First Watch

Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? Wouldst thou like to live horrifically? In the final installment of our horror genre Eras Tour, Jake joins Cole and Zach to discuss turn-of-the-millennium horror, including Scream, The Blair Witch Project, the endless wave of J-Horror, slasher sequels, and finally, the rise of "elevated horror" and Robert Eggers' seminal debut, The Witch.

Killers of the harvest moon. This week, Morgan drops by to aid Cole and Zach in the continuing exploration of horror through the eras. After discussing our favorite horror movies of this year, we cruise through the 60s, 70s and early 80s to talk about horror's arrival on the main stage with hits like Psycho, best picture nominee The Exoricst, and slashers from Halloween to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and beyond.

After covering the recent release slate - Saw X, The Exorcist: Believer, The Creator, as well as the Palme d'or and Golden Lion winners, Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things, Cole and Zach travel back to the earliest days of horror. This week we tell the story from the silent era to the Hays Code, and focus particularly on Jacques Tourneur's 40s classic, Cat People.

This week - perhaps a consolation to Cole after so much Christopher Nolan talk - we offer a smorgasbord of gay classics, new and old! The main focus is Ira Sachs' Passages, but also discussed are Kurosawa's classic color-explosion Ran, and a fond farewell to the ultra-70s (and surprisingly homoerotic) filmography of the late William Friedkin.

This week, in our continuing celebration of the release and box office domination of Oppenheimer, Cole and Zach extend their discussion backwards in time to dissect the cerebral works of director Christopher Nolan: Inception, The Prestige and Memento.

This week, Morgan and Ryley join Cole and Zach to explore the fallout of J. Robert Oppenheimer's most notorious invention, and the latest and, yes, greatest of Christopher Nolan's ballyhooed filmography, Oppenheimer, as well as the week's other big release, Barbie, and a historical watchlist leading up to Nolan's grand opus.

In the first ever bonus episode of The First Watch Podcast, Ryley links up with Zach and Cole to discuss Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition to explore two examples of men trying to spare their human souls in the face of the Pacific War. Stay tuned for our episode on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer later in the week!

This week, we've assembled our team with one mission. Morgan and Jake join Zach and Cole to debrief on all our favorite action movies of this century so far, from the turn of the millennium to the films on this week's marquee. In this stuffed episode we talk James Cameron, we talk George Miller, and of course, we talk all things Mission: Impossible. In this conversation you can get a breakdown of every single entry, including the latest two-part box office bruiser, M:I - Dead Reckoning.

It's July, the summertime, the midway point of the year 2023. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Oppenheimer and Barbie are still in the future tense for Cole and Zach, but before the bomb, the pink shoe, and Tom Cruise all drop, it's time to look back and celebrate the best cinema has to offer at this halfway point.

This week, after a huge rundown of new releases, guest Ryley joins Zach and Cole to talk about the great Hungarian slow cinema maestro, Béla Tarr, and all the things, big and small, that make his work endure through the decades, focusing particularly on Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies.