Sound Speed Action: Movie & TV Reviews

The Insider review: the 1999 Michael Mann drama starring Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, and Christopher Plummer, based on the true story of tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and the 60 Minutes story CBS almost didn't air. If you love Heat and never got around to The Insider, this is the case for watching it tonight.

Ask people to name Michael Mann's best film and you'll hear Heat, Collateral, or The Last of the Mohicans. For me it has always been The Insider. It has been my favorite film since the first time I saw it in 1999, and for twenty seven years I couldn't explain why.

This is a special episode. It's an origin story. The Insider didn't just become my favorite movie, it built the lens I watch every other movie through, and it took me years to find the words for it. Here's the short version: the stories I love most are about two people and a relationship at the center of the film, and by the time the credits roll that relationship has either been forged into something unbreakable or completely decimated. The Social Network, Amadeus, Whiplash, The King's Speech, and it started here, with Al Pacino on a hotel phone in Louisville, Kentucky, telling a broken man to trust him.

There is also something most people get wrong about The Insider. I got it wrong for years. It's about which relationship the movie is actually built on, and I'll make the case in the middle of the episode.

This week on Sound Speed Action: why The Insider is Michael Mann's best film, how one movie can teach you what kind of stories you're drawn to, the Aaron Sorkin style engine of intention and obstacle running underneath it, how Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti shot a movie about phone calls and depositions like a thriller, the Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke score that other movies keep borrowing, Russell Crowe in his mid thirties playing a man in his fifties right before Gladiator, a hotel phone call, a deposition room, and a golf course driving range that still makes me look over my shoulder, and one honest gripe about a great film.

Also covered: the source material, from the 60 Minutes segment to Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair piece, the Eric Roth and Michael Mann screenplay, Bruce McGill's one scene, who should watch it tonight and who should skip it, and the question I want to leave you with: what was your origin film?

No spoilers. Everything about the plot is what you'd get from the trailer or the back of the box.

Also mentioned in this episode: Heat, Collateral, The Last of the Mohicans, The Social Network, Amadeus, Whiplash, The King's Speech, Good Will Hunting, Gladiator, Ferrari, Tony, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and 60 Minutes.

The Insider is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon, and YouTube.

What was your origin film? Tell me the title and the year. Find me at https://www.ssapod.com.

Sound Speed Action is a movie review podcast. New episodes out now everywhere you get your podcasts. If you have a minute, a review on Apple Podcasts really does help the program.

🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: The Insider (1999)

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On this episode of Sound Speed Action, we review Mayday, the new 80s style action comedy on Apple TV starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, made in the vein of Midnight Run, 48 Hrs, and Red Heat. It's a lot of fun, it knows exactly what it is, and Branagh's Nikolai, a former KGB hermit who worships one bootleg VHS of Top Gun, turns out to be a genuine badass. I am not kidding. I did not see that coming.

But I keep telling myself the two guys who made it are cursed. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley made Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which everybody who saw it loved and Hollywood still called a disappointment. Then they made Mayday, finished it in the spring of 2024, and it sat on a shelf for two years before going straight to your phone. Cursed is not the right word, though. I found a better one, and I'll give it to you at the end of the episode, right after I tell you what they're making next.

What We Cover:

• Nikolai Owns One Movie: A character set in 1987 who worships a film from 1986. Why the 80s homage in Mayday lives inside the character instead of being painted on top.
• Thin Is The Point: Red Heat did not have a serious position on the Cold War. Neither does this. Why the reviews knocking the politics are grading the wrong thing.
• The Villain Problem: One honest gripe about a good actor in a part nobody built.
• Two Years On A Shelf: Apple's habit of holding content that gets close to live geopolitics, and why a comedy stops being the same movie once the room around it changes.
• Same Week, Different Screens: A movie a studio decided was worthless opened in theaters. A movie built for theaters opened on your TV. Neither decision had anything to do with whether the movie was good.
• Not Cursed: Goldstein and Daley keep making movies that Hollywood keeps burying. I owe them a better word than cursed, and I found one. Stay to the end.

Connect & Support:

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Anthony Bourdain at nineteen was arrogant, mean, and genuinely hard to be around, and the filmmakers made him worse on purpose. In this episode of the Sound Speed Action podcast, we break down why Tony invents so much of its own story, why that creative license is the point rather than the problem, and how a small independent film gets closer to the truth of a man than most authorized biopics ever manage.

