The veil has thinned. The leaves have fallen. The pumpkin guts line the garbage bins streetside, where swarms of masked adolescents march in unison in pursuit of sweet confections. The Twin Geeks, now aged 7, continues our annual tradition of Halloween specials with Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) — an inflection point where the now …

Felicia Maroni (Seeing Faces in Movies) joins the show to discuss the first half of John Cassavetes' filmography: Shadows (1958); Too Late Blues (1961); A Child is Waiting (1963); Faces (1968); Husbands (1970); and Minnie & Moskowicz (1971). When we talk about John Cassavetes, we're talking about the history of American independent movies, from wha…

Paul Thomas Anderson's exquisite Phantom Thread (2017) is our New Year's movie of choice, as our friend Renee (follow on LB: Pixie_Bomber) sits in for a discussion that weaves discussions of terrific costume design with subjects who are driven to become experts in their field. Phantom Thread is one of the reasons this site came to exist and we'll a…

Your Christmas friends Calvin & Perla (follow on LB: pxcaballero) discuss cinema's weightiest Christmas film, Todd Haynes' exceptional Carol (2015). How do we perceive each other, Carol asks, at a perfect remove, characters stand back and observe one another. They take each other in. There is a boldness to let the movie happen, to always place the …

It's a Thanksgiving special with... The Vvitch, perhaps our best American pilgrim cinema, as we're joined by our friend Warren Cantrell (Scene Stealers & The Playlist). This week, the whole feast is on the table, from comforting to deeply discomforting holiday movies, centering on Robert Eggers' modern classic. All this and reviews of some new film…

Our friend Caless (BlackNerdMagic) joins us for a momentous entry in online cinema discourse: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). We explore the rich themes of the flagship mob text, everything from the use of light and darkness to the film's systemic exploration of what draws its characters into lives of crime, and never lets go. One of t…

The Twin Geeks Editor Vaughn, our resident Enthusiast of All Things, joins the show in promotion of his terrific new action cinema podcast, co-hosted with resident Musician for All of Our Theme Songs Jack. Their new show is called Throw Down, so-named after the excellent action film of the same name, which gives an idea of what kind of high-octane …

The night the Kentucky Gentleman came home! Our friend Jesse returns for our yearly tradition of exploiting the Halloween franchise for content. At this point, the series has received a genre-defining first film, a normal slasher sequel, a strange outlier sequel, a comeback movie, and now, a normal sequel to a comeback movie. That's how it goes wit…

Nicole Kidman makes movies better: which ones? Your friends at thetwingeeks.com rank all of them with a metric inspired by her best work, her We Make Movies Better ad for AMC. From Eyes Wide Shut to BMX Bandits, we cover all the significant works of a singular performer who has captured the widespread attention of the internet, and nearly everyone …

Familycast resumes as Ezra joins the show to talk about her favorite things: Bluey, Nintendo Live, her cat, and everything else a six-year-old cares about. Thing about Bluey is that it's endlessly sweet, full of life lessons, beautiful character moments, and like Fast and Furious, it's about family. Likewise, Nintendo is for families, and we discus…

Dear friend Perla sits in with us to discuss Todd Haynes' Safe. In this striking psychological horror film, Julianne Moore's character develops environmental sickness and an allergy to the conditions of the 20th Century. We frame the film in the context of movies about the lives of women in society and how hard it is to live in it. As we discuss th…

Welcome Jack Davenport to the show as he sits in for our long overdue retrospective of Guy Maddin's poem of home, My Winnipeg. Famed The Twin Geeks composer, co-founder, and the ACK of The Stacks, excellent musician 10secondbeats on Spotify, and popular Letterboxd member, Jack wears many hats, and puts on another one, analyzing a great work of docu…

Friend of the show, professional podcast guest, and den mother to podcasts everywhere, Perla sits in with us for a wide-ranging discussion of David Lynch's full filmography, especially focused on the new restoration of The Elephant Man & SIFF's Dreams & Nightmares: The Films of David Lynch festival. We collect our shared passions for Lynch to give …

Matt Farley (of Motern Media notoriety — see: Local Legends (2013) & Magic Spot (2022)) joins the show to discuss Richard Linklater's seminal 2016 hangout movie Everybody Wants Some!! We discuss the great and varied career of Linklater and his unmatched ability to find the in-between moments of life while also allowing the audience to live with his…

It's a double header with friend of the show Seth Vargas (Movie Friends Podcast). Seth sits in while we explore two rule-breaking essentials. First up is the rarely-seen Canadian film Crime Wave (1985) which is a totally different movie from Sam Raimi's Crimewave (1985). This one is a surrealist comedy written, directed, produced, and acted by Winn…

