Phil and Emily are joined by writer Jude Ellison Doyle to open up Richard Kelly's The Box (2009). Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a cash-strapped 1976 couple handed a simple, horrible deal by a scarred stranger (Frank Langella): press the button on the box, collect a million dollars, and somebody you don't know dies. What starts as a Twilight Zone morality test (via Richard Matheson's "Button, Button") spirals into NASA, Mars, and a very literary sense of damnation.

The three dig into Kelly's whole deranged sensibility after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, whether he's fully in on his own material, how he writes women, and why a studio thriller this strange even got made. There's a real case here for reading The Box as a big, glossy panic attack about being broke in America. Heady, funny, and a little unhinged same as the movie.

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Jude Ellison Doyle - https://www.instagram.com/byjudedoyle

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Phil and Emily are joined by Mitchell Beaupre, editor and podcast host at Letterboxd, to dig into Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008). Michelle Williams stars as a woman driving to Alaska for work who gets stranded in a small Oregon town when her car dies and she loses her dog, and the film turns that small catastrophe into one of the quietest, most devastating portraits of American poverty the 2000s gave us.

The three of them get into why Reichardt is so good at trapping her characters, and us, in situations that tighten without anyone noticing, how the movie looks at the unhoused with a clear eye instead of pity, and where it lands in the show's Reichardt run. There's a detour into Richard Kelly and The Box, a bit on how Williams does more with a single look than most actors manage with a monologue, and Mitchell's case for why this one stays with you long after the credits.

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Mitchell Beaupre - https://www.instagram.com/mitchellbeaupre

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Phil and Emily are joined by journalist and author Josephine Riesman to continue their Richard Kelly Reichardt mini-series with the magnificent disaster that is Southland Tales (2006). And there is no better guest for it: Josie wrote the definitive deep-dive on this movie and once spent three hours walking Venice Beach interviewing Richard Kelly himself.

Set in an alternate 2008 where nuclear attacks on Texas have tipped America into a surveillance-state apocalypse, Southland Tales unleashes Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and a cast of SNL alumni across a sprawling, end-of-days Los Angeles on the Fourth of July. It premiered at Cannes as an unfinished cut on DVD, got booed into oblivion, made a legendary $374,000 against a $17 million budget, and then quietly became the cult object that fans swear is more true than the reality we actually got..

The gang digs into why a movie this incoherent is also this irresistible. Emily makes her case that it is what you would get if Philip K. Dick novelized Robert Altman's Nashville, while Phil counters with "Magnolia with a head injury." Josie reveals what Kelly told her about that surreal Justin Timberlake lip-sync to The Killers, the tie-in graphic novels, the Cannes catastrophe, and why he has a reason for every baffling choice, even the ones that never made the final cut. Plus its eerie kinship with Children of Men and The Handmaid's Tale, and the thin line between satire and prophecy.

Misunderstood masterpiece or beautiful trainwreck? On America's 250th birthday, it might be the only movie that fits. This is the way the world ends.

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Josephine Riesman - https://www.instagram.com/josie.zone

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Phil and Emily are joined by critic and editor Isaac Feldberg to continue their Richard Kelly Reichardt mini-series with Kelly Reichardt's quiet breakthrough, Old Joy (2006). Isaac edits at Letterboxd Journal and writes for RogerEbert.com and Fangoria, and as a former Eagle Scout, he might be the perfect guide to a movie about two guys going camping.

Made for roughly $30,000 and shot in the forests east of Portland, Old Joy follows old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) on a weekend trip to a hot spring deep in the Cascades. Almost nothing happens, and somehow everything does. It became Reichardt's calling card, earned rapturous reviews including four stars from Roger Ebert, and announced one of American cinema's most quietly essential filmmakers.

The gang gets into why Reichardt remains a beloved secret, the kind of filmmaker fans swear will one day get a Criterion box and a wave of "how did we not know about this?" They dig into the ache underneath the film's radical simplicity, the suspense of a friendship that can't quite say what it means, the tender and unspoken queerness running through it, and why these two men sound less like a Richard Linklater hangout and more like real life. Plus Lucy the dog, "the John Cazale of canine performers," the perfect Old Joy double feature, and the image of a slug on a mossy boulder that Ebert never forgot.

Why do we remember the small moments more than the big ones? Old Joy has a few answers. Come sit with it.

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Isaac Feldberg —https://www.instagram.com/ijfeldberg

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Phil and Emily are joined by actress Fiona Dourif to launch a brand new mini-series, Richard Kelly Reichardt, with the cult classic that started a thousand dorm-room arguments: Donnie Darko (2001).

Richard Kelly's debut premiered at Sundance, opened the same day the Patriot Act was signed into law, and promptly bombed in theaters before Drew Barrymore's Flower Films, a $4.5 million budget, and a generation of video-store rentals turned it into a phenomenon. The gang digs into why it became the movie every college bro swore was a misunderstood masterpiece, and whether it actually holds up a quarter century later.

They get into the big stuff: the tall bunny named Frank, the pocket-universe time-loop mechanics, and that gut-punch ending where Donnie chooses to sacrifice himself. Emily, who has seen this more times than almost any movie in her life, untangles Kelly's "ironclad" explanation, why she prefers the simpler emotional read, and why the director's cut overexplains everything. Fiona connects it to American Beauty and Magnolia, the search for God after religion, and her own time-bending turn in Christopher Nolan's Tenet. And the whole table takes on modern film-discussion culture's obsession with mapping every rule instead of just living inside a story that doesn't quite make sense.

Plus: baby Noah Wyle, the most unhinged high-school teacher ever written, and a stacked early-2000s cast that keeps making you hit pause. Does Donnie Darko hold up, or did it age like the 25-year-old screenwriter dialogue it's built on? Listen and decide.

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Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

Fiona Dourif — https://www.instagram.com/fionadourif

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Phil and Emily are joined by writer Elias Isquith (Necessary Fictions blog) to close out the Angelina Jolie Action Films of the 2000s miniseries with the loudest, messiest entry yet: Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted (2008).

James McAvoy plays a cubicle drone recruited by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman into a secret fraternity of assassins that takes its orders from a magical loom. Yes, a loom. The movie was a surprise hit the summer it opened alongside WALL-E, weeks before The Dark Knight blew everything away, and none of them had seen it since theaters. Rewatching it in 2026 was a very different experience.

The conversation digs into how Wanted plays like a proto-incel power fantasy, a movie that negs its audience for 110 minutes and then stares into the camera asking "what the fuck have you done lately?" They trace the line from Fight Club and The Matrix to this film's confused politics, where the message is "be free and take charge of your life" but also "obey the magic loom or die." Emily breaks down the gendered self-loathing baked into so many films aimed at young men, and Elias connects the movie's hyper-individualism to the toxic masculinity pipeline that would migrate to social media just a year later. They also talk about Angelina Jolie's decision to kill off her own character, why the film's structure feels like a video game with half-assed cutscenes, and how Zack Snyder somehow handles this same territory with more nuance.

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Phil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscove

Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

Elias Isquith — NecessaryFictions.blog - https://www.instagram.com/eliasisquith

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Phil and Emily bring in writer Lindsey Romain for the fourth installment of the Angelina Jolie action films miniseries, and it is the one LaToya Ferguson was promised. Lindsey's work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Vulture, and Bright Wall/Dark Room, and she saw this movie four times in theaters as a teenager. She still has the promotional pin from when she worked at a movie theater in high school. She is the right person for this.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith follows two upper-class assassins who are also, it turns out, married to each other and working for rival agencies. It opened June 10th, 2005 against Madagascar, Star Wars Episode III, The Longest Yard, and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, and made $487 million on a $110 million budget. The script originated as Simon Kinberg's graduate thesis. Carrie Fisher, Akiva Goldsman, Jez and John Henry Butterworth, Ted Griffin, and Terrence Winter all took passes at it. Angela Bassett and Keith David filmed scenes that were cut entirely. What remained was Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, which Roger Ebert correctly identified as the only thing that needed to remain.

The conversation covers the Doug Liman of it all, specifically his "we'll make it up as we go along" approach and what that costs the film in its final act. Emily identifies the half hour from when they can't kill each other through the home improvement store sequence as the movie locking in completely, and the final action sequence as where it loses her. Phil compares the last scene to Eyes Wide Shut. The group also gets into how the affair backdrop has shifted what it feels like to watch now, the surprisingly durable premise and its various attempted adaptations, who was responsible for the ex-wife jealousy beat, and where exactly 2005 Brad Pitt ranks in the full Brad Pitt hotness timeline. The answer is not first.

This is the fourth installment of the Angelina Jolie action films miniseries. Wanted is next.

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Lindsey Romain — https://www.instagram.com/lindseyromain

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Phil and Emily continue the Angelina Jolie action films miniseries with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life (2003), joined by Carson Betts and Caroline Thompson, co-hosts of the How Have You Not Seen It podcast. All four participants are watching this film for the first time. This is relevant information.

