Robert Altman has long been seen as one of the great geniuses of American cinema; with iconoclastic masterpieces such as The Long Goodbye and Nashville influencing directors as different as Paul Thomas Anderson and Judd Apatow. But even with those in mind, tonight's picks represent the core of Altman's deepest anti-establishment feelings, and not only in their themes, but in the productions themselves - which were wildly against the standard practices of both filmmaking and storytelling of the day! So get ready as MG takes on the anti-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the anti-war comedy, M*A*S*H!

Mid-life crisis stories are often dramas that keep both feet on the ground, but tonight MG looks at a couple of films that use comedic fantasy to break their heros free from their humdrum lives!  First up, Ben Stiller is all but forced to live out his adventurous daydreams when he must track down Sean Penn in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, followed by Will Farrel in Stranger Than Fiction, in which a dronelike accountant discovers that he's actually a character doomed to die in a novel being written by Emma Thomson!

The arc of Bill Murray's career has been fascinating -  beginning as the ex-SNL goofball slob of Meatballs and Stripes, then shifting to the snarky charmer of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, then finally morphing once again into the befuddled grouch of his Wes Anderson years.  But Murray himself has always been an introspective spiritualist, and tonight we take a look at two of the films where this comes through the most clearly: Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, and Erick's favorite, The Razor's Edge!

Tonight MG has a Scorsese double feature - but it's possible that many listeners have never even heard of these two films, let alone seen them, as they are often lost in the director's flood of classics! First up is After Hours from 1985, featuring the underrated Griffin Dunne as a beige-souled corporate desk jockey who finds himself stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare version of the SoHo art scene, and then we follow it up with another crazed journey through NYC, as a wild-eyed and sleep-deprived Nicholas Cage works as an EMT in Bringing Out the Dead!

Alexander Payne's filmography contains some of the most bitter and hilarious films of the past twenty years, from Laura Dern's caustic abortion comedy Citizen Ruth to the movie that Thron calls the unofficial sequel to Ferris Beuler's Day Off: the merciless Reese Witherspoon showcase Election. But today we take a look at his softer side, with a double feature of Bruce Dern in Nebraska and George Clooney in The Descendants! Each was made to be much more audience friendly than his usual fair - but does MG think they are Oscar-worthy or Oscar-bait?

Tonight MG features a pair of brilliantly upsetting early films from a pair of brilliantly upsetting filmmakers! First up, Roman Polanski's lesser-known dark comedy Cul de Sac, featuring a young-n-skinny Donald Pleasence living in a lonely castle with his bored wife, followed by Under the Skin helmer Johnathan Glazer's first film, Sexy Beast - in which Ray Winstone lives in the more blissful isolation of retirement...but in both cases, a terrifying criminal guest arrives to shatter their world...and steal the show with a larger-than-life performance!

In 1984 David Lynch's disastrous adaptation of Dune seemed to prove the critics right - that this novel, even after decades of development in the hands of artists like Alejandro Jodorowski, Moebius, Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger had proved itself totally unfilmable. But Hollywood has never met a remake it could resist, so now they've laid a 165 million bet down on a new version by Blade Runner 2049's Denis Villeneuve! So was Jason Mamoa worth the money? Is Lynch's film really the secret classic some say it is? Join MG as we do the worm with Dune vs Dune!

Few actors have captured Gen-X's  grungy combo of ironic charm and misanthropic frustration better than John Cusack...or so MG argues with tonight's double feature! First up, Cameron Crowe's directorial debut Say Anything navigates a surprisingly subtle transition from goofy 80's high school comedy to thoughtful, realistic relationship drama; then our second feature, Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, gets even more real, following Cusack as an embittered burnout trying to figure out his trainwreck of a life! Join MG as we identify all-too-closely!

Break out the Pumpkin Spice martinis MG fans, because it's time for our (semi) annual horror triple feature!  Each October, your hosts all pick a shocker that the other two haven't seen, and we guarantee you have some deep cuts comin'!  First up, Chris goes for the gut with the low-budget gross out-comedy Bad Milo, starring The State's Ken Marino and Office Space's Stephen Root; then Erick unearths the long-forgotten bones of Fred Astaires' Ghost Story, and finally Thron takes us to the frontier for some cannibalistic fun in Ravenous, with Guy Pierce!

Romance-on-the-run is one of cinema's most enduring genres, from Gun Crazy to Wild at Heart - but tonight's selections are a strange breed all by themselves: films built to test the audience's relationship to their heroes, and make us ask why we identify with them and their sometimes ugly stories! First up: Terrence Malick's breakout hit Badlands, in which an innocent-seeming Sissy Spacek follows handsome newcomer Martin Sheen on a cross-country killing spree - then next up is Vincent Gallo's quirky indie Buffalo '66 - one of Erick's favorites!