The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

Some years, one film locks in early as a popular, unbeatable favorite to win all of the major awards at all of the major ceremonies, such as last year’s Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly a billion dollars and swept the Oscars. This year? It’s not so clear what the frontrunner is, how various controversies might have affected Academy voting, or what the significance of the awards might be in the age of streaming. This week's fi...

Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World, and Brand Upon the Brain is a filmmaker who seemingly operates by no rules and often merges the surreal, the traditional, and the experimental. The idea of discomfort at the merger of traditional ideas with the inexplicable, of the familiar with the bizarre, is both true of his style and also the substance of his latest film, Rumours—which he directed with Evan Jo...

It’s the time of year where awards bodies, critics, and audiences alike are all finally able to catch up on the notable releases of the past year, to look in retrospect at trends, and start to let works settle in ways that they don’t always in the heat of the moment. Most critics will do a best of list, awards bodies have released or already given out their awards. But the idea of our episode today is not to look to the critics who...

Something that has changed drastically about our relationship with screens over the course of the past few decades has been the shift from reliance on physical media to streaming. With the click of a button and an internet connection, you now no longer need the middle man of DVDs, Blu Rays, or rental stores. You have it all. Or do you? If you listened to our four part series on the life and legacy of Elaine May, you know that a leg...

Fairly or not, there’s a huge amount of pressure placed on the way an artist chooses to debut. The first film, album, book–it has potential to launch, and sometimes even define, a career. There’s something thrilling about a first film that manages to break out and signal a unique voice, someone announcing their talent and potential that we as viewers get to anticipate and experience across an emerging body of work. If we perhaps pu...

One of the things we’re not doing when we’re buried in our screens is soaking in the world around us. Sometimes that’s intentional—a way of hiding from an often ugly and overwhelming reality. Sometimes it’s to fight off the horror of boredom. But the more we live inside our screens, the less we’re outside in our communities or exploring new kinds of cultures that exist all around us. And this brings us to Rick Steves—today’s Herodo...

For decades now, outlets and scholars have been predicting who the next Spielberg might be, including names like J. J. Abrams or M. Night Shyamalan. But what does it mean to be the next Spielberg? To answer that, we'd have to know what it means to be Spielberg in general. So, to get to the bottom of this, Ian Nathan, author of Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work, chimes in. What accounts for the wild popularity of t...

Today we’re looking at a movie that is about exploring more than just meaning in culture but meaning in general. What is meaning? How do we know? What do we believe and why? This may sound more like the territory of an art-house move or prestige drama, but perhaps surprisingly it’s the focus of the new horror film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods called Heretic, which is playing now in theaters. It follows a pair ...

Often, when we look at our screens, we’re looking for distractions, But just as often, we want to be informed. This election weekend, maybe a frantic mixture of both. If we can be informed and be entertained? Even better. Almost all of our coverage on The Entertainment so far has been focused on narrative spaces, telling fictional stories or adapting reality into something broadly fictional. But, of course, much of what has been on...

Last week, we started a two part series exploring the way horror films in 2024 seem to feature significant overlap, often manifesting through a woman losing control in a malicious world full of corrupt institutions and family structures imposing their will on her in uniquely horrific ways, from Immaculate to The First Omen to Longlegs, and more. The critic Vern calls this a strand of "post-Roe" horror. He means Roe v. Wade, but we ...

The 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby works as psychological thriller, satanic horror, and social satire all at once. Closely adapted from Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, Roman Polanski’s film tells the story of Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who becomes increasingly convinced that her aspiring actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has made a horrible deal with maybe the literal devil to advance his career in exchange for their unborn child...

One of the most popular genres of the past several years, one you’ve probably seen on the screen, on the page, in music, and just by living through various stages of life is the bildungsroman or the coming of age story: the journey from youth into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood–the messy formation of identity and the conflict between an innocent conception of the world and the often ugly realities that wait around the co...

For a lot of people over the past decade, the nonstop campaigning and chaos of our political system has instilled a kind of constant dread about the future, compounded by looming environmental disaster and geopolitically uncertainty. And sometimes it feels like all we can do is accept that the train is slowly crashing. But what if we could do something about it? In 2023, Kurt Andersen teamed up with Larry Doyle and Steven Sode...

Over the past few months, we’ve done several episodes that return again and again to the word genius. What is a genius? Is it something objective we can all agree on? Is it a lofty way to say favorite? Is it a way of saying a person was a mess but they were talented? Moon Zappa has strong feelings about the concept as the daughter of a man who got a lot of leeway by being known as a genius. Frank Zappa became known for guitar solos...

Few people have made an impact on our screens as profound and lasting as Rod Serling, creator and host of The Twilight Zone, in which he and his team would interpret anxieties about human nature, nuclear war, the problems of power, and many more universal themes through genre exercises that exaggerate, allegorize, and depoliticized its subjects just enough to get by network censorship across the 1950s and 60s. And, since The Twilig...

Whether you’re a fan of classic cinema or, say, just saw Barbie last year and wondered what that opening sequence was all about, you’re living in a world that is unmistakably in the shadow of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t help but recognize the Kubrick touch behind a Kubrick film, from their composition to their tone, to their sheer ambition. The number of monumental works he wrote, produced, and directed is nearly unparalleled, from ...

Donald Sutherland passed away in June at the age of 88 after a long, unusual, and widely celebrated career. His performances range from M*A*S*H to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Don’t Look Now to JFK and, more recently, The Hunger Games. This is to say that he never let himself become limited to one type of character, film, or genre. And, while he could seemingly play any range of cha...

We’ve talked before on this show about the concept known as the paradox of choice—that having infinite choices across infinite streamers and live channels is less of a utopia of riches than an overwhelming landscape of indecision. What’s worth your time? How do you know? Well, that’s what critics try to help with. They watch a lot more than the average person and, in particular when it’s easier than ever for movies to slip through ...

In part four of our four part series on Elaine May, it’s finally time to talk about her final directorial effort and what has become a cultural punching bag as the worst film of all time: Ishtar. The 1987 release saw May returning to her screwball roots with, as so much of her work centers on, a dysfunctional partnership pushed to its extremes. Unlike the darkness of Mikey and Nicky, though, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty play lo...