The Brattle Film Podcast

We pay tribute to one of our favorite movie stars on the occasion of what would have been her 100th birthday. Lauren Bacall's early films played a major role in the history of the Brattle Theatre, and she's a figure all four of us have long admired. We take a deep dive into some of Bacall's most revered pictures as well as some of her lesser-known films, discuss her life and work, and Ned shares the story of his brief encounter with the screen legend. 

As the dog days of summer approach, we take a look at the sweatiest movies we can think of.  Many of these films artfully showcase how oppressive heat leads to conflict. 

We welcome Susan Seidelman to the podcast in celebration of her new memoir and her upcoming live appearance at the Brattle on July 18th. In addition to listening to stories about her life in film, we talk about what her films have meant to us and what it was like revisiting many of them while reading her book. We also dive into the past couple of months of listener mail.

We kick off Season 5 with our annual Reunion Week show, talking about films celebrating their 75th, 50th, and 25th anniversaries. This year, that's 1949, the year of the first televised Oscar ceremony; 1974, one of the greatest movie years of all time; and 1999, a pivotal, trendsetting year for cinema. While our discussion is tied to the series running at the Brattle, we touch on all sorts of films from each year in this extra-long episode.

We close out our 4th season with a show about needle drops, those brilliant and sometimes lazy pop music choices filmmakers employ to set a tone, evoke an era, express a character's unspoken emotions, or just give the film a burst of energy. 

Boston Underground Film Festival programmers Kevin Monahan and Nicole McControversy join us to discuss the history of this unique fest and their 2024 lineup.

We wrap up awards season with more thoughts on the terrific year in film that was 2023, including discussions about the 10 Best Picture nominees, the documentary and international feature nominees, the idiocy of this year's Oscar controversies as well as other internet hot takes that surrounded the big movies before and after their releases, and we shine our appreciation on the big swings taken by actors and filmmakers this year. 

We begin our deep dive into the abundance of excellent films of 2023, a year that still saw fewer new releases than is typical of pre-pandemic cinema but gave us far more exciting, risky, and unusual movies of quality than we've gotten used to. It was a year of big swings by filmmakers, actors, and studios—most of which paid off, and familiar "comfort fair" from old favorites that still delivered excellence, as well as a fairly resounding rejection of the same-old-same-old corporate franchise product. It was a year that gave us Barbenheimer, the best Godzilla movie since the original, some terrific biographical documentaries, a slew of memorable dance sequences, two Hirokazu Kore-eda features, and six Nicholas Cage pictures! In this show, we focus on the smaller films that might have flown under people's radar, and we'll return next month to talk about the big awards movies.

For our last episode of 2023, we wrap up the Brattle's yearlong look back on 100 years of Warner Brothers by diving into how the studio reacted to the blockbuster era. Examining Warner's overt attempts to capitalize on its "franchise" intellectual properties like Superman and Batman, to its unexpected '80s blockbusters like Private Benjamin, Gremlins, and Beetlejuice, to the risks that paid off like Purple Rain, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and The Lost Boys, to some lesser-known gems like Crossing Delancey, Stand and Deliver, and True Stories.

For this year's Noirvember, we look at crime and caper pictures that center on technology as well as dark dramas that deal with noirish themes of identity and mistrust. Film Noir and Science Fiction are two great cinematic genres that taste great together, and we have a grand old time discussing how the tropes, subtexts, and visual styles of each criss cross and complement each other.