The Brattle Film Podcast

We celebrate 25 years since Ned and Ivy took over running The Brattle and turned the cinema into a non-profit organiztion, looking back at some of the highs and lows, special guests, and adventures behind the screen.

We set the wayback machine 75 years to take look back at the creation of the alien invation subgenre, its origins, motivations, the paralles to today, and why we still love watching these sometime hocky, sometimes silly, often beautiful, and still effectilvly thrilling, chilling, and entertaining pictures.

For July 4th weekend, we celebrate actors many consider "National Treasures" in films that are typically over-the-top examples of Amercian excess and Hollywood hokum.

Our annual Reunion Week season premeire takes us back to three excellent years in cinema: 1951, 1976, and 2001.

Our Mother's Day Series brings out some deep feelings (about actors and movies more than parents and parenthood) as we explore movies about good moms, bad moms, nostalgic moms, traditional moms, alterna-moms, protective moms, over-protective moms, and chosen moms.

The "lost episode" from Season 6, this show dedicated to movies set and shot in Chicago was recorded as our Thanksgiving episode, but it was eaten by a computer. We bring it out now, even though the series it was meant to drop in conjunction with has come and gone. But Chicago movies are evergreen, and we talk about many of our favorites from the Windy City and debate many finer points about certain actors and filmmakers who choose to set films there.

We close out our look back at the year in movies with a deep dive into many of the Oscar nominated films and several smaller pictues we don't want people to forget about. While our conversation doesn't get quite as heated as on our previous episode, we do discover than many of us have strong feelings about some surpinging movies. With the Academy nominating films ranging from F1 to Train Dreams as Best Picture, 2025 feels like a year in which the Oscars are far more representational of what most folks chose to watch - not just during awards season, but throughout this challenging year.

Our annual tradition of looking back on the past year in movies engenders passionate debates as we discuss the Brattle's biggest ever "Some of the Best of" program (30 films!), touching on cinema trends of the past year and giving some love to some of our favorite lesser known titles of 2025.

We bid a fond farewell to the legendary actor, director, producer, humanitarian, activist, and cultivator of emerging talent with a program of films from the period in which Robert Redford came into his fullest self. Starting with the pivitol year of 1969, when he made Downhill Racer and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, through the early '80s when he made his astonishing directorial debut, Ordinary People, and set the image for his future on screen with The Natural. Recalling many stories and anecdotes we pay tribute to one of the biggest icons of the movies at the end of a year that saw the passing of far too many cinema greats.

For the final episode of our Boston on Screen series, we're joined by Adam Roffman for a look behind the scenes of many of the films featured in our three previous episodes. Adam, an on-set dresser, documentarian, and former programmer of the Independent Film Festival of Boston, shares his stories of working on The Town, Little Women, American Hustle, Patriots Day, The Heat, and countless other Boston productions, as well as what the future of production looked like during the COVID-19 pandemic.