The Cradle of Life follows Lara Croft racing to find Pandora's Box before a rogue scientist with strong Peter Thiel energy can use it as a biological weapon, with complications provided by her ex-lover Terry Sheridan, played by Gerard Butler. It cost $95 million, grossed $160 million worldwide, and opened July 25th, 2003 against Spy Kids 3D, Pirates of the Caribbean, Bad Boys 2, and Seabiscuit. It received three stars from Roger Ebert, which nearly convinced Emily to see it in theaters that summer. She saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen instead. Phil does not believe she made the better choice. The film was also banned in China for giving the impression of a country in chaos overrun by secret societies. Hollywood had not yet figured that out.

The consensus is that this movie is more competent than the first Tomb Raider along nearly every axis, which somehow makes it less enjoyable. Phil calls it dumb and not fun, as opposed to the first film, which was dumb and fun. Emily notes the big action set piece in the middle is a shootout in a lab, which she finds strange given the title. The group also covers Jan de Bont's filmography and what it means that this was his final film, the Sasquatch creatures that the script introduces and then declines to explain, and the actual Cradle of Life, which turns out to be visually underwhelming in a way that Carson compares to a YouTube video that will not load.

The true climax, Carson argues, was always going to be in Lara's heart.

This is the third installment of the miniseries on Angelina Jolie's 2000s action films, following Gone in 60 Seconds and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

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Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

Carson Betts — https://www.instagram.com/carsonlbetts

Caroline Thompson — https://www.instagram.com/sportclimbbarbie

How Have You Not Seen It — https://www.instagram.com/hhynspod

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Phil and Emily continue the Angelina Jolie action films miniseries with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), joined by BJ Colangelo and Harmony Colangelo, co-hosts of the This Ends at Prom podcast. BJ and Harmony previously joined the show for Hard-Boiled, which Phil describes as a superior action movie. Harmony agrees with everything about that sentence.

Tomb Raider follows aristocrat archaeologist Lara Croft racing against the villainous Illuminati to retrieve the two halves of the Triangle of Light before a rare planetary alignment allows them to unlock its power over time. It cost $150 million, grossed $274 million worldwide, and opened June 15th, 2001 against Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Shrek, Swordfish, Pearl Harbor, and Evolution. Paramount had purchased the video game rights in 1998. No fewer than seven screenwriters took a pass at the script before Simon West stitched something together and pointed a camera at Angelina Jolie.

The group agrees on several things: Jolie is perfectly cast, clearly having a blast, and simply is Lara Croft in a way that very few actors embody a character that completely. They do not agree on much else. Phil's issues are with the script, specifically a 45-minute delay before the film bothers to explain what is actually at stake. Harmony's defense is that this is video game logic, anything is possible, and sometimes you just want to watch someone cool do cool things. Emily ran into Angelina Jolie at a grocery store once and has thoughts.

Daniel Craig is also in this movie. Nobody can identify what accent he is doing. Emily has a theory involving one specific block in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This is the second installment of the miniseries on Angelina Jolie's 2000s action films, following Gone in 60 Seconds.

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Podcast Like It's... — https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeits

Phil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscove

Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

BJ Colangelo — https://www.instagram.com/bjcolangelo

Harmony Colangelo — https://www.instagram.com/harmonycolangelo

This Ends at Prom — https://www.instagram.com/thisendsatprom

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Phil and Emily are joined by LaToya Ferguson to kick off a new miniseries on Angelina Jolie's action films of the 2000s, beginning with Gone in 60 Seconds (2000). LaToya is a TV writer, critic, and co-host of the Empire Diaries podcast. She has appeared on the show before, covering The Other Sister and Ladybugs on previous installments. She wanted to cover Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She did not get Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Gone in 60 Seconds follows retired master car thief Memphis Raines, forced back into the game to steal 50 high-end cars in one night to save his brother from a ruthless crime boss. It cost $100 million, grossed $237 million worldwide, outperforming both Remember the Titans and Coyote Ugly from the same Bruckheimer production year. Angelina Jolie had just won the Oscar. The film was sold entirely on her. She is barely in it. Nicolas Cage plays the lead, does not radiate car energy, and shares with Jolie what Emily describes as the opposite of chemistry. The movie goes dull at exactly the moment it should not, Frances Fisher has less screen time than the dog, and Christopher Eccleston delivers the villain line "it never rains, but it pours" with complete conviction.

Phil makes the case for where this sits in the Bruckheimer era and why it signals the end of something, Emily misses the era of movies that made audiences want to steal cars, and LaToya has thoughts about Nicolas Cage, Billy Bob Thornton, and what actual dirtbag energy looks like on screen. They also get into whether Gone in 60 Seconds quietly paved the way for Fast and Furious, and why Phil rides for Sorcerer's Apprentice to the dismay of everyone present.

This episode opens the miniseries on Angelina Jolie's 2000s action films, with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider up next.

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Phil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscove

Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

LaToya Ferguson — https://www.instagram.com/thelafergs

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