The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast

On this month’s bite-sized episode we're zooming in on a snappy/passionate moment from Ernst Lubitsch’s effervescent 1932 screwball comedy, Trouble in Paradise.

We get into: sex & pre-code cinema, eye-widening lines, wikipedia marriage math, Betty and Veronica vibes, the Lubitsch Touch, what does classy even mean?, how a perfect escapist film from 1932 works just as well in 2025, and more.

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Hosts: ⁠Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠⁠⁠ &a...

Pop quiz, hotshot: join us as we welcome back BWDR veteran and De Palma completist ⁠Travis Woods⁠ for a special conversation on one of our all-time favorites, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). We get into: repetition compulsion and classical Hollywood storytelling, Keanu’s peak hotness, Speed’s existential lessons, does Jeff Daniels close his eyes?, Mark Mancina’s love theme, what it means to “become bomb,” and more.

Further reading/viewi...

This month’s micro-episode takes us inside the mysterious, sensual brilliance of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, a curated pick from director Ezra Edelman:

"The idea of wanting to live with purpose, even if it’s someone else’s purpose—there’s just something so human about it."

We get into: the comfort of slow cinema that doesn't feel slow, the aesthetics of existential malaise, the virility of 70s'-era Nicholson, the intensit...

This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién, author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses, where she recently started writing about “Movies That Fuck.” In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance. We get into: Roman Coppola’s practical effects, Keanu’s accent work, crossing oceans of time to find you, Mic...

This month's bite-sized episode zooms in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg's debut film, The Celebration (1998), one of Palestinian director/writer/producer Annemarie Jacir's curated picks.

We get into: Dogme 95, family gatherings as horror movies, the generative energy of stylistic constraints, dynamic chaos, ghostly POVs, and finding something in a film that's a little bit in excess of what the film seems to think i...

In honor of guest Michael Koresky's new book announcement, we're revisiting this conversation with him from last summer about Steven Spielberg's A.I.

Michael's new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, will be out from Bloomsbury in June.

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Reverse Shot⁠ co-founder and editor, and Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image Michael Koresky joins us to proselytiz...

We’re back with an episode analyzing writer-director Aaron Schimburg’s Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man.

Joining us is critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi, co-founder of Garden State Lantern. We get into Adam Pearson’s Oscar snub and Sebastian Stan’s win, The Substance for boys, shooting in NYC, if you want to dance the mask, the humanism of karaoke, doing your life wrong, self-image as self-esteem, and what it means...

Our first mini-episode of 2025 looks to one of director Andrew Haigh’s curated picks: Billy Wilder’s subversive farce Some Like It Hot.

We get into the unlikely modernity of Hot’s sexual politics, Orry-Kelly’s naked dresses, Wilder’s collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond, is this the greatest comedy of all time, and more.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands...

Be thankful we did your Gladiator II homework, rewatching Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 1 (2000) with amateur Russell Crowe historian Blake Howard.

This is a Gladiator II-spoiler-free conversation: listen as we get into Crowe kissing disembodied feet, Scott’s world-building, the technology of acting, Oliver Reed’s digitized face (RIP), is anything better than practical effects, expressionism vs. historical accuracy, and more. Gladiator...

This month’s mini-episode takes us into the rich opening sequence of a pick curated by director Andrew Haigh: Nicolas Roeg’s Venetian nightmare, Don’t Look Now .

We get into Graeme Clifford’s expressionist editing, celebrating movies for grownups, the color red, non-chronology, grief, and what lies “beyond the fragile geometry of space.”

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, pro...

This holiday season, we're revisiting last year's holiday special: an audio essay of one of the most popular articles we've every published on the site: Ethan Warren's ⁠A Grand Yuletide Theory: The Muppet Christmas Carol is the Best Adaptation of A Christmas Carol⁠.

Written and read by ⁠Ethan⁠ himself, with holiday music from ⁠Ryan Pollie⁠.

(Originally aired December 17, 2023)

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We'll be back later this month with two brand new p...

On this special mega episode, co-host Veronica sits down with critic ⁠Fran Hoepfner⁠ and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 62nd New York Film Festival. This is a mainly spoiler-free conversation!

We get into: Hard Truths, Caught by the Tides, Nickel Boys, April, Harvest, The Brutalist, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Shrouds, Queer, Maria, Stranger Eyes, Eephus, I’m Still Here, Anora, The Room Next Door, one stray line about...

This month’s mini-episode takes us into one of costume designer Sophie de Rakoff’s curated picks: Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), an American giallo with style to spare. We get into Faye Dunaway’s scream, POV in horror, how this is Helmut Newton x John Carpenter, the ethics of glamorizing suffering, and, yes, the clothes.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, prod...

This whole episode is a trap. In it, we join Josh Hartnett scholar and The Film Stage gentleman Dan Mecca to dissect the ins and outs of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap.

We talk about: baby bangs, Hartnett always being a little bit weird, the tooth gap, Sleeping with the Enemy’s hand towels, auteur theory, one good part in The Village, Hayley Mills on the walkie-talkie, and more.

Further reading: Dan’s interview with Hartnett for Film S...

Joining us this month: Blank Check co-host & staff writer at The Atlantic, David Sims!

In summer’s last gasp, we go back to a flashpoint of summer blockbuster season: Jan de Bont’s 1996 Twister, plus its legacy in Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024), epic ensemble casting, craving movies about grown-ups, Hollywood’s dangerous brunettes, why not kissing at the airport matters, whether anyone votes in the world of Twisters, cinema s...

Chad goes full dad in this mini-episode on Richard Linklater’s 2014 coming-of-age epic Boyhood. Specifically, the plural meanings of Patricia Arquette’s anguished move-out speech, and why raising children to lead their own lives is a bittersweet success.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

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This episode ...

Welcome back to the pod Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius out now from St. Martin’s Press.

Carrie joins us to discuss Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), her honeymoon horror film co-starring May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin as doomed newlyweds and Cybill Shepherd as the coed for whom Grodin’s Lenny quite literally risks it all.

Further...

Follow us into one of Rachel Kushner’s picks: Maurice Pialat’s slow ode to the sacred and profane, Under the Sun of Satan (1987). Co-starring Gérard Depardieu and Pialat’s muse Sandrine Bonnaire alongside Pialat himself, Under the Sun is a pastoral parable with a lot of dialogue and a few good screams.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Ou...