How to Make a Killing is ostensibly a crime drama about financial ambition and ethical compromise, but what lingers after the credits is less a plot and more a portrait—a character study of how obsession can warp morality and justify itself in the believer’s own mind. Films about money are rarely just about money. They are about desire, identity, and the narratives we tell ourselves to rationalize decisions that eventually define us.

In this film, we are invited into the psyche of Becket, played by Glen Powell, a man whose intelligence and drive are initially admirable, but whose fixation on the promise of wealth becomes the lens through which he interprets love, loyalty, justice, and even self-worth. The story reminds us, with quiet inevitability, that the love of money doesn’t simply corrupt—more often, it rationalizes corruption, wrapping unethical choices in the language of necessity and vision.

There are striking parallels here with films like The Big Short, where financial systems are shown not just as mechanisms of profit but as moral minefields. How to Make a Killing doesn’t have the structural cleverness of that film, but it shares its fatalistic interrogation of ambition and ethical elasticity.

And because this movie is as much about psychological descent as it is about financial ascent, conversations about obsession, leverage, and self-justification aren’t just thematic — they become personal.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots is joined by the bank Lucky Mud to play some of their latest songs in a tiny desk concert and talk about updates in their musical career.

Is Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights a bold, thoughtful reinterpretation of a literary classic—or a grotesquely self-indulgent fever dream? You be the judge. That question may sound hyperbolic, but it feels unavoidable.

Fennell is undeniably a visionary director. Her eye for composition, texture, and tonal immersion is extraordinary. The production design, cinematography, and costuming are exquisite—gothic romance rendered through contemporary sensibilities with remarkable visual confidence. This is, without question, one of the most visually striking adaptations of Brontë ever mounted.

And yet, the screenplay is another matter entirely.

Where Brontë constructed a narrative architecture built on decay—of estates, of relationships, of moral order—Fennell often rearranges or redistributes character traits in ways that undermine that structural collapse. Characters are flattened. Motivations shift. Symbolism loses its arc. When Fennell adheres to the novel, the film finds footing. When she diverges, it falters.

This is not a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down conversation. It’s about interpretation. About authorship. About whether contemporary sensibilities illuminate classic texts—or impose upon them.

And because this story, at its core, concerns gender, power, agency, repression, and emotional violence, I am especially pleased to welcome Melissa Watts—a longtime friend and former graduate colleague—whose perspective will bring a necessary female lens to this adaptation and conversation.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots welcomes back singer-songwriter Todd Sparks into the studio for a tiny desk concert adn conversation about what's going on in his performance career. From Florida's panhandle to the Tampa Bay region, he is all over the place.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots and his zany crew have Kathryn Roberts & Sarah Whitehead in studio for a tiny desk concert and to talk about what they're up to in their music careers. 

On this episode of ReelTalk, we review Sam Raimi’s newest movie Send Help followed by a countdown of top three Raimi movies.

Ever so often, scheduling—or simple reality—forces you to rethink how you talk about a movie. This episode is one of those occasions. Send Help is a film I’ve seen, but my guest hasn’t—so instead of a traditional review, we’re flipping the format. I’ll be responding to questions, prompts, and curiosities, letting the conversation guide the critique rather than delivering a straight monologue.

That approach actually feels fitting for Send Help, a film that plays with expectation, tension, and survival—forcing characters, and by extension the audience, to reassess what matters moment to moment. I’ll save the specifics for the discussion.

Then, we’ll pivot to celebration—counting down our Top 3 Sam Raimi films. Raimi is a filmmaker whose career spans horror, superhero cinema, studio spectacle, and gleeful excess—and tonight we’ll be narrowing that eclectic filmography down to the three titles that best define his voice.

So we’ll begin with survival… and end with splatter, style, and Sam Raimi at full tilt.

On this episode of ReelTalk, we take a deep dive into the history, present state, and future of The Oscars, which held its first ceremony in 1929,  and has recently made waves with its announcement that its moving the broadcast of the ceremony to YouTube in 2029.

