ends. In this episode, Veronica sits down with Fran Hoepfner, Frank Falisi, and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 63rd New York Film Festival. This is a spoiler-free conversation.
We get into: Miroirs No. 3, The Mastermind, Late Fame, No Other Choice, With Hasan in Gaza, The Secret Agent, Peter Hujar’s Day, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, A House of Dynamite, Sirāt, Cover-Up, Duse, How to Bake a Cherry Pie
plus: One Battle After Another, Alana Haim sighing, bringing Tupperware to critics screenings, the push to explicit politics in this year’s slate, film critics turned filmmakers, “actual jeers,” settler colonialist ravers, Magellan wasn’t long enough, the corona of fascism, Veronica hasn’t seen anything yet, and more.
Further reading & listening: Look out for more NYFF coverage on Eli’s podcast, Deep Cut. Find Frank at BWDR and Reverse Shot. Find Fran online at Vulture and Fran Mag.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
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You can read every single issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room here, including our most recent issue: Teachers.
We’re also on Bluesky @BWDR and welcome listener feedback & sponsorship inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
Happy 30th birthday to David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Joining us to celebrate is special guest Adam Nayman, Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of, among other books, David Fincher: Mind Games (2021).
We get into: boy movies, the intersections of art and trash, Fincher as mad designer and marketing guru, Veronica can’t do math, canceling Det. Mills, how a spark of ambiguity can incite a book-length study, the undersung editing of Richard Francis-Bruce, the undersung producing prowess of Michael De Luca, what is and is not in the box, and more.
References: Tony Zhou on David Fincher (“And the Other Way is Wrong”), Richard Dyer’s BFI book for Seven, and of course, Adam’s terrific book on Fincher, Mind Games, from Little White Lies/Abrams Books.
The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
Find all 142 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com, and please consider subscribing to the site, which directly helps support this show!
We welcome feedback, inquiries, and sponsorship opportunities at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back to the podcast Michael Koresky (listen here to his first visit, discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence). Michael is MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, out now from Bloomsbury.
Michael joins us to talk about a film from that book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the ‘perfect murder’ cocktail thriller best known for its deceptive formal gambit (shot continuously with “no” cuts) and spectral queerness.
We get into: ways around the Production Code, that Technicolor sunset, Farley Granger’s offscreen persona, Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust doc, the film version of trompe l’oeil, teaching classical Hollywood in a contemporary classroom, the lesser-seen These Three (1936) and Crossfire (1947), and more.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
You can read all 141 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room—including our current Jonathan Demme issue!—at brightwalldarkroom.com.
Feedback and/or sponsorship inquiries: podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
For a taste of summertime sadness, we look at a pick from curator Christos Nikou (Apples [2020] and Fingernails [2023]): Mike Mills’s semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010).
We get into the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as metaphor for life.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Discover more at Galerie.com.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it: Bilge Ebiri—the man, the myth, the legend—joins us to bookend our discussion of all things Mission: Impossible from a couple of summers ago, on the occasion of the final (?) film of a nearly 30 year franchise.
We get into: the perils of Cruise-dom, building an extension on a plane you've already built, Luther!, missing Rebecca Ferguson, decompression chambers & gel manicures, Benji Impossible, no closure, loving these movies, and more.
Relevant reading:
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess. - Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star - Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly
Where Does Tom Cruise Go From Here? - Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
The Entity: On the Technologies of Late Cruisedom - Jadie Stillwell, Bright Wall/Dark Room
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad (and remixed for this episode by Eli).
You can find every single issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com. We welcome comments and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for one month of free access to curated film lists, essays, live discussions, and more at galerie.com, code: BWDR
This message will self-destruct in—
This month's micro edition zooms in on a snappy, passionate moment from Ernst Lubitsch's effervescent screwball,Trouble in Paradise.
We get into: sex in pre-code cinema, eye-widening lines, wikipedia marriage math, the Lubitsch Touch, what does classy even mean?, how a perfect escapist film for 1932 works just as well in 2025, and more.
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Hosts: Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman
Producer: Eli Sands
Music: Chad Perman
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Read the current issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room:
Community (Issue #140)
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.
To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit Galerie.com and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.
Pop quiz, hotshot: join us as we welcome back BWDR veteran and De Palma completist Travis Woods for a special conversation on one of our all-time favorites, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). We get into: repetition compulsion and classical Hollywood storytelling, Keanu’s peak hotness, Speed’s existential lessons, does Jeff Daniels close his eyes?, Mark Mancina’s love theme, what it means to “become bomb,” and more.
