Movie Memory Machine

In near-future Los Angeles, the Hotel Artemis treats wounded criminals — but our hosts are more concerned with countdown etiquette, 3D-printed weapons, and where Jeff Goldblum keeps his tiny hand bomb.

What you'll hear:

• Heist etiquette, countdown anxiety, and why masks should stay on — even in your sleep

• Sci-fi tech that makes no ergonomic sense (looking at you, jade...

What if your health insurance got you shot?

In Hotel Artemis (2018), Jodie Foster runs a secret hospital for criminals in riot-torn Los Angeles — but despite ten unbreakable rules, nobody seems to follow any of them, including the movie itself.

Set in the not-so-distant future of 2028, Hotel Artemis follows a covert Los Angeles hospital for criminals operated out of an abandoned art deco ho...

The Machine wrests control of the list and serves up five films that echo, challenge, or outshine Body of Lies (2008). From Cold War shadows to desert firefights, these movies test the limits of trust, tension, and espionage on screen.

• A black-and-white classic spy story with Richard Burton and moral fallout

• The beard-to-weight Oscar conspiracy of Syriana

• Why Spielbe...

Leonardo DiCaprio side-sips a beer. Landen sprays beer out his nose. Somehow, that’s still more memorable than anything in Body of Lies.

This Mini-Transmission spirals from forgettable marketing into prop comedy, actor auditions, and the least effective interrogation techniques ever recorded.

• Why Body of Lies has one of the most boring posters and marketing campaigns imaginable

What happens when you take a CIA thriller, strip it of personality, and add brown contact lenses? Body of Lies (2008) is the rare war-on-terror drama that forgets itself while you’re still watching it.

Released in 2008 by Warner Bros. and directed by Ridley Scott, Body of Lies stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a CIA operative running ground operations in Jordan and Russell Crowe as his remote, micromanaging sup...

What do Brazilian fight scenes, video game sound cues, and a referee with a whistle have in common? This Mini-Transmission dives into the sonic mayhem of The Rundown (2003), plays the easiest Trailer Game of all time, and ends with a cryptic new clue from the Machine.

WHAT YOU’LL HEAR

• A spirited debate over whether a jungle fight scene is secretly reffed by a whistle-h...

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s first big shot at movie stardom came in The Rundown (2003) — a jungle action-comedy from a studio that couldn’t decide what it wanted.

This week, Movie Memory Machine digs into the awkward birth of a blockbuster franchise that never was.

In The Rundown (2003), Dwayne Johnson stars as Beck, a bounty hunter sent to the Amazon to retrieve his boss’s ...

How many tracking shots does it take to find a lost love? In this high-style, low-logic thriller-romance from the early 2000s, Matthew is consumed by a single question: what happened to Lisa? And we’re consumed by a different one: wait, who is Lisa again?

Before Gone Girl, before You, there was Wicker Park — a 2004 psychological romance thriller where Josh Hartnett broods, stalks, and slowly unravels ove...

Rom-coms, rules, and red flags. In this “5 For,” Truman and Landen pick five films that helped shape the cinematic dating game — from charming classics to early-2000s cultural crimes.

Highlights

• Why When Harry Met Sally set the rom-com template for behavioral science in dating

• Hitch vs. Justin Long: Who’s more believable as a love expert?

• Read more