We kick off "Dennis versus the movies" month with a viewing of the second Muppet movie, The Great Muppet Caper, in which the Muppets go to England and get tangled up with Charles Grodin and a jewel heist. Joining us is our special guest, Zach Woliner, a puppeteer and children's entertainer.

Starring Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Charles Grodin, Diana Rigg, John Cleese, Robert Morley, Peter Ustinov, Jack Warden, and of course Peter Falk. Written by Tom Patchett, Jay Tarses, Jerry Juhl, and Jack Rose, and directed by Jim Henson.

David Lynch's violent romantic drama plays like William Faulkner had written The Wizard of Oz starring Elvis Presley--a strange, campy, Southern Gothic road trip through America that Lynch described as "a love story in Hell".

Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, and Isabella Rossellini.

Neil Jordan's neo-noir romance about a jailbird driver, a high-priced escort, and the mob boss running everything is a bleak, sometimes-funny look at duplicity, delusion, and the seedy side of London. 

Starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane, and Clarke Peters. Written by Neil Jordan and David Leland, and directed by Neil Jordan.

From the nadir of Disney filmmaking comes yet another spin on Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, this time featuring Dennis Dugan as a NASA engineer accidentally sent back in time with his android twin Hermes. It's not the worst movie we've covered for the show--the supporting cast of English comedians as Arthur's court are fine--but it's not exactly Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Starring Dennis Dugan, Sheila White, Kenneth Moore, Ron Moody, and Jim Dale. Written by Don Tait and directed by Russ Mayberry.

 This is a preview of our latest episode from Hollywood Avalon. Join the Mary Versus the Movies patreon for $3/month to hear this entire episode and the series Hollywood Avalon, where we watch Arthurian films: https://www.patreon.com/maryvsmovies.

Omar, a young Brit from a Pakistani family, and his boyfriend Johnny, a former skinhead, attempt to open the nicest laundromat in London while tackling issues of family, race, class, sex, crime, and Thatcher-era austerity.

Starring Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke, and Shirley Anne Field. Written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears

Merchant-Ivory's lush adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel of romantic struggle against Edwardian repression is the best possible version of those PBS dramas your mom likes to watch--better, even, because this one has full frontal male nudity.  

Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Sands, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, and Simon Callow. Written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and directed by James Ivory.

New York's hottest club is Liquid Sky. This club has everything: heroin, David Bowie impersonators, aliens, necrophelia, shrimp, cocaine, a Fairlight CMI synthesizer, Germans, murder, and anorgasmia. 

(A UFO causes havoc in the New York downtown art scene, where sex and drugs mix together with casual cruelty and sometimes murder. It's pretty cool.)

Starring Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, and Otto von Wernherr. Written by Slava Tsukerman, Nina V. Kerova, and Anne Carlisle. Directed by Slava Tsukerman.

It's a cyberpunk body-horror story of sex and violence, shot through with the kind of late 1980s indie movie aesthetics that we seriously miss, sitting somewhere between David Lynch and MTV. 

Starring Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomorowo Taguchi, and Kei Fujiwara. Written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto.

David Lowrey’s rewriting of the medieval poem Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight is well-acted, and has some lovely art direction, it ultimately misses the mark in several ways: the CGI is murky, the crucial section at Sir Bertilak’s castle is truncated, and the ending is muddled at best. The poem having an ambiguous meaning is fine—you can debate whether it’s a celebration of chivalry, an elegy for it, or even a satire of it—but to leave the ending as ambiguous here as it is robs the film of any real meaning.

Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, and Ralph Ineson. Written and Drected by David Lowrey.

To hear the entire episode, join the Mary Versus the Movies patreon for $3/month to hear this and the entire series Hollywood Avalon: https://www.patreon.com/maryvsmovies. If you are reading this newsletter, you may already be a member!

Toxic fandom by way of Stephen King, with one of the most famous torture scenes in cinema. Look, our fans are great, and we're gonna keep saying that, please put down the hammer.

Starring James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, and Lauren Bacall. Written by William Goldman and directed by Rob Reiner.