Artist and writer Eli Valley joins us to wrestle with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director’s retelling of the 1972 Olympics massacre and Israel’s subsequent campaign of assassinations. The film is meticulously crafted, humanizing Avner and his team while layering in hesitation, doubt, and the weight of family. It also dramatizes Palestinian lives with unusual care for Hollywood, even if the balance tilts toward Israeli perspectives and familiar tropes about “moral” violence. We talk through its most affecting set-pieces—the aborted bombing when a child answers the phone, the grotesque mix of mazel tovs and murders, and Avner’s paranoia in New York—while asking what it means to live inside this endless dialogue of revenge and reprisal.

Our conversation with Eli traces the film’s political afterlife: the fury it provoked in Ariel Sharon’s government, the defenses mounted in the American press, and the broader struggle over how violence is represented on screen. We also reflect on its haunting aesthetics, from Spielberg’s chilled tones to the intimacy of family meals punctured by death to the final cut of the World Trade Center. And how these choices underscore the film’s central verdict about vengeance corroding all. Whatever its blind spots, Munich remains one of Spielberg’s most morally serious films, a rare Hollywood attempt to stage the derangement of “tribal” obligation while still respecting the humanity of all involved.

Further Reading

Eli’s website

“Steven Spielberg’s unforgivable sin”, by Eli Valley

Michael Oren interview on Munich

“What ‘Munich’ Left Out,” by David Brooks“Israeli consul attack’s Spielberg’s Munich as ‘problematic’,” by Gary Younge

Fürstenfeldbruck 1972 police operation (Official history and documents)

Munich Trailer

The Guardian arts writer Adrian Horton joins us to discuss The Report, Scott Z. Burns’s dramatization of Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones’s investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. We follow the film’s flashbacks and committee-room battles, tracing how “enhanced interrogation” was engineered by Air Force psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, sanitized by lawyers like John Yoo, and sold to White House officials while the FBI’s Ali Soufan was proving rapport-based interrogation actually worked. The movie captures both the bureaucratic slog—“just the facts” over years of reading transcripts—and the political cowardice that let CIA leaders lie to presidents of both parties, cover up deaths like Gul Rahman’s, and spin torture as having led to bin Laden.

Our conversation with Adrian turns to how the film frames institutional failure and accountability: John Brennan’s CIA spying on Senate staff, Obama’s refusal to pursue prosecutions, and the spectacle of Feinstein, Udall, and McCain trying to salvage transparency while the agency rebranded its crimes. We talk aesthetics, too, including the film’s cool tones, Adam Driver’s restrained performance, and how it stages the clash between truth-seeking and “middle ground” politics. At stake, then and now, is whether brutality gets buried by euphemism and liberal adulation of “patriotic” spies, or confronted for what it is.

Further Reading

Adrian Horton’s writing at The Guardian

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Torture Report”

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, by Ali Soufan

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman

Teaser from the Episode

The Report Trailer

The combat journalist Wes Morgan joins us to unpack Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor—a film that packages “victim-hero” mythology in SEAL-recruiting gloss—alongside John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), a studio-era propaganda relic made with heavy Pentagon help and shot largely at Fort Benning. We track shared tropes: the “good foreigner/child,” the moral theater around killing noncombatants, and how both movies swap unsavory political histories for clean, consumable heroism. From Lone Survivor’s Pashtunwali turn to Green Berets’ cartoon villainy, we ask what these stories make both legible and invisible.

Wes brings the granular Afghanistan context that Hollywood blurs: the Pech/Kunar campaigns and how special-operations logic, local powerbrokers, and U.S. prerogatives collided on the ground. And we contrast the films’ PR-friendly aesthetics with reporting on how the war was in fact fought, and what that meant for Afghans and Americans alike.

Further Reading

The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wes Morgan“Marcus Lutrell’s Savior, Mohammad Gulab, Claims ‘Lone Survivor’ Got It Wrong,” by R.M. Schneiderman

“Exception(s) to the Rule(s): Civilian Harm, Oversight, and Accountability in the Shadow Wars,” by the Center for Civilians in Conflict

Roger Ebert’s review of The Green Berets (1968)

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, by Anand Gopal

Teaser from the Episode

Lone Survivor Trailer

Osita Nwanevu joins us to revisit David Lean’s epic with an eye toward empire’s soft power: the seductive aesthetics that make conquest look noble, even as the film telegraphs its own critique. We track Lawrence’s zigzag between identification and revulsion—his “It’s clean” quip about the desert; the Deraa trauma; the “no prisoners” massacre—and the way racism on the British side (“bloody wogs”) refracts his alienation back home.

