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.

For our third episode, looking at the way Boston is depicted in movies, we look at the wave of independent pictures that began shooting in the city during the 1990s, as well as some of the more outlandish genre pictures that have used (or destroyed) the city.

For this second part of our reissued Boston on Film series, we go beyond the crime movie to focus on how the institutions of Boston – educational, social, scientific, medical, legal, and the press – are depicted on screen. Because the focus of these pictures is not on the underground criminal element, they are more likely to feel like time capsules giving us a glimpse into a Greater Boston that many of us have never seen.

For Thanksgiving, we're reissuing all 4 of our Boston on Screen episodes. Inspired by partnering with the Massachusetts Historical Society for a program focusing on the dichotomy of Boston's image in Hollywood films, we did, what turned out to be, a four part series with a selection of pictures that could be called "The Boston Crime Wave," or, as Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr calls this subgenera, "Boston Triple Decker Films," or, as Boston crime novelist Chuck Hogan refers to them, "Boston No-R movies." We explore what these films get right and what they get wrong in how they depict and use our fair city in geographical, character, and thematic terms.

We're unable to bring you our planned Episode #87, "Give Thanks for Chicago." So we'll be re-running our Boston on Screen series for Thanksgiving. But first, take a listen to voice messages from listeners who called in with their responses to Episode #86, "Scariest Movie Moments."

For Spooky Season, Allisa, Ian, Ivy, and Ned share their personal top five scariest movie moments and invite our listeners to share their own rankings of this most subjective of cinematic rankings.

On the occasion of his latest feature, Where to Land, coming to the Brattle, we welcome indie cinema icon Hal Hartley to discuss his text-built and performer-driven films, the ways the industry has evolved over the decades of his career, as well as his fondness for Kojak and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.