The Next Picture Show

The Family That’s Prey Together, Pt. 2 — The End of Oak Street

The Platt family is barely surviving, and that’s before their neighborhood is inexplicably dropped millions of years into the past and overrun by hungry dinosaurs. The En

The Family That's Prey Together, Pt. 1 — War of the Worlds (2005)

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street drops an ordinary family into extraordinary circumstances, forcing them to focus all their energy on surviving— and maybe, j

Anyone Can Cook, Pt. 2 — Tony

Matt Johnson’s new biopic Tony sidesteps the infamous Walk Hard trap by narrowing its scope to a single summer that would end up shaping the rest of Anthony Bourdain’s li

#535: Anyone Can Cook, Pt. 1 — Ratatouille

Anthony Bourdain, whose early experience working in a restaurant kitchen is chronicled in the new biopic Tony, once singled out Ratatouille as Hollywood’s best depiction

Home Sweet Homer, Pt. 2 — The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey approaches Homer’s epic from a much more literal vantage point than O Brother Where Art Thou, but that doesn’t mean it’s a dutiful, beat-b

Home Sweet Homer, Pt. 1 — O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Considering The Odyssey is one of the most famous and influential stories of all time, there had been relatively few attempts to directly translate Homer’s epic poem to t

Lady Justice, Pt. 2 — Supergirl

A good chunk of Supergirl’s DNA can be traced back to True Grit by way of the comics miniseries the film is adapting, which is why we paired it with Joel and Ethan Coen’s

Lady Justice, Pt. 1 — True Grit (2010)

The new Supergirl isn’t an outright adaptation of the comic-book miniseries Woman of Tomorrow, but it retains enough of its shape that it evokes that comic’s own source o

Our Aliens, Ourselves Pt. 2 — Disclosure Day

Forty-four years after his science-fiction classic about the deep connection between a 10-year-old human boy and an alien visitor stranded on earth, Steven Spielberg is o

Our Aliens, Ourselves Pt. 1 — E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Disclosure Day is not Steven Spielberg’s first film about the confirmation of alien life, nor is it the first such Spielberg film we’ve discussed on this podcast — that w

Negative Spaces, Pt. 2 — Backrooms

Backrooms’ journey to the big screen — from anonymous 4chan post to viral creepypasta to mega-popular YouTube series to A24-backed box-office smash — is as unique and une

Negative Spaces, Pt. 1 — Phantasm

20-year-old Kane Parsons is now the youngest director to ever hit No. 1 at the box office thanks to his A24-backed horror film Backrooms, which made back its budget sever

Baby on Board, Pt. 2 — The Mandalorian and Grogu

The Mandalorian and Grogu plays like a few stitched-together episodes of The Mandalorian, which makes it a particularly apt pairing with the 1980 Lone Wolf and Cub assemb

Baby on Board, Pt. 1 — Shogun Assassin (1980)

The Mandalorian and Grogu gives the feature-film treatment to a streaming series whose premise — an outcast warrior lives by a code of honor while traveling in the compan

Burden of Hoof, Pt. 2 – The Sheep Detectives

Kyle Balda’s new family film The Sheep Detectives pulls off a move George Miller was dissuaded from including in his 1998 sequel Babe: Pig in the City — killing off its h

Burden of Hoof, Pt. 1 — Babe: Pig in the City

The Sheep Detectives is about as short on pigs as Babe: Pig In the City is short on sheep, but Kyle Balda’s new family film still reminded us of the 1998 box-office-bomb-

Minnesota Not-So-Nice, Pt. 2 — Normal

Despite the snowy setting, law-enforcement-officer protagonist, and pointed poking at the idea of "Minnesota Nice," Ben Wheatley's new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-'em-up

Minnesota Not-So-Nice, Pt. 1 — Fargo

As a comedic crime thriller set in snowy Minnesota and featuring a sheriff protagonist, it would be pretty tough for the new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-em-up Normal to a

Past Imperfect, Pt. 2 — The Drama

Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative new The Drama turns on the revelation of a secret past that is more of an abstraction than the one in the other half of this pairing, maki

Past Imperfect, Pt. 1 — A History of Violence

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama uses the revelation of one character’s dark secret as a provocative “twist,” but also as the basis for an exploration of whether a romantic