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.

We discuss our love of documentary features and the Brattle's legacy of screening non-fiction, sometimes in conjunction with one of our series partners. We're then joined by the programmer of one of those series: GlobeDocs Film Festival Director of Programming Lisa Viola, who gives us a history of that series and a preview of 2023's line-up.

Diving deep into the '80s filmography of one of our favorite actors, we discuss the unique performance style of Christopher Walken; his sense of humor, sense of menace, skills as a dancer, the many commercial failures he made as a leading man during this decade, and why we think all his '80s movies are all worthy of revisiting. Along the way, we get into many cultural aspects of the decade: Madonna power ballads, the Roger Moore era of James Bond, Golan-Globus fairly tale musicals, pre-CGI special effects, actors who say "yes" to every role, and real-life alien abductions.

We pay tribute to the late great Paul Reubens and his iconic film Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Then we take a deep drive into some of the lesser-known works of New Hollywood legend, Billy Friedkin.

For the dog days of summer, we strap in for an episode that asks, if there is such a thing as "elevated horror," then what the devil is unelevated horror? We try to answer that question with a summer series of Thrill Rides featuring giant monsters, killer AI, and demons from hell.

In this rerun, we revisit an early episode that highlighted some small movies (and a couple of big ones) that are very much worth checking out.