Teenagers. Normally, they're the last demographic you'd want to arm with deadly weapons and a thorough knowledge of martial arts, what with their unstable hormones and abysmal decision making. Now hold on a minute, Boomer, I hear you say. What if the teenagers in question weren't just young folks from the ages of thirteen to nineteen, but a group of mutant turtles age thirteen to nineteen? Why my dear hypothetical reader, in that case I would purchase their weapons myself because then we would have the titular heroes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a 1990 action comedy directed by Steve Barron. This film may not be a beloved classic with general audiences, but it is a mainstay of the Magellans’ childhood, but were they always imbued with the invincible critical eye for talent we all know them to possess today? There's only one way to find out: listen to today's brand-new episode! Cowabunga!

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How come we don’t hear that much about serial killers these days? I like to think it’s because the global spirit of human brotherhood has just grown too powerful for even the most depraved of violent urges to be fulfilled. Either that or the advancement of forensic technology coupled with a host of societal and cultural factors has made serial murder both less appealing and the prospect of success less viable. Whatever the cause, serial killers have become increasingly rare, but there was a time when sequence murder was a genuine national terror, which explains the prevalence of movies like Manhunter, a 1986 detective film directed by Michael Mann and based on the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Although it’s outshined by its more successful younger sibling, Manhunter is actually the first film appearance of sophisticated cannibal Hannibal Lector, long before Anthony Hopkins made the character a household name. Despite sharing source material, Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs could not be more different. Manhunter is a much moodier, broodier film noir that follows a different protagonist hunting a different serial killer with a bunch of different actors being addressed by familiar proper nouns. Does different mean worse, however? Better? Incomparable? This is the question that will be answered on today’s new episode of Magellans at the Movies! You want the scent of great banter and sharp film analysis? Too bad because that’s not perceivable by smell, but it is perceivable by sound so quit reading and get listening!

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Aliens! They may have already visited our home in the solar system, but if so, then they seem to have mainly come here for tourist reasons and to appear in grainy footage shot by air force pilots and people who don’t have anything better to do than point active cameras at the sky in the middle of the night. Whatever the truth of the various historical and modern UAP sightings may be, the fact is that people have been fascinated by hypothetical encounters between man and E.T. for centuries, from H.G. Wells to Roland Emmerich, to Winston Churchill (true story). Perhaps no story about a hostile cosmos is more famous or more spine chilling, however, than Ridley Scott’s Alien, the audience's introduction to the tube-headed, double-mouthed xenomorph. The xenomorph and its (. . . I guess mother?) the facehugger haven't been well served by their movies of late, a downward trend Fede Alverez hopes to invert with his 2024 horror movie Alien: Romulus. A.R. is cleaning up both at the box office and with reviewers, so it was only a matter of time before it became the subject of another episode of Magellans at the Movies! Get away from that skip button you, uh, nasty person and let it play!

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If war is hell, then I suppose it makes some ironic sense that filming a movie about war would be hellish, too. In case you hadn’t heard, wars are messy, noisy, dangerous things for all involved and recreating them can be tricky as well, especially if you’re a slightly eccentric perfectionist director deep in the jungles of Asia trying to make a movie about one of the most chaotic and unpopular wars in American history. Such was the mission of Francis Ford Coppola in his legendary Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now, released in 1979 and (very loosely) based on the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In addition to having one of the most bonkers productions in all of cinema, Apocalypse Now is the standard bearer for Vietnam movies and has enjoyed laudatory praise for most of its existence. Critics, however, are easy to please, the Magellans at the Movies are harder to impress. Can this legendary film hold up to their high standards, then? Let’s find out on today’s new episode! I love the smell of podcasts in the morning!

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Ah the halcyon days of the 2010s. The era when video games began emerging as the cultural powerhouse they have evolved into, the world was recovering from the Great Recovery, and Covid-19 was just a glint in virology’s eye. It was also a time of movies, and lots of them. Good movies, bad movies, and everything in between. Marvel movies got their start, and with their ascent came the great (and short lived) comic book movie war, followed by the meteoric rise of the cinematic universe as an often reached for but seldom reached golden goose of cinematic success. With the close of the decade naturally came a healthy crop of lists purporting to delineate the best films the preceding ten years had produced. And the people were cast down with great fear and suffering, for the lists were pretentious and the movies featured on them were seen by none. Now, however, a pair of champions arise. Two brothers from the American Midwest bring balance to the Force by forging a list of the people, by the people, and for the people, and their name is Magellan. That’s right folks, prepare for your demands to be met by having two nobodies tell you what your demands should be on today’s exciting new special episode of Magellans at the Movies! Countdown from ten and hit the play button!

