Oh Brother

Message Dan and Mike

Dan finally crosses a massive blind spot off his list in this Classic Films Dan Hasn't Seen Yet deep dive: Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, seen here as The Whole Bloody Affair, the rare combined cut stitching Volumes One and Two into the single epic Tarantino always intended. We dig into why it took over two decades to get this version cleared for release, the rights battle that held it up, and the extended anime...

Message Dan and Mike

We're back with another streaming deep dive, and this time we're tackling The Runner, the Amazon Prime thriller starring Gal Gadot that dropped to the top of the charts on September 2nd. The premise sounds promising on paper: a lawyer out for a jog gets a phone call informing her that her son is being held hostage, and the only way to save him is to carry out a series of increasingly dangerous tasks dictated by ...

Message Dan and Mike

We're back in a brand new studio (still under construction, but functional) to talk about Mayday, the straight-to-Apple TV+ action comedy from Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds' production company. Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein set the film in 1987 during the Cold War, with Reynolds playing a Navy pilot shot down over enemy territory and rescued by an ex-KGB agent played by a nearly unrecogniza...

Message Dan and Mike

Glengarry Glen Ross turns 34 this year, and we're finally giving David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play its due on the show. James Foley's 1992 film adaptation brings together an absolutely stacked cast — Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, and Alan Arkin — for the story of four desperate real estate salesmen pitted against each other in a brutal sales contest. We dig in...

Message Dan and Mike

We're reviewing Netflix's The Last House, the sci-fi horror thriller starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura as parents whose family gets mysteriously sealed inside their home with no way out. The premise is strong and the first act hooks us immediately, but a jarring five-year time jump sends the story spiraling into some of the weakest, most unsatisfying territory we've covered on the show. We dig into the film's ...

Message Dan and Mike

We finally sit down to unpack Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth installment in Tom Holland's run as Peter Parker and the first Spidey film from director Destin Daniel Cretton. Picking up four years after No Way Home's spell erased Peter from the world's memory, this is a noticeably darker, more isolated take on the character — Aunt May is gone, his friendships with MJ and Ned are gone, and the arachnid...

Message Dan and Mike

We're back with part two of our San Diego Comic-Con recap, picking up where we left off on day two and carrying through to our final thoughts on the whole experience. This time we get into the chaos of Hall H, including a wristband standoff that turned into a two-hour, half-mile trek around the building just to get denied entry — twice. We also break down the panels that delivered and the ones that didn't:...

Message Dan and Mike

We're back from our first San Diego Comic-Con with press credentials, and this episode kicks off a two-part recap of the entire experience. Part one covers our arrival, the scramble to find the convention center on San Diego's trolley system, and the reality check that comes with picking up press badges for the first time. We also take a detour to Seaport Village for tacos and a beer with a view of the harbor, t...

Message Dan and Mike

We're reviewing John Cassavetes' Opening Night (1977), starring Gena Rowlands, as part of our dive into the Criterion box set of five Cassavetes films. This is a filmmaker some call the father of independent cinema, and we get into why he had to finance his own work, act in other people's movies to bankroll his next project, and watch this one bomb so badly on release that the studio pulled it from theaters.

We t...

Message Dan and Mike

Rocky turns 50 this December, and Sylvester Stallone just turned 80 — so we're marking both with our very first Stallone review. A broke, unknown actor with bit parts in mob films turned down nearly $400,000 from the studio, wrote the script in three days, and sold his own dog to make the one movie he refused to let anyone else star in.

We get into the guerrilla filmmaking behind it: a budget under ...

Message Dan and Mike

We saw Supergirl opening weekend and couldn't disagree more. Dan's defending it. Mike thinks it's one of the worst films he's seen in years. No fence-sitting — just a real debate about whether Craig Gillespie's DCU origin story actually works.

We break down Milly Alcock's performance as Kara Zor-El, the galactic revenge story adapted from Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Jason Momoa's Lobo and what ...

Message Dan and Mike

Four months ago we did a first look on Project Hail Mary and walked away genuinely excited. Now that we've seen it — Dan nearly three times, Mike once — we're ready to give it a full review.

Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist moonlighting as a middle school teacher who wakes up alone in deep space, no memory intact, on what amounts to a suicide mission to save Earth from extinction...

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We finally got Dan in front of Cool Hand Luke for the first time, and this one did not disappoint. The 1967 Stuart Rosenberg film stars Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson — a decorated, easygoing war veteran who ends up on a Florida chain gang and absolutely refuses to be broken. It's a simple premise with a whole lot going on underneath it.

We dig into what makes the film work, starting with Paul Newman's perfor...

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We're two episodes into Apple TV+'s new adaptation of Cape Fear, and we have some thoughts. The series, which dropped its first two episodes on June 5th, stars Javier Bardem as Max Cady, Amy Adams as attorney Anna Bowden, and Patrick Wilson as her husband Tom — a family now living under the shadow of a man they may have wronged. Scorsese and Spielberg are both on board as executive producers, which raises ...

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We're back with our eighth installment of the Oh Brother Criterion Collection reviews, and this one is our fourth Coen Brothers entry — the 2001 neo-noir masterpiece, The Man Who Wasn't There, celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed Crane, a laconic small-town barber who speaks little but observes everything. When he discovers his wife Doris is having an affair with her boss Big Dave, ...

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The first Star Wars film in seven years is finally here, and we're breaking down The Mandalorian and Grogu with a mostly spoiler-free review. Dan saw it opening night, Mike saw it the night before we recorded, and we are not on the same page — which makes for one of our most honest conversations yet.

We cover everything: the opening weekend box office, whether the film delivers on years of buildup, how it c...

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We finally got around to Outcome, the new Apple TV+ dark comedy directed by Jonah Hill and starring Keanu Reeves as a sober Hollywood star forced onto an apology tour after a blackmailer threatens to tank his career. On paper, it has everything — a great cast, a sharp premise, Cameron Diaz, Matt Bomer. In practice, it just doesn't work.

We dig into why the film falls short despite its ingredients: the tonal...

Message Dan and Mike

We finally saw Michael — Antoine Fuqua's long-awaited biopic about the King of Pop — and we have thoughts. Dan and Mike break down Jaafar Jackson's performance as his legendary uncle, the film's decision to sidestep the 1993 allegations entirely, and whether the finished product does justice to one of the most complicated legacies in music history.

We get into what Fuqua gets right — the recreat...

Message Dan and Mike

This week we're reviewing At Close Range, James Foley's 1986 rural noir crime film — newly available in a 4K restoration from Cinematographe. It's the kind of release that makes you wonder why it took this long. Based on the true story of the Johnston Gang, a Pennsylvania crime family whose reign ended in betrayal and murder, the film stars Sean Penn as Brad Whitewood Jr., a young man who seeks out his est...