What We Cover:

• A Problem On Purpose: Why Matt Johnson and Dominic Sessa built a lead this unlikable, and the paradox of rooting for him anyway.
• Two Kinds Of True: The difference between what happened and what it felt like, and why Tony trades one away to get the other exactly right.
• The Kitchen Is The Point: The heat, the noise, the tickets, the rhythm of a real line during a rush. What the filmmakers treated as sacred while they invented everything else.
• Matt Johnson Outside Canada: His first feature made away from home, why he brought his longtime creative partner along for the score, and what that says about protecting your voice.
• The Supporting Bench: Antonio Banderas doing his best work in years, Leo Woodall's range across two very different films this year, and Emilia Jones after CODA.
• Permission To Invent: Bourdain's estate signed off on a film that plays loose with the facts. Why that approval, in an independent film, produced something a studio system almost certainly wouldn't have allowed.
• One Small Nitpick: A couple of shots where I could see the seams, and why it didn't dent the film for me.

Connect & Support:

• Show Website: https://www.ssapod.com
• Follow & Review: If you enjoyed this breakdown, please leave a review on your podcast app and follow the show for more cinema breakdowns.

🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: Tony (2026)https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.cebdfaab-b554-48d2-8b26-8579bfabb29b?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

Christopher Nolan risked everything on a $400M epic based on an ancient poem, and the result is a massive box office phenomenon. In this episode of Sound Speed Action, we break down why The Odyssey works so well on a regular screen, the insane sound design bleeding into adjacent theaters, and why its massive success is saving original cinema.

What We Cover:
• The $400M Risk: Why Universal greenlit an ancient epic with no franchise backing, captured entirely using IMAX large-format cameras.
• Star Power & Loyalty: How A-list talent took blind pay cuts and why Nolan’s recurring cast and crew keep coming back.
• A Scene-Stealing Moment: Why one specific performance had the entire theater dead silent and completely locked in.
• Sound Design & Score: Ludwig Göransson’s pulse-pounding music, volume mixes, and the physical limits of 70mm prints.
• Theatrical Window Strategy: Why you shouldn't wait for home streaming and how IMAX is extending runs.

Connect & Support:
• Show Website: https://www.ssapod.com
• Follow & Review: If you enjoyed this breakdown, please leave a review on your podcast app and follow the show for more cinema breakdowns.

Two movies came out in 2026 that did the exact same thing, in completely opposite directions. One spends two hours testing your patience, and then the final stretch is so good it almost erases everything that came before. The other is one of the best action movies you've seen in years, right up until the ending takes a wrecking ball to all of it.This is the last reel flip. When the ending of a movie reaches back and rewrites how you feel about the entire thing, for better or for worse.This is a special commentary episode to start a conversation.Movie one is the flip that saves: Steven Spielberg's "Disclosure Day." Sky, secrets, and the feeling of not knowing what's looking back at you. Nobody does that better than Spielberg. The problem is what you have to sit through to get to the part where he proves it.Movie two is the flip that wrecks: "The Furious," a 2026 martial arts film that earns every bit of its hype for about two thirds of its runtime, with fight choreography up there with The Raid. And then the last 30 minutes arrive and turn a movie I loved into one I never want to watch again.No spoilers on either one. Just the shape of what happened and why it stuck with me.Then I'm handing it to you. Have you lived through a last reel flip? A movie the ending saved, or one it destroyed? Head to our Instagram @soundspeedaction, find the teaser post for this episode, and tell me in the comments. I'm reading all of them and turning a few into a short video."Disclosure Day," and "The Furious," are in theaters and on home video now.More reviews and recommendations on the way. If you're enjoying the show, a review wherever you listen genuinely helps.Thanks for listening.Topics: Steven Spielberg, Disclosure Day, The Furious, martial arts movies, The Raid, movie endings, film commentary, 2026 movies, spoiler free review

🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: Disclosure Day (2026)https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0H3QRLYCN?tag=soundspeedact-20🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: The Furious (2026)https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0H2C6SYQ8?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

Christopher Nolan is bringing Homer's Odyssey to IMAX with Matt Damon. It'll be an event, and it should be.

