Sheila O'Malley is one of our greatest film writers, historians, & critics of screen acting. Her essays & reviews on The Sheila Variations blog & Roger Ebert's site are always must-reads, & I've been incredibly fortunate to have had her on the pod a few times to discuss some of cinema history's best & brightest performers. This time, she's back to share her thoughts on the vulnerable, intelligent, & understated character actor Dana Andrews, who to Sheila's mind is the recipient of many "10-second Oscars," wherein the smallest choices he makes in a scene or given line-read change the temperature of a film for good. In this warm, wonderful chat, we cover Andrews in LAURA, FALLEN ANGEL, DAISY KENYON, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, BALL OF FIRE, & more.

Guest Bio: Sheila O’Malley has been writing for Rogerebert.com since 2013. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Sight & Sound, and other outlets, including Film Comment, for which she had a biweekly column called Present Tense. She has written numerous booklet essays and video essays for Criterion Collection releases. She is the author of The Art and Making of Frankenstein, a book detailing the making of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. Sheila is a member of the New York Film Critics’ Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

Originally Posted on Patreon (8/4/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/165775594

Listen to the Watch With Jen™ Podcast on RSS, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Apple, Pandora, and More

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

You're in for a treat this week! Queue up Watch With Jen's long-overdue reunion of covering iconic action superstars with my dear friends (& frequent guests) Jed Ayres, Jordan Harper, & Priscilla Page. In '24, we gathered to dig deep into Jean-Claude Van Damme's life & career. And in '25, Jordan & Priscilla logged in for a celebration of all things Jackie Chan.

This time, we're going back to our Gen X & Millennial childhoods watching Arnold Schwarzenegger save the day. From PUMPING IRON to T2 & beyond, we compare/contrast Arnold with his fellow Planet Hollywood investors & action megastars Bruce Willis & Sylvester Stallone, discuss what it is that sets him apart as a mischievous, charismatic presence with a surprisingly light touch, and walk you through some of his biggest films.

Although we reference many other performances & pictures along the way, in this feature-length conversation, we set our sights on PUMPING IRON, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, COMMANDO, PREDATOR, TOTAL RECALL, & T2: JUDGEMENT DAY.

Full of nostalgia, laughs, stories, and clever insights, we hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we did. And make sure you're subscribed to Watch With Jen; we can't wait to get the band back together again to cover another action legend for you soon!

Originally Posted on Patreon (7/28/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/watch-with-jen-165083130

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

Delightful Mary Higgins Clark award-winning mystery writer Lina Chern drops by the podcast once again for a perfectly summery, vacation-and-sunscreen-season-worthy tour of Island Movies, such as SEND HELP, SHUTTER ISLAND, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, KING KONG, CAST AWAY, SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS, & beyond.

Lina's Bio: "Hi. I'm Lina. My debut novel Play the Fool won the 2024 Mary Higgins Clark Award and was a 2024 Lefty and Anthony Award nominee. A sequel, Tricks of Fortune, is expected in 2025. Other work has appeared in The Marlboro Review, The Bellingham Review, Rhino, The Collagist, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. I have also written trivia questions, word puzzles for a TV game show, paranormal romances, dialogue for your favorite comic book characters, award-winning movie reviews, and poems that have been published and read by up to dozens of people." (c/o LinaChern.com)

Originally Posted on Patreon (7/22/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/164555257

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

Encyclopedic cinephile, writer, and pal Jed Ayres joins us once again to discuss the action-horror subgenre Games of Death. Taking us on a journey from THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, we touch on some of the biggest, rarest, & best films in the genre before exploring THE HUNGER GAMES, READY OR NOT, & SELF-RELIANCE.

Originally Posted on Patreon (7/15/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/163902834

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

Earlier this year, I had a blast revisiting five of my favorite Joan Cusack performances for RogerEbert.com's Women Writers Week celebration. My friend, the prolific MovieMom.com critic Nell Minow, who also writes and edits for Ebert's site, was my editor for the article, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring her back to Watch With Jen to explore a handful of our favorite Cusack roles that I wasn't able to cover in the piece. Touching on almost her entire filmography in this briskly energetic conversation, we pay close attention to WORKING GIRL, TOY STORY 2 (& 5), SCHOOL OF ROCK, MY BLUE HEAVEN, ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES, and several others.

