The Brattle Film Podcast

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.

We embark on our annual journey into movies celebrating their 25th, 50th, and 75th anniversaries in conjunction with our annual Reunion Week series. (Actually 10 days not a week this year, so this is a double episode!) With our upcoming Noir City Boston program entirely comprised of 75th-anniversary crime pictures, we spend some time on those as well.

We welcome Brian Tamm and Nancy Campbell back to the podcast to talk about the twenty-year history of the Independent Film Festival Boston and the line up for the 2023 fest.

To celebrate "Reel Film Day" and in honor of the Brattle's commitment to screening 35mm prints, we dive deep into why we love showing films on film and why Boston is such a unique and abundant city for repertory cinema. We talk with our fellow programs and projectionists at some of the other five cinemas in Boston and beyond that continue this rich tradition. And we chat with some of our patrons, visitors, and fellow podcaster as to why they love the celluloid experience.

We continue looking back on 2022's best films via some listener suggestions for their favorite films of the year. We then discuss the Oscars nominations, the Best Actress "controversy," the various rules and non-rules of the Academy's nomination process, the pros and cons of digital color grading, and many other Oscar-adjacent topics we have strong opinions about. There's never a dull moment around awards season.

We look back on the ups and downs of 2022, a year that saw some huge successes and some huge disappointments and some disturbing trends. This episode focuses mostly on the smaller films that people may have missed, but we start out with Top Gun Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once because we can't talk about 2022 in film without going deep on the two films that got people back to the cinemas.

We take a look at the Antoine Doinel cycle of five films made about the same character over a twenty year period by director François Truffaut and actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. We're then joined by Truffaut scholar Annette Insdorf for some detail on the iconic French New Wave filmmaker and her insights into these particular films.

Andrew Dominik's contentious new film Blonde, an ahistorical biopic anti-fantasy about Marilyn Monroe provides plenty of fodder for a lively discussion about the film and the legendary actress at its center. We take a deep dive into many of Marilyn's movies, her status as an icon of cinema and of womanhood, and why so many people still feel so passionately about her after all these years.

We herald the return of co-host Alissa Darsa with this spirited, all over the place conversation about alien invasion movies: sci-fi/horror settings, practical vs digital creature effects, blending sci-fi and horror with comedy, and squiggly little wormlike creatures that can take over human beings if we're not careful!