For nearly a century, the Academy Awards have functioned as Hollywood’s grand mirror—reflecting not only what the industry celebrates, but what it values, what it fears, and what it is willing to forget.

At their best, the Oscars can spotlight artistry, elevate careers, and preserve a cinematic legacy. At their worst, they become a symptom of a larger cultural drift—away from craft, complexity, and adult storytelling, and toward visibility, virality, and brand alignment.

In my recent article, I argue that the Oscars have not simply “lost relevance,” as the popular refrain goes, but that they have been reshaped by the same forces transforming film culture itself: social media amplification, algorithmic attention economies, and a growing emphasis on content over cinema.

Awards campaigns now unfold less as conversations about artistry and more as extended exercises in optics, momentum, and narrative control.

Following the announced move to YouTube in 2029, I wrote an article titled “The Oscars are big. It’s the Oscars that got small.”

I argue that the ceremony’s move toward platforms like YouTube is not merely a distribution decision, but a symbolic capitulation—an institution founded to celebrate cinema’s grandeur and communal ritual now flattening film into algorithmic content, where immediacy and engagement metrics outweigh reverence, craft, and artistic risk.

The shift raises a fundamental question about what the Oscars still stand for in a culture increasingly willing to trade ceremony and meaning for convenience and reach.

Which brings us to this episode’s guest. Debbie Pawlak’s book, Bringing Up Oscar: The Men and Women Who Founded the Academy, approaches the Academy Awards not as a red-carpet spectacle, but as a living cultural institution—one shaped by history, tradition, contradictions, and change. It’s thoughtful and accessible exploration of the Academy Awards.

Together, we’re not here to scold the Oscars, nor to romanticize them, but to ask a more productive question: what do they still mean—and what could they mean again?

Enjoy the show!

On this episode of Sound Sessions, join host Tom Hoots and his crew as they welcome back Tim Parish to the studio for a tiny desk concert and to talk about the latest in his musical career. 

Ever so often, a genre film comes along that knows exactly what it is—and more importantly, what it is not trying to be. Primate is not interested in prestige horror, elevated allegory, or winking irony. It is an unapologetic “when nature attacks” movie, and refreshingly, it commits to that premise with confidence, craft, and conviction.

To my surprise, I liked Primate quite a lot. It delivers spine-tingling chills, nightmare-fueled thrills, and a steady sense of dread that never collapses into camp or self-parody. The pacing is solid, the set-pieces are effective, and—perhaps most importantly—we actually find ourselves rooting for these characters to survive. In a genre where human beings often exist merely to be dispatched, that matters.

Are there a few paper-thin characters? Yes. But most are developed just enough to create investment, tension, and consequence. Primate may not operate on the same psychological or thematic level as something like Cujo, but it is very much in that ballpark—lean, mean, and built around the primal terror of losing control when nature decides to push back.

On this episode, we’re talking about what Primate does right, why “when nature attacks” movies still work, and what this film suggests about the enduring power of straightforward genre storytelling.

Joining me for this episode's discussion is returning guest, friend of the show, and fellow film critic Sean Boelman.

Fifty years ago this November, Network arrived in theaters as a blistering satire—a provocation aimed squarely at television news, corporate power, and a culture increasingly addicted to spectacle. Today, it no longer plays as satire at all. It plays as documentation.

Sidney Lumet’s Network didn’t just predict the future of media—it diagnosed the mechanics of our present. A world where outrage is currency, truth is negotiable, and authenticity is something to be branded, monetized, and discarded. What was once a cautionary tale has become an instruction manual we never stopped following.

At its core, Network is not simply about television—it’s about systems. Systems that reward noise over nuance, attention over accountability, and performance over principle. And perhaps most unsettling of all, it asks us to confront not only the institutions that enable this decay—but our own role as willing participants.

2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most prescient films ever made, so we’re not just looking back. We’re holding up a mirror. And the reflection is… unsettling.