Watching classic films on nitrate is one of the rarest opportunities in filmgoing and our friend Matt has attended an entire festival that works in this old tradition. Every time a nitrate picture is shown, the film degrades, and so herein presents a unique opportunity, to see these physical copies as they are now, how they will only be this once. …

A very special guest joins the show! My daughter helps us rank all of the Pixar movies released ahead of Elemental and the takes are extreme. Please enjoy our father-daughter content and for the visual tier list, you can watch us rank 'em all on YouTube. A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our Discord…

Good for Health. Bad for Education. The Twin Geeks Editor Vaughn Swearingen joins the show to discuss Akira (1988) and why it has earned and maintained its title as The Definitive Anime. We use Akira as a launching point to discuss our month of Ani-May watches, our history with the medium, and the plethora of other great content that also deserves …

All good things come to an end. Succession, as it stands, might be the best television program of a generation. As it draws to a close, it marks a distinct end of an era for HBO shows and the future of television. What does Succession tell us about the state of television, the future of prestige appointment television, and the shaky future ahead fo…

If it's a podcast ya want, yer in one. Aaron White of Feelin' Film joins the show to discuss the spirited Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. From top-to-bottom, we trace the lineage of the Disneyland ride that inspired the franchise, the great Gore Verbinski action vehicles that defined the movies, those other two entries, and even a rarely-covere…

Dad & daughter join forces as a podcasting duo for the first time ever to record their thoughts after seeing Illumination's Mario film in theaters. Ezra shares her favorite videogames, movies, thoughts about the Mario Universe, Dreamlight Valley, and our shared favorite movie experiences. It's a special show about how families connect over movies a…

There’s no crying in baseball, as friend of the show Renee Marie joins for a wide-ranging discussion of the iconic A League of Their Own, which remains the pinnacle of Women’s Sports Movies. Films that live with us are our bread and butter. This is especially true for this episode, as Renee has a close personal relationship with the film, informed …

Our friend JD Duran from InSession Film joins the show to discuss the complete works of James Cameron’s filmography, why he is the king of sequels, and how his career as a foremost technician has advanced the course of filmmaking. A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our DiscordDi The Twin Geeks

Every Best Picture winner in Oscars history enters and all are ranked according to your hosts, Calvin and Matt, organized into tidy tiers for your viewing and listening pleasure. Every movie has been watched, evaluated, and slotted into careful placement in our lists, including all but this year's eventual winner. A production of The Twin Geeks | J…

The Twin Geeks co-founder David Punch presents his list in this The Twin Geeks podcast special, presented by Stephen Gillespie A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our DiscordDi The Twin Geeks

It's a The Twin Geeks tradition! Our resident Halloween expert Jesse joins the show to talk Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween Ends, seasonal horror watches, and... Radiohead's In Rainbows (2007). See you next year! A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our DiscordDi The Twin Geeks

Over the course of nearly 50 active years in the film industry, Robert Altman created a total of 35 unique and creative feature films. It has been a long journey to catalog the trajectory of that storied course, but we come now, some four months later, at the end of the road. From an early peak in the mid-1970s, he was churning out an unmatchable s…

It's not often, in Hollywood, that our heroes find a second wind. It's true that everyone loves a happy ending, but they love a devastating tragedy just as much, if not more. Some of the industry's most treasured pioneers spent the later halves of their career languishing out in the cold, and after more than a decade of relative isolation from the …

Altman's continued trend of adapting stage plays into feature films proceeded into the end of the '80s with mixed successes. On one hand there were films like Secret Honor (1984), a scaled-back character study of a fictional Richard Nixon contemplating on the missteps and bitter grudges of his tumultuous political career, carried by an astounding o…

The legacy of Robert Altman presides mostly in the '70s, based on the strength of his back-to-back run of multiple masterpieces in the early part of that decade. That trend did not continue for him on into the '80s, as a series of previous flops put him in a precarious scenario of needing a big commercial hit that studio executives were praying wou…

If the central thesis of Altman's directorial bent has always been an investigation of what America means, then Nashville (1975) is his ultimate statement on the matter. This sprawling opus of the country musical capital of the country brings together all the disparate, intersecting elements of our culture into an overlapping menagerie of cultural …

And thus began Altman's unprecedented run of innovative masterworks. One by one, Altman ran the gamut of American genre favorites, upending and undoing every convention and expectation held within their structures as a means of dissecting and interrogating the inherent truths buried beneath their mountains of cliches. Time and time again, contempor…

Often recognized as a maverick within the Hollywood system, during a time when everyone was a maverick trying to reinvent the American industry just as it had creatively bottomed out, Robert Altman was truly a filmmaker of his own making. Preceding his New Hollywood contemporaries by about a generation, Altman fought in World War II and made his di…

