The Brattle Film Podcast

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.

We wrap up the summer with an episode and a film series devoted to movies about house cats, of which there are a lot more than you can shake a stick at. Whether they appear in animated movies, horror films, comedies, or historical fictions, felines play an outsized role in cinema, despite being notoriously difficult to train in the craft of acting.

For Robert Altman's centennial, we dive deep into the filmography of the great maverick.

We kick off Season Six with our typically epic Reunion Week show, highlighting films celebrating their 75th, 50th, and 25th anniversary of release.