Along the way we talk casting (Omar Sharif’s indelible Sherif Ali, Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal), the brittle politics of the Arab National Council, and how Sykes–Picot shadows the dream of independence that flickers and fails in the final act. Osita helps us tie the film’s Orientalist grammar to real-world partition and mandate politics without losing sight of media incentives: the American reporter’s hunt for a marketable hero mirrors the alliances Faisal seeks and the headlines the West wants. (On Osita’s work and his new book framing a more democratic American project, see below.)

If the movie flirts with myth, the history complicates it: wartime bargains that prefigured the French defeat of Faisal’s forces by 1920 and the rechanneling of Hashemite rule, the contested record on Deraa, and the indispensable (if compromised) architects of a new Middle East. We sit with the film’s ambivalence—how it both glamorizes and subverts the imperial gaze—and ask what a less self-exculpatory storytelling tradition might look like, on screen and in policy.

Further Reading

Osita’s website

Osita’s debut book

“The True Story of Lawrence of Arabia,” by Scott Anderson

“What Gertrude Bell’s Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq,” by Elias Muhanna

Lawrence of Arabia Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Ben and Jordano from the Remember Shuffle podcast to take on The Hunt for Red October (1990), John McTiernan’s Cold War submarine thriller packed with an all-star cast. Sean Connery’s Ramius may be the most Scottish Russian ever put on screen, but the real star is the film’s endless roll call of talent and character actors—from Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones to Sam Neill, Tim Curry, Stellan Skarsgård, and Courtney B. Vance—each grounding a plot that often becomes too convoluted for its own good. The trio unpacks how these performances and sharp writing moments (like the recurring teddy bear motif) elevate the film into its iconic status.

At the same time, the conversation digs into the politics underlying the spectacle: the film’s inflation of the Soviet threat, its naturalization of U.S. military dominance, and its childlike portrayal of Cold War geopolitics as a cat-and-mouse (eagle-and-bear?) game. By the film’s end, this game seems less about preventing nuclear Armageddon than about obscuring the everyday violence and exploitation guaranteed by imperial competition, particularly in waters and shores well below the Northern Hemisphere.

Further Reading/Listening

Remember Shuffle Podcast

The Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael Brenes

The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

“The Lethal Crescent: When the Cold War Was Hot” by Daniel Immerwahr

Van and Lyle’s Appearance on Remember Shuffle

Teaser from the Episode

The Hunt for Red October Trailer

In this episode, Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and author Noah Hurowitz (El Chapo) to discuss Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the sweeping 2010 miniseries about the infamous Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. The conversation explores how Carlos’ life story illuminates both the allure and the pitfalls of revolutionary violence: how genuine struggles for liberation can attract both the most earnest and courageous fighters, as well as opportunists like Carlos who drift into becoming hired guns for despots and intelligence services.

Along the way, we talk about the film’s depictions of groups like the PFLP, Black September, and the German Revolutionary Cells; Carlos’ entanglements with figures from Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi to Nicolae Ceaușescu; and the moral contrasts between Carlos and comrades such as Hans-Joachim Klein (“Angie”), who ultimately chose conscience over bloodshed. The miniseries captures both the romance and disarray of internationalist militancy, while reminding us why the long-term task must be to build societies—and a global order—where such violence is no longer called into being.

Further Reading

El Chapo by Noah Hurowitz

Noah at The Intercept

Jackal by John Follain

Abu Nidal by Patrick Seale

Teaser from the Episode

Carlos Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Sandipto Dasgupta—legal scholar, political theorist, and possessor of an encyclopedic knowledge of Congolese politics, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial political economy—to discuss Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. The film blends archival footage, radical history, and one of the most inspired uses of diegetic sound you’ll ever encounter, tracing the assassination of Patrice Lumumba against a global backdrop of jazz diplomacy, Cold War intrigue, and the contested promises of decolonization.

Sandipto walks us through the tangled histories of the Congo’s natural resources, the role of Dag Hammarskjöld (depicted here as something of a willing instrument of U.S. imperial aims), and the African musicians whose performances frame the story. The conversation threads Lumumba’s fate through the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, and the New International Economic Order, in turn connecting the film to works like Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire and Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method. Together, they explore how Soundtrack captures both the intoxicating possibilities of cultural exchange and the brutal realities of a world order determined to foreclose them.