Bakshi continued his pursuit of avante-garde animation throughout the 1980s. His refinement of rotoscoping as a means of perfecting the fluid translation of human movement continued into the decade, beginning with American Pop (1981): a jukebox journey through America's cultural apogee, starting with the sonic roots of vaudeville and ragtime, build…

With the death of the Haye's Code in the late 1960's and a dearth of new movies from the Disney Corporation's homogenous stranglehold over the field of animation, the time was right for new players to take up the field, carving out a unique landscape in cinema which was not only varied in its style and artistic voices, but in its audiences as well.…

The world's most famous rock band. The last vestiges of a style and sound still thriving after the world has moved on to so many other modern genres. A link to the revolutionary sound stemming from Seattle, Washington in the early '90s, birthed from the ashes of its most infamous loss. And now, another cloud of ash threatens to blanket the Foo Figh…

Take a new look at the world around you. Look through a mirror. What does it say about your world that is new? The cinema of Jean Cocteau is a world of mirrors and new ways of imagining the world. Looking at Cocteau’s movies is also a kind of gazing into a mirror, reality reflected back more fantastical, more fabulous, more than the real thing ever…

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature. Jean Cocteau. The rest is literature. When Cocteau was a young boy he said he would be clever later. He said his father was a pa…

Bogdanovich earned his keep in Hollywood as a director of films first and foremost. But he was perhaps more widely recognized for his efforts as a second-hand oral historian of Hollywood movies, embolding their legacy through innumerable interviews and commentary tracks in which he would recite the stories passed onto him in perfect comic imitation…

The following chapter of Bogdanovich’s career has yet to be recorded in any significant capacity. Previous retrospectives of his works tend to end at his dramatic apex, with the more thorough examinations dipping into the later classics and recent reevaluations recognizing his last theatrical works. Nobody, however, has paid any attention to his TV…

While the impetus for Bogdanovich’s movie-making career began with Roger Corman, the genesis of his directorial ambitions came earlier, as an actor studying under the tutelage of Stella Adler and her prestigious New York studio for the Method. Bogdanovich gathered a troupe of his fellow students and directed them in a scene from Clifford Odets’ The…

Bogdanovich has claimed that the early months of 1980 were the happiest time of his life. He was in emphatic, unequivocal love with Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, and she was equally in love with him. Their blissful romance led to Bogdanovich dreaming up his next film, They All Laughed. Weaving together his affections for Stratten, the ongoing dis…

It was during the casting process for The Last Picture Show when Cybill Shepherd was first brought to Bogdanovich’s attention. He and his wife Polly Platt picked Shepherd out from the cover of a magazine, with Platt in particular noting the devious sexuality she possessed which suited perfectly the role of Jacy Farrow. Her promiscuous nature would …

Much like the French critics turned New Wave phenoms, Peter Bogdanovich was a student of the American classics. Beginning as a historian, Bogdanovich expanded his knowledge of the medium by chronicling the words of these directors through various books, interviews, essays, and documentaries. He took their sagely advice as inspiration for his own ca…

It was not evident, on Oscar Night 2010, that Kathryn Bigelow would walk away a historical victor, for her modestly-sized independent film about distressed bomb technicians in Iraq had stiff competition, including a movie which remains the highest-grossing film of all time. Pluck persevered, ultimately, and The Hurt Locker took not only the Oscar f…

It’s 1991, and Bigelow has made a nominal name for herself in the cutthroat world of the American film industry. Point Break, Bigelow’s high-octane action thriller about a band of surfing bank robbers and the youngblood FBI agent in desperate pursuit of them, drops in July with a major splash, garnering her greatest receipts to date and continued c…

Bigelow’s directorial career is often recognized for its unique consideration of traditionally masculine subject matters from a more nuanced and deconstructive perspective. While her works aren’t traditionally seen as overtly feminine then in their juxtaposition to masculine subjects, there’s no denying that Bigelow brings some greatly appreciated …

Christmas Eve is upon us as we ring out the old year with this final collection of holiday features to round out the season. We've dug deep for this final handful, boasting the longest collective runtimes thus far, including one which almost made its way to the theaters. It's perhaps also the weirdest batch of the bunch, featuring such oddities as …

We continue our trek through a frosty winter wonderland with six more Rankin/Bass holiday productions, adding to our mixed bag of Christmas goodies with some timeless holiday classics and some other unwieldy misfires long since forgotten. The seasonal canon expands here, as we see the first of several entries in which the directing duo continues th…

The annual Christmas specials of veteran stop-motion legends Alan Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass have permeated our pop culture in an unforgettable fashion. The many iconic expansions they rendered, formatting old holiday songs into forty-minute television specials, has encapsulated for so many of us the very essence of the season itself. To decide once…