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Japan has given us many amazing things: body pillows of questionably aged characters, plumbers who seem to do stunningly small amounts of plumbing, and the best method to find out which of your friends sing best when they are drunk. But all those things have nothing to do with cinema, of which Japan's greatest contribution is arguably Akira Kurosawa. This legendary director influenced much of American cinema with his films from the 60s, including one certain franchise about prolonged conflicts between molten-hot interstellar bodies. And today the Magellans are tackling one of his many celebrated films, the 1963 police drama High and Low. This movie has many of Kurosawa's trademarks: Toshiro Mifune, incredible camera work, and a powerful story about Japanese society. No need to look high or low for the Magellans opinions, just hit that play button and find out now!

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It’s hardly revolutionary to say that the superhero genre is on the decline these days. In terms of both review scores and box office returns, movies featuring men and women in brightly colored outfits throwing CGI monsters through CGI cityscapes with the aid of their CGI powers have become little more than fodder for less than favorable memes and a literally endless stream of articles with titles like “Is This the End of the Comic Book Movie?”, “Is This the end of the MCU?”, “Have Superheroes Gone the Way of the Westerns?”, and so on. Who, then, can save us from genre entropy? Who will reach into the sludge of tropes and cliches and bring forth the diamond in the rough needed to prove that the superhero movie yet has life in it? The answer, according to some, is Deadpool, an irreverent, violent, fourth-wall demolishing anti-hero who began his cinematic career with 2016’s Deadpool directed by Tim Miller. While the modern Deadpool might be in the unenviable position of being a hard R rated movie tasked with salvaging a cinematic universe whose main demographic is children and teens, the character’s first outing was a much lower stakes flick primarily marketed at those who are children and teens in spirit only. But does the Merc with a Mouth’s hugely popular film debut hold up? Let’s put forth maximum effort to find out in today’s episode of Magellans at the Movies!

(Production note, the tracks got offset near the end, so Elliot talks over Nathan a bit. He was not being rude or prescient, it is just an unsolvable audio error)

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Ah, snobbery. It’s so often a mask for the discouraged, the downtrodden, the defeated. To puff yourself up over some esoteric details only you and five other people know about is to appear large and confident when we are in fact small and meek. But enough about me, let’s talk about Sideways, a 2004 drama based on the book by Rex Pickett. Sideways centers on that rarest of snobs: wine snobs, but slowly unfolds into a deeply moving character study of a struggling middle-aged writer and wine-thusiast on a road trip with his engaged best friend who is . . . just the worst. Sideways is a lovely, multifaceted film, now comedic, now devastating, that is sure to leave an impact on viewers from all walks of life. So grab a glass and get pouring along with those charming ragamuffins Magellans at the Movies! When’s your podcast getting published, you ask? Right now!

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When you get knocked down, you simply must get back up again. Surely one of the most worn of all the many self-help cliches, basically just keep on keeping on for the less earthy among us. Still, sometimes a classic is just what the doctor ordered, and for a dejected and apathetic Bruce Wayne who’s lost his kind of girlfriend and his kind of work friend to a nihilistic mass murdering clown, doctor’s orders are really the kind of things you want to be following. Thus, the stage is set for the return of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, a 2012 superhero action thriller directed by Christopher Nolan. The conclusion to the Dark Knight trilogy has a less sterling reputation than its cultural titan of an older brother thanks to some thoroughly litigated plot holes, iffy fight scenes, and all around lighter thematic impact than its predecessor. Nolan, however, is Nolan, so what does it look like when the master makes a slip? Today we’ll be finding out all that and more on an exciting new episode of Magellans at the Movies! Is convincing you to listen to the episode a part of your plan? OF COURSE.

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Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be a super genius. While some synaptically blessed individuals carve their names into the face of history with their achievements in advanced particle physics and beating all of the Dark Souls games without getting hit, the best us dumb losers can hope for is third place at Dusty Steve’s general trivia night. Thankfully, movies allow us to live vicariously through onscreen characters who possess far greater acuity than ourselves. And if you’re feeling particularly slow, consider glimpsing true intellectual greatness in Good Will Hunting, a 1997 drama directed by Gus Van Sant. The Will Hunting designated by that clunky title is a young man of unparalleled smarts and dismal manners. Good Will Hunting was a big ‘ol hit with critics and audiences when it came out, and its popularity has only grown since then. Is that popularity enough to earn a favorable review from Magellans at the Movies? My dear reader, that is a question that you don’t need a PHD to answer. It’s not your fault you haven’t figured it out yet, you just need to start the episode!

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