Further Reading

Sandipto’s Website

The Jazz Ambassadors – PBS

Worldmaking After Empire by Adom Getachew

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andrée Blouin

Teaser from the Episode

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat Trailer

In this episode, we discuss Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, a tightly constructed political thriller based on the real-life kidnapping and execution of U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. Set in early 1970s Uruguay but filmed in Allende-era Chile just before the coup, the film dramatizes how U.S. “public safety” programs—nominally about technical assistance and crime prevention—became tools of Cold War counterinsurgency, helping repressive regimes police and suppress political dissent.

With scholars Stuart Schrader (Badges Without Borders) and Alex Aviña (Specters of Revolution), we explore the intersections of U.S. empire, global policing, and revolutionary resistance in the Southern Cone, and reflect on what it means to live in a world still shaped by these Cold War legacies.

Further Reading

Specters of Revolution, by Alex

“When NACLA Helped Shutter the U.S. Office of Public Safety,” by Stuart

“From Police Reform to Police Repression,” by Stuart

Twitter thread on Dan Mitrione by Stuart

Badges Without Borders, by Stuart Of Light and Struggle, by Debbie Sharnak

“The Long Arm of the Law,” by Lyle

Latin America’s Radical Left, by Aldo Marchesi

“Revolution Beyond the Sierra Maestra,” by Aldo Marchesi

Becoming the Tupamaros, by Lindsey Churchill

National Security Archive: The Dan Mitrione File

Teaser from The Episode

State of Siege Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by historian and Slate Senior Editor Rebecca Onion to talk through the entire 28 Days Later trilogy, from its early aughts origins to its apocalyptic present. Together they explore the first film’s anti-militarist edge, arriving just as the War on Terror began to unfold, and how its disaffected rage gave way to the bombastic sensibilities of the 2007 sequel.

If the original cast British soldiers as the truest threats to civilization, the second leans into Global War on Terror aesthetics, gathering around a Delta Force commando as protagonist. Then again, it still preserves a kernel of the earlier critique: That security operations have a way of turning from containment to extermination.

The group breaks down this shift through a striking bit of dialogue from Rose Byrne’s Army medical officer, which lays out a three-stage process—identify the infection, contain the infection, and when the containment fails, exterminate all the brutes—that mirrors countless historical escalations, from Cold War brinkmanship to post-9/11 imperial overreach to the genocide now unfolding in Gaza.

They debate whether 28 Weeks Later offers any coherent politics at all, or simply mirrors our own contradictions. They also reflect on the beauty of Cillian Murphy, the chemistry between Murphy and Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson’s wrenching turn, and the creative imprint of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland; clearly felt in the first and final films, and sorely missed in the second. Most of all, they dig into the wild third installment—28 Years Later—and how its mystical, cosmic pivot late in the film, when Ralph Fiennes assumes center stage, reorients the entire franchise around memory, mourning, and what it means to love in a world on fire.

Further Reading

Rebecca’s Website

Rebecca’s Author Page at Slate

“28 Years Later and the Social Life of Catastrophe,” by Eileen Jones

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“Illusions of Containment,” by Tom Stevenson

Teaser from the Episode

28 Days Later Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist Sam Carliner to unpack Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, a 2023 entry into the Afghanistan war movie canon. Together they examine how the film reinforces the myth, heavily circulated in the wake of the 2021 U.S. pullout, that American troops and Afghan interpreters were bonded as brothers in arms, fighting a noble, shared war against evil. While the film’s central relationship between Master Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim) is marked by quick banter and trust, the reality on the ground was often far icier; mutually suspicious relationships shaped by Islamophobia, infiltration, coercion, and years of betrayal.

The conversation digs into the emotional beats of the film and what they obscure. Kinley and Ahmed each risk their lives to save the other, and their intertwined fates become the “covenant” of the title. But rather than offering a serious reckoning with U.S. violence, the film functions as a feel-good fable of reciprocal loyalty, centering a “Good Muslim” who rescues his “Good American” friend, only to be rescued in return—with the arrival of private contractors cast as a climactic moment of salvation rather than as mercenary forces profiting off the neo-colonial periphery. The backdrop of a 20-year U.S. occupation and a 40-year civil war, both shaped and fueled by American policy, is left untouched.

The film doesn’t argue the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan, but it’s steeped in post-withdrawal melancholia, more interested in soothing American audiences than engaging historical truth. And yet, in its final scene, Kinley and Ahmed staring blankly from the cargo bay of a C-130, the production evokes an eerily similar ending to Zero Dark Thirty: The protagonists afloat in transit, surrounded by machinery, without any real sense of where they’re going or why.

Further Reading

Sam’s Substack

No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani

Bang-Bang doing Zero Dark Thirty

Teaser from the Episode

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant Trailer