Originally Posted on Patreon (7/8/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/163253169

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

This week, film scholar and author Mike Miley returns to the podcast to discuss one of his favorite directors, Jonathan Demme. Intriguingly, Mike opted to focus on Demme's earliest movies before his most successful era of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and PHILADELPHIA. Although we touch on the unsung filmmaker's entire career, in this fast-paced, well-researched conversation, Mike and I cover Demme's background, recurring themes, collaborators (especially David Byrne), contemporaries, and those he influenced (most notably Paul Thomas Anderson), plus the films STOP MAKING SENSE, SOMETHING WILD, and MARRIED TO THE MOB. One of my favorite episodes of the season so far and perfect for the Fourth of July weekend given what Demme chooses to celebrate onscreen in America; it's also a must for cinephiles with access to the Criterion Channel, given that this month there's a spotlight on the filmmaker's work.

Mike's Bio: Mike Miley is the author of David Lynch's American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema and Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film. His writing on film has appeared in The Atlantic, Bright Lights Film Journal, Reactor, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. His next book, A Guide to Reading (and Finishing) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, will be published next year. He's currently working on an oral history about an 80s cult classic.

Originally Posted on Patreon (7/1/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/162635425

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

My good friend, Black List Senior Vice President Kate Hagen, returns to Watch With Jen for this throwback summer celebration of 1996 films written, directed, and starring women. A diverse cross-section of independent and commercial offerings that we highlight throughout the hour, Kate and I discuss WALKING & TALKING, A VERY BRADY SEQUEL, HARRIET THE SPY, THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS & DOGS, plus one of the summer's biggest headline getters, STRIPTEASE with Demi Moore, who made history that year as the highest paid studio actress of all-time. While the film itself isn't great, Moore's success paved the way for women such as Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon to earn paychecks closer to those of their male counterparts. Shouting out other films that year that you need to see (like I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, which releases in two months from Criterion), Kate also walks us through the summers of '76, '86, '06, and '26 to let us know the way opportunities have changed.

Note: I never know whether or not to include my pod series MIDNIGHT RUN THROUGH in my official show count, but if you take a look at the total number of pods I've uploaded since the show's beginning in 2020, this marks the 300th offering from Watch With Jen! Thanks for listening.

Originally Posted on Patreon (6/25/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/162054436

It was a joy to bring on a fellow Arizona critic & film scholar, the brilliant & funny Barbara VanDenburgh, to discuss the masterful Arizona-raised filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Barbara's favorite director and her greatest area of film knowledge; it's wild to realize that we haven't done an official Spielberg episode of the pod before this one. I know you'll love it! Covering the filmmaker's life, career, major themes, techniques, collaborators, and more, we touch on most of his pictures in this fast-paced conversation, and pay special attention to three of his summer releases, JAWS, JURASSIC PARK, and A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Guest Bio: Barbara VanDenburgh is a longtime arts and entertainment journalist, a film critic, and a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle. She is also the founder and host of the First Draft Book Club, a popular, long-running book club that discusses recently published works of literary fiction at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix. She is the former books editor of USA Today and currently manages programming and communications for The Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University.

Originally Posted on Patreon (6/16/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/FilmIntuition/posts/161259047

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

The brilliant and soulful Roxana Hadadi returns with this episode devoted to one of her current favorite actors, the great Riz Ahmed. Similar to past conversations focused on terrific character actors like Tom Wilkinson and Edward Norton, this week, we explore Ahmed's filmography at large, discuss his evolution as an actor, and what sets him apart in the films THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, NIGHTCRAWLER, and SOUND OF METAL.

Guest Bio: A TV critic with Vulture, who also writes about film & pop culture, Roxana was previously the film editor & a critic with Pajiba, & her reviews, essays, recaps, and other writing have also been published by The AV Club, Polygon, RogerEbert.com, The L.A. Times, Crooked Marquee, The Playlist, Fox Digital, The Criterion Collection, GQ, & Inverse.

Originally Posted on Patreon (6/7/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/160446279

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

Every time Leslie Byron Pitt is on the podcast, we go deep, & this episode is no exception. A film blogger and hobbyist photographer, Leslie is also a fellow podcaster, co-hosting the shows Fatal Attractions and Hustlers of Culture. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the way that photography and the role of the photographer are used in a variety of films, and zero in on REAR WINDOW, ONE HOUR PHOTO, and CITY OF GOD in particular.

Originally posted on Patreon (5/31/26) here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/159733813

Donate to the Pod via Ko-fi & PayPal

Shop Watch With Jen logo Merchandise in Logo Designer Kate Gabrielle's Threadless Shop

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive