Moving Histories

What happens when a historical film tries to explain Anthony Bourdain before he became Anthony Bourdain? This week on Moving Histories, John , Robert Burgoyne, and Kim discuss Matt Johnson’s Tony and how the film to explores history, memory, place, and, of course, food. We also ask a more fundamental question: does Tony actually illuminate the person Bourdain became, or does knowing that person make the film seem more meaningful than it really is? Suffice it to say, the three of us have some thoughts.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings one of history's oldest stories to the screen, but what does it reveal about myth, memory, and historical storytelling? Joined by renowned classicist Monica Cyrino, we explore Nolan's adaptation, revisit the ideas from our Oppenheimer episode about Nolan as a historian, and discuss why Homer continues to shape cinema nearly three thousand years later.

This week on Moving Histories, we sit down with director Anthony Maras to discuss his powerful new historical drama Pressure. Together, we explore how cinema can make history feel lived rather than merely observed, and why environment, atmosphere, and sensory experience matter just as much as events themselves when telling stories about the past.

In our latest episode, we unpack the Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and starring Wagner Moura. 

History usually remembers the rock stars—Lincoln, Washington, the giants—but Death by Lightning shifts the camera toward the hustlers, dreamers, and delusional outsiders who actually move the machinery of history. In this episode, we explore how the series turns the assassination of James Garfield into a strange and revealing thought experiment about fame, failure, and the fragile human ecosystem behind American history.

History doesn’t sit still in The Testament of Ann Lee—it moves, sings, and repeats itself through bodies in motion. This week, we explore how belief becomes choreography and how cinema turns the past into a living performance. 

Listen as we explore Richard Linklater's latest film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's radical masterpiece Breathless. 

We end 2025 with a discussion on Chloe Zhao’s new film Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel. 

In this episode, we discuss Ken Burns’s recent PBS documentary The American Revolution. Listen as Robert, Kim, and John talk about the rich complexity the film adds to the history and how Burns brings in new voices that challenge the traditional understanding of America’s founding. 

In our latest episode, we discuss the new Netflix series House of Guinness, a historical drama set in 19th century Ireland, from the creator of Peaky Blinders.