Before that lands, I want to point you somewhere stranger.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? carries Homer's name on the box and almost nothing else. The Coens borrowed a couple of characters, a familiar shape, and then took off in their own direction entirely. Chain gang escapees. Bad hair product decisions. A radio station. It is not an adaptation so much as a rumor of one, and it's better for it.

I'll be honest about my own bias here. Everything about this premise told me to skip it. Depression era. Slapstick. A chain gang escape. I was wrong in a way I still haven't fully worked out, and that's most of why I wanted to make this episode.

No spoilers in this one. What I do get into: why a movie with barely any plot holds together this well, a piece of filmmaking history that happened quietly on this production and now touches nearly every movie you watch, how the music outgrew the film that birthed it, and a bit of union bureaucracy that erased one of the two people who actually directed it.

Nolan's version will be the monument. This one's the detour worth taking first.

Available to rent on most streaming platforms. Watch it, then let's talk about it. Enjoy this classic.

More reviews and recommendations on the way. If you're enjoying the show, a review wherever you listen genuinely helps.

Thanks for listening.

🎬 Get the film on DVD: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00003CXRM?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

A spoiler-heavy breakdown of Curry Barker's 2026 psychological thriller "Obsession," the indie horror movie everyone is about to be talking about. Friend of the podcast Chris Cheng is back for this one.

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: This is a full spoiler review. See the movie first.

Our friend of the podcast Chris went to see the 2026 psychological thriller (it's also kinda horror too, right?). I have always known that Chris is not the kind of moviegoer to see something in the theater more than once. That was not the case with this instant classic helmed by Curry Barker. I still don't think he has come down from the high of experiencing this one of a kind movie. I was already excited and looking forward to seeing this movie, and when Chris heard that I was planning to see it in theaters, he said yes, you absolutely need to see it in theaters, and when you plan to go, let me know because I'm coming with you and seeing it again! That was the moment that I knew I was in for something different with this movie.... and what a movie it was!

Where to begin with all the great things of this movie. First, it was made by independent filmmakers on a relatively low budget (somewhere between $750,000 to $1m). These filmmakers come from a short content and YouTube fanbase origins. This movie showcases their creativity in bringing stories to life and developing truly fascinating stories, characters, and themes that will be stuck in your head long after watching them.

"Obsession" is such a treat of a film in that it terrifies not just from the psychological thriller and horror elements (oh, it has plenty of those) but also from relatable, accurate, and very cringe awkward moments that are just all too familiar with all of us to some degree from the not so great relationships that we may have experienced.

The cast in this movie is stellar, especially the leads of Michael Johnston as Bear and the out-of-this-world performance by the up-and-coming actor whose name you will definitely know soon, Inde Navarrette, the scene stealer who plays Nikki. There were so many great elements regarding the acting, directing, themes, and creativity of this movie that Chris was so impacted by this movie that he said we have to record a second session because our first session didn't cover enough. After seeing this movie, I couldn't possibly agree more. Listener, this is the movie to beat for 2026 so far. It will stay with you way long after you have seen it. I can't wait for you to check it out and let us know what you think.

"Obsession" is in theaters now. Do yourself a favor and see it in theaters first. It will be available for purchase on June 30th, but trust me, the theater for this movie will be a next level experience.

We've got more episodes, reviews, and recommendations coming your way. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review, it really helps the podcast.

Thanks for listening, and enjoy the movie.

🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: Obsession (2026)https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0GWXJZD16?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

A new podcast episode of "Sound Speed Action," a review episode on the movie "In The Grey" (2026), is now available everywhere you get your podcasts!

Episode 68 – Review: In The Grey (2026)

Guy Ritchie movies are special. There is always something fun about them. I got hooked with the one-two punch that opened his career, "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch", and I have followed him ever since.

The phases of Ritchie:

The amazing start: "Lock Stock" and "Snatch".

Veering off course (the Madonna era): "Swept Away" (yikes, not Ritchie).

Finding his way back: "Revolver" and "Rocknrolla".

There he is!: "Sherlock Holmes", "Aladdin", and "The Gentlemen". Now he is everywhere, also making shows like "MobLand" and "Young Sherlock". But spreading himself thin has recently produced fun yet troubled movies.

