The Playlist Podcast Network

Sweaty palms, bad decisions, and the creeping realization that the walls are closing in have always been Joe Carnahan’s cinematic comfort zone, from the raw nerve of “Narc” to the adrenalized chaos of “Smokin’ Aces.” With “The Rip,” Carnahan distills that obsession into its most claustrophobic form yet, a lean, pressure-cooker cop thriller that weaponizes procedure, grief, and mistrust by refusing to let anyone leave the room.Premiering January 16 on Netflix, the film follows a team of law enforcement officers tasked with counting a massive cash seizure inside a private home, only to realize the money has placed them squarely in someone else’s crosshairs, turning routine protocol into a moral and physical siege where loyalty fractures and survival comes at a cost. The film stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler