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.

Last weekend the historic Texas Theatre hosted one of the era's premier cinematographers, Roger Deakins, with a series to celebrate the accomplishments of Team Deakins', their Oscar glory, and some of the best looking films of this century. This week, new guest Tyke sits down with Zach to discuss the event and all four films screened - Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and finally, Deakins' first Oscar winner, Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049.

The demise of the superhero film has been greatly exaggerated. This week, Ben joins Cole & Zach to discuss the latest insect/arachnoid caped comic adaptations, Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider, and the much anticipated animation juggernaut, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Our final episode has finally arrived. The big one. The best ever Czech film, according to the Czech people: František Vláčil's Marketa Lazarová. Ryley joins Cole and Zach to unpack this masterpiece and a specific type of period film that eschews modern themes and character dynamics in favor of the cold, harsh realities of the past.