With Kelly Krantz! Liliana Cavani’s psychological, post-Holocaust perverted thriller went down as one of the most controversial movies of all time. In a concentration camp during World War II, concentration camp officer Max (Dirk Bogarde) and his prisoner victim Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) form a sadomasochistic relationship. Their relationship is c…

NORTH BY NORTHWEST is a hinky Hitchcock tale of mistaken identity, assumed identity, shifting truths, and a man with a huge butt chin using a SpongeBob-comically-small razor. Cary Grant stars as an ad man who gets caught up in a Cold War game of cat-and-mouse (he’s the mouse) opposite double agent Eva Marie Saint, Broadly European Bad Guy James Mas…

LEGEND is a 1985 fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and written by William Hjortsberg. It stars Tom Cruise in one of his first leading roles as Jack, a pure-hearted forest-dweller who is in love with Princess Lily (played by Mia Sara). Hoping to show her something beautiful, Jack introduces Lily to two majestic unicorns that live in a remote par…

THE BEASTMASTER is a 1982 fantasy action movie directed by Don Coscarelli (best known for the PHANTASM films #TheBallIsBack). Marc Singer stars as Dar, rightful heir to the throne of Aruk and prophesied slayer of the evil priest Maax (Rip Torn). Born with the power to speak to animals, Marc befriends a number of mammals on his journey to reclaim th…

Featuring filmmaker/programmer Kris Montello and Something Rotten host Blake Hester! SAMURAI REINCARNATION is a 1981 samurai fantasy action film written and directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Shiro Amakusa (Kenji Sawada) is the sole survivor of a massacre of Japanese Christians during the Shimabara Rebellion. Witnessing the devastation, Shiro renounces th…

Noted Arnie fan Celia Mattison is back to discuss the swords and sorcery classic!John Milius’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN adaptation limits its view of the character to his pursuit of vengeance and conquest. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a rich, pagan paean to one’s drive for self-determination! On this episode, we talk about what rocks in Arnold Schwarz…

Two years before ALIEN (1979), Ridley Scott packed a bunch of audacious ideas about empire, masculinity, and class into his feature debut: THE DUELLISTS. Rival officers in Napoleonic France, Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and Armond d’Hubert (Keith Carradine) are thrown into a mythical, divinely comic cycle of nearly deadly clashes after d’Hubert i…

There wasn’t anything quite like Michael Roemer’s NOTHING BUT A MAN before it, and there arguably hasn’t been anything quite like it since. All the same, it’s often cited as “ahead of its time” – a critical, realistic look, almost documentary in nature, at the life of a black American man in the middle stages of the Civil Rights Movement. Duff Ande…

Sweet, heartwarming, funny, and deeply weird, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH plays to its creator duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s strengths: swift writing, a flair for the dramatic, and deeply affecting images. David Niven stars as the should-be-late British RAF Squadron Leader Peter Carter, who falls in love with American soldier June (Kim…

Five nuns. One Briton man-whore. A harem-turned-convent high in the Himalayas. Fellas – what could go wrong??? In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS, an adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1947 novel, external conditions reveal internal torment: Altitude, wind, and culture clashes in the hilltop former harem of Mopu help expose the re…

With special guest Bret Berg (Theatrical Sales Director at the American Genre Film Archive and Creator/VJ at the Museum of Home Video)! Bret Berg created the Museum of Home Video, a weekly stream comprising archival footage like commercials, TV shows, movies, and more, all edited for the quickest-hit emotional impact possible. Before he hosted two …

With special guest and Minnesotan Drew Tenenbaum (@AshCoolBro)! A threshing accident, exploding parade floats and trailers – contestants and participants in the Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant meet untimely ends in a series of suspicious incidents in Mount Rose, Minnesota. In this episode (comprising exclusively Minnesota-born s…

With special guest Natalie Marlin (@NataliesNotInIt)! Bi Gan’s lovelorn neo-noir follows Luo (Huang Jue) as he pursues Wan (Tang Wei), the woman he fell in love with years before. Luo weaves in and out of half-recalled memories to trace Wan’s whereabouts, only brushing shoulders with reality as he dodges his own past in pursuit of the fading memory…

Based on Charles Willeford’s noir novel, George Armitage’s MIAMI BLUES is ‘supposed’ to be about the escapades of Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward), a jaded, toothless Miami cop. Instead, it’s about Frederick J. Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin), a sociopathic, interloping hustler. Junior’s ongoing seduction of young prostitute Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) provide…

The truth behind the assassination at the center of Brian De Palma’s political paranoia thriller BLOW OUT isn’t really the point. It’s more about the ways in which fact comes to be distorted through many lenses, each built on relative understandings of the core event itself. When he happens to catch the sound of a politician’s murder on tape while …

In Béla Tarr’s dour, slow drama WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, an aimless people’s anger and malaise is leveraged to violent ends by figures of power. A desolate town bristles when a traveling circus comes through with a stuffed whale as its centerpiece. Uncertain of its meaning, the townspeople respond with disbelief and skepticism as they suffer through…

With returning guest Blake Hester! BURST CITY is arguably more of a cultural document than a movie with a plot and a story. It consists largely of musical setpieces by the Japanese punk groups of its time, with plot threads (vengeful bikers, nuclear infrastructure, etc.) being more hinted at than shown. In this episode, Blake joins us to talk about…

You’ve seen movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1996 directorial debut, HARD EIGHT. In fact, if you called it part of the PULP FICTION (1994) neo-noir craze, you wouldn’t be wrong. Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) is an avuncular elder hustler who takes John (John C. Reilly) and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) under his wing, keeping new blood small-timer Ji…

Tim Burton’s debut feature feels a little bit like a filmmaker finding his footing. At the same time, it’s a trial by fire for Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman as they brought their creation, the capricious Pee-Wee Herman, to the big screen. It paid off, of course, cementing Pee-Wee as an icon of character comedy and a mainstay of American children’s …

We’re kicking off 2024 (THE YEAR OF THE #BIG #BALLER - "Let your nuts hang!") with William Richert’s gonzo political paranoia thriller WINTER KILLS! It’s kind of funny, but not funny enough to be a laugh-out-loud comedy. It’s kind of serious, but not serious enough to demand attention. Riding behind the unluckiest motorcade in American history, WIN…

Dozens of movies. Hundreds of hours of talking. Fifteen categories. No ties. The Golden Barrys return. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gmail.com to get in touch! Buy tickets and support the Trylon at https://www.trylon.org/. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Ou…

Content warning: Discussions of sexual assault. Twenty years after a string of murders in rural South Korea, Bong Joon-ho made a movie about the people who tried to catch the country’s first serial killer. What resulted was a harrowing chronicle of a trail slowly going cold, people who were unequipped for the heuristic exercise of catching a home-g…

Juzo Itami’s “ramen western” TAMPOPO is… just a delight. The lines that separate class, sex, and generations are broken through the lens of food in vignettes that surround a sweet, satisfying A plot. The mundane and universal is elevated to indulgence through the presumption of taboo, with each character’s indulgence – a meddling supermarket crone,…

With returning guest and Perisphere senior editor Finn Odum! Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best-known film, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, is a psychedelic hero’s journey from rags to riches, from shit to gold, and from iniquity to enlightenment. It follows “The Thief” as he gives up his search for material wealth to join a cast of sinful sages on their way up the ti…

Takahide Hori’s one-man masterpiece-in-the-making is fun, sweet, and terrifying. In the distant future, after losing a war to the synthetic life forms they created, humans who’ve lost the ability to reproduce in a viral pandemic launch a last-ditch effort to correct the course of their species. Parton – a lonely prole who lives a vicarious, virtual…