Further reading/viewing: Veronica’s BWDR essay on Speed, the comprehensive 50 MPH podcast on the making of Speed, and Keanu Reeves’s vision of a perfect day. Find Travis at BWDR, and here’s another recent piece of his on David Lynch's Wild at Heart over at Southwest Review.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com. We welcome comments and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for one month of free access to curated film lists, essays, live discussions, and more at galerie.com, code: BWDR.
This month’s micro-episode takes us inside the mysterious, sensual brilliance of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, a curated pick from director Ezra Edelman:
"The idea of wanting to live with purpose, even if it’s someone else’s purpose—there’s just something so human about it."
We get into: the comfort of slow cinema that doesn't feel slow, the aesthetics of existential malaise, the virility of 70s'-era Nicholson, the intensity of traveling relationships, and more.
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Bonus Feature: We'll be hosting a special live discussion on The Passenger over at Galerie on May 20th at 3pm EST/12pm PST. We'd love to have you join the conversation!
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Hosts: Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman
Producer: Eli Sands
Editor: Buczar
Music: Chad Perman
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.
To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit Galerie.com and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.
This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién, author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses, where she recently started writing about “Movies That Fuck.” In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance. We get into: Roman Coppola’s practical effects, Keanu’s accent work, crossing oceans of time to find you, Michael Ballhaus (and whether this is the dark b-side of The Age of Innocence), Eiko Ishioka with the muscle armor and tiny glasses, do young people want to be turned on by the movies (or at all), and more.
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Further reading/viewing:
The Costumes are the Sets (a 15-minute doc on the film’s Oscar-winning costumes), and James Hart on the transformation of Dracula’s script.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.
To enjoy one month of Galerie for free—and then receive 50% off the next three months—visit Galerie.com and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.
This month's bite-sized episode zooms in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg's debut film, The Celebration (1998), one of Palestinian director/writer/producer Annemarie Jacir's curated picks.
We get into: Dogme 95, family gatherings as horror movies, the generative energy of stylistic constraints, dynamic chaos, ghostly POVs, and finding something in a film that's a little bit in excess of what the film seems to think it's doing.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.
To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit Galerie.com and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.
In honor of guest Michael Koresky's new book announcement, we're revisiting this conversation with him from last summer about Steven Spielberg's A.I.
Michael's new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, will be out from Bloomsbury in June.
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Reverse Shot co-founder and editor, and Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image Michael Koresky joins us to proselytize Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Michael takes us back to being an intern in 2001, watching A.I. six times in theaters, how both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick do “sentimentality with a point,” Jude Law’s dialogue, parables of loss, and how this “unexpected sledgehammer” of 00s’ filmmaking sticks with him today.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
You can find all 135+ issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room online at brightwalldarkroom.com. We're on Bluesky at @bwdr and @bwdrpod, and welcome feedback and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now enjoy 3 months of free access to Galerie by signing up here.
We’re back with an episode analyzing writer-director Aaron Schimburg’s Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man.
Joining us is critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi, co-founder of Garden State Lantern. We get into Adam Pearson’s Oscar snub and Sebastian Stan’s win, The Substance for boys, shooting in NYC, if you want to dance the mask, the humanism of karaoke, doing your life wrong, self-image as self-esteem, and what it means to never change a bit.
Further reading: Le Cinema Club’s interview with Aaron Schimburg, RogerEbert.com’s interview with Schimburg, Adam Pearson, and Sebastian Stan, and Screen Slate Podcast’s episode with Schimburg (and a few cameos from the film).
The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings, and more at join.galerie.com.
Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com. Holy trinity: please give us a follow, rate the pod, give a review. We welcome feedback and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com. Happy new year.
Our first mini-episode of 2025 looks to one of director Andrew Haigh’s curated picks: Billy Wilder’s subversive farce Some Like It Hot.
We get into the unlikely modernity of Hot’s sexual politics, Orry-Kelly’s naked dresses, Wilder’s collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond, is this the greatest comedy of all time, and more.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for three months of free access to Galerie's streaming library, curated film lists, essays, live screenings and more at join.galerie.com.
Be thankful we did your Gladiator II homework, rewatching Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 1 (2000) with amateur Russell Crowe historian Blake Howard.