"In The Grey"

Pros: Eiza Gonzalez is the most fun thing here, full of charisma, not phoning it in. The action and that kinetic, slapstick Ritchie energy are intact. The understated Chris Benstead score adds to it, and the locations are fantastic.

Cons: Gyllenhaal and Cavill are dialed way down, so the tough guys never feel human. That ties into the bigger problem: the protagonists never feel in real danger, the third straight Ritchie film with that issue. The courts get manipulated so easily that nothing pushes back, so there are no stakes. The on-screen scribble text is overused to hide the gaps, and the ending, hurt by reshoots that never happened, just abruptly drops.

"In The Grey" hits rental everywhere June 2nd (it was in theaters May 15... 😬). When your movie does worse than "Swept Away," slow down, dude. I love Ritchie, but a reset is needed. Still excited for two Guy Ritchie 2026 works coming soon: "The Gentlemen" season 2 (Netflix, Fall) and "Wife & Dog" (in theaters) with Cumberbatch, Pike, and Hopkins.

If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a review, it really helps the podcast.

Thanks for listening

🎬 Get the film on Prime Video: In The Grey (2026)https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0GXX1Q4QJ?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

⚠️ FULL SPOILERS. If you haven't read the book or seen Project Hail Mary yet, do that first, then come back.

Andy Weir fans have been waiting for this one. The 2021 bestselling novel finally makes its big screen debut and this is the kind of movie that reminds you what movie magic can actually feel like.

Ryan Gosling (star and producer), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest), directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, Spider-Verse), and the voice and puppetry team behind Rocky team up to bring Weir's epic to life. It's a tall order given how many people love this book and how many millions were absorbed by Ray Porter's unrivaled audiobook narration.

Sohrab and Roya break it all down. Does Gosling nail the balance of Grace, the goofy, brilliant, emotionally isolated scientist thrust into an impossible mission? Does Hüller carry the cold, commanding presence of Strat with the laser focus the role demands? And how do you bring a faceless alien to life and make the entire audience fall in love with him?

Weir does it again, a story built on optimism, science, intelligence, and teamwork against insurmountable odds. Ted Lasso comes to mind: even in the darkest moments, there is always a place for hope. You feel that in every scene.

Yes, things were cut from the book. Yes, changes were made. Are there some bumps and decisions we didn't fully understand on first viewing? Sure. Does this still deliver? Hell yes.

Project Hail Mary has already locked its place on the best films of 2026 list and its theatrical run has been extended, including on IMAX. See it on the biggest screen you can. When it hits Prime Video, that'll be your second or third watch.

If you are enjoying the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It genuinely helps more than you know.

Sound Speed Action covers film reviews, series reviews, and the business of entertainment. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.

For more great book content follow Roya at @royaltyreads on IG.

🎬 Get the film on 4K UHD: Project Hail Mary (2026)https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHY59VKP?tag=soundspeedact-20This description contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

A new special topic episode of Sound Speed Action is out now everywhere you get your podcasts!

The big ongoing story in the entertainment world has been the fate of Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount has acquired Warner Bros. Discovery after a long bidding war with Netflix. Netflix is being called the loser in all of this. Look, either of these companies getting their hands on this archive of content pushes this industry into some uncertain territory. But the narrative that Netflix was outplayed here is crazy to me. Today's episode gets into why.

📌 EDITOR'S NOTE: I forgot to include this detail in the episode itself, but it's too important to leave out — so I'm adding it here. A thank you to my friend Arvind for the reminder. The WBD board initially rejected Paramount's hostile bid outright, citing "illusory" financing. The turning point came when Larry Ellison — Oracle co-founder and father of Paramount CEO David Ellison — stepped in with an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion in equity financing. WBD's board chairman had specifically said the deal needed exactly that: direct accountability from Larry Ellison himself. Without that guarantee, Paramount's campaign likely dies in December. The episode covers the broader battle, but that's the detail that changed the math.

We're stepping away from our regular reviews and recommendations for this one. Special topic episodes are for exactly this kind of thing, any major development that impacts this industry of art we all care so much about. The last one was about the American film union strikes of 2023. And by the way, the unions are renegotiating their contracts this year. Fingers crossed on that. Those strikes reshaped this industry in real ways, and this acquisition is going to do the same.