Co-hosts disagree on THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, a new film about the title character (played by Amanda Seyfried) who founded the Shaker religion. Eileen liked it because she has a morbid religious streak that makes her obsessively interested in movies about old-time people who see visions and start mad spiritual communities. Dolores, on the other hand, hates movies set in the 18th century “when everything was so ILL” and found THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE a dull empty frustrating would-be-hipster work that makes the artfully simple utilitarian structures of Shaker architecture look like Restoration Hardware stores. A lively debate ensues!

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores found Jim Jarmusch’s new indie film Father Mother Sister Brother a sleep-inducing slog. It’s a comedy-drama anthology film in three chapters about difficult family relationships that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stars Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling. Jarmusch calls it an “anti-action film” that avoids commercial expectations of such typically hard-hitting effects as “drama, violence, revenge, sex” in order to create a film that’s minimalist, focused, delicate, and deliberately simple, like “three flower arrangements.” So consider yourself warned!

In honor of the season, co-hosts Eileen and Dolores take on the made-for-TV holiday movie, focusing especially on the perennial Hallmark Channel favorite, A SHOE ADDICT’S CHRISTMAS (2018). It’s about a thirtysomething department store employee and shoe-lover named Noelle (Candace Cameron Bure) who’s lost both her creative and romantic mojo, which leads her guardian angel Charlie (Jean Smart) to use her Ghost of Christmas Past and Future powers in showing Noelle how to find a man and a plan. Naturally several Christmas miracles ensue. Eileen, a Hallmark Channel newbie, is appalled by these eye-hurting spectacles while Dolores points out how to read against the grain and discover the socially critical women-centered melodramas that survive in surreal forms in these ultra-popular movies.

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores disagree when it comes to their basic reactions to the new FRANKENSTEIN, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro and currently playing on Netflix. Whereas Dolores finds a number of aspects of the film compelling, such the opulent production design, the sensitive performances of Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, and the all-out melodramatic emotionalism typical of Del Toro, Eileen experienced such a blinding hatred of the whole thing she could only gradually realize that…yes, Mia Goth is always interesting.

Co-host Eileen Jones and special guest Conan Neutron of the Movie Night Extravaganza podcast enthuse about the wild and riveting new Yorgos Lanthimos film, Bugonia. It concerns a pair of rural cousins, played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, who abduct the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien come to destroy planet Earth through corporate means. Their plan is to force her to arrange a meeting between the cousins and the “Andromedans” on their mother ship in order to negotiate an agreement for the aliens to leave Earth in peace. Which is a fairly reasonable account of what’s happening on Earth recently, compared to some of the explanations we hear.

Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is a must-see movie and a model for American filmmaking right now. An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel VINELAND, ONE BATTLE makes brilliant use of such dynamic genres as action, dark comedy, and the political thriller to drive this depiction of an aging radical leftist in hiding, hilariously played by Leonardo DiCarprio, who’s trying to protect his teenage daughter from his past. Then they’re targeted by rightwing political forces led by the repulsive Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and compelled to go on the run. Don’t miss it!

New Filmsuck episode! Dolores and I enthuse about CAUGHT STEALING. It's doing pretty badly at the box-office, though it's a timely dark comic noir of chaotic working class life, and Austin Butler has a delightful co-star in the cat actor playing Bud. 

Special guest Asali Echols, documentary filmmaker, talks to me about the current state of documentary films. We discuss a recent trend toward reviving the strict "observational documentary," led by filmmakers like Elizabeth Lo, whose breakthrough film was the dog's-eye-view movie STRAY (2020). Her upcoming new doc MISTRESS DISPELLER, about a "love industry" in China involving wives hiring undercover operatives to break up the relationships of husbands and their mistresses, tests the limits of Lo's "observational not interventionist" documentary filmmaking ethics. https://www.patreon.com/posts/straying-into-136099786

New Filmsuck episode! While Dolores is making the world safe for opera in Santa Fe, I'm talking to my friend M Dalebout, whose area of scholarly expertise is identity construction in onscreen comedy. We start off with the 2025 HBO Max documentary PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF!

New Filmsuck episode! I rage against Lena Dunham, who cursed us all with GIRLS and is back doing further harm to impressionable minds everywhere with her new, semi-autobiographical Netflix romantic comedy TOO MUCH. Dolores has a more measured reaction to this low-stakes entertainment about an arrested development case played by Megan Stalter (HACKS) who tries to get over a bad breakup by relocating from Brooklyn to London and immediately starting a messy relationship with an indie rocker played by Will Sharpe (WHITE LOTUS 3).How high is your Lena Dunham tolerance?