This is a Gladiator II-spoiler-free conversation: listen as we get into Crowe kissing disembodied feet, Scott’s world-building, the technology of acting, Oliver Reed’s digitized face (RIP), is anything better than practical effects, expressionism vs. historical accuracy, and more. Gladiator: a good movie.
Further reading: here’s Gladiator cinematographer John Mathieson on returning to the sequel after 24 years.
The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for 3 months of free access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings, and more at join.galerie.com.
You can find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room here. Holy trinity: please give us a follow, rate the pod, give a review. We’re on Bluesky at @BWDR and @BWDRPod, and welcome feedback & inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
This month’s mini-episode takes us into the rich opening sequence of a pick curated by director Andrew Haigh: Nicolas Roeg’s Venetian nightmare, Don’t Look Now .
We get into Graeme Clifford’s expressionist editing, celebrating movies for grownups, the color red, non-chronology, grief, and what lies “beyond the fragile geometry of space.”
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for 3 months of free access to Galerie's curated film lists, essays, live screenings & more at join.galerie.com.
This holiday season, we're revisiting last year's holiday special: an audio essay of one of the most popular articles we've every published on the site: Ethan Warren's A Grand Yuletide Theory: The Muppet Christmas Carol is the Best Adaptation of A Christmas Carol.
Written and read by Ethan himself, with holiday music from Ryan Pollie.
(Originally aired December 17, 2023)
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We'll be back later this month with two brand new pods, but in the meantime:
Happy Holidays from Bright Wall/Dark Room!
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for three months of free access to Galerie by using this special link.
On this special mega episode, co-host Veronica sits down with critic Fran Hoepfner and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 62nd New York Film Festival. This is a mainly spoiler-free conversation!
We get into: Hard Truths, Caught by the Tides, Nickel Boys, April, Harvest, The Brutalist, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Shrouds, Queer, Maria, Stranger Eyes, Eephus, I’m Still Here, Anora, The Room Next Door, one stray line about Misericordia, plus: wife guy directors, the surveillance motif, doing Mike Leigh homework, critic versus public screenings, do we need subtitles to understand Scottish accents, stop describing Brutalist as monumental, are movies too long, Almodóvar’s secret to killing it at Q&A, what lipstick is Mikey wearing in Anora, and more.
Further reading and listening: Fran’s NYFF report for Bright Wall/Dark Room and her incredible piece on Dick Pope, and more of Eli on the festival at Deep Cut. Find Fran online at Fran Mag, Twitter, and Letterboxd.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
Please: follow, rate, review!
Find all 135 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com (and be sure to check out our upcoming November issue, Neo-Noir 2024). We’re on Twitter (@BWDR and @TheBWDRPodcast), Bluesky, and Letterboxd, and welcome feedback and ad/sponsorship inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. Listeners can currently sign up for three months of full access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings and much more at join.galerie.com.
This month’s mini-episode takes us into one of costume designer Sophie de Rakoff’s curated picks: Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), an American giallo with style to spare. We get into Faye Dunaway’s scream, POV in horror, how this is Helmut Newton x John Carpenter, the ethics of glamorizing suffering, and, yes, the clothes.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for three full months of free access to curated film lists, essays, live screenings and more here.
This whole episode is a trap. In it, we join Josh Hartnett scholar and The Film Stage gentleman Dan Mecca to dissect the ins and outs of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap.
We talk about: baby bangs, Hartnett always being a little bit weird, the tooth gap, Sleeping with the Enemy’s hand towels, auteur theory, one good part in The Village, Hayley Mills on the walkie-talkie, and more.
Further reading: Dan’s interview with Hartnett for Film Stage, Nicholas Russell’s M. Night Shyamalan essay for BWDR, and you can even run it back to Dan’s first-ever The B-Side episode on Hartnett himself.
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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.
You can find all 134 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room, including our most recent issue on Spike Lee, at brightwalldarkroom.com. Please help us find more ears: follow, rate, comment, leave us a review!
This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for 3 full months of free access to curated film lists & streaming films, essays, live screenings and much more at join.galerie.com.
Inspired by the curation of costume designer Sophie de Rakoff, this month we're taking a loving look at the gear-shifting, hybrid charms of Jonathan Demme's screwball noir, Something Wild—and the Ray Liotta entrance that changes everything.
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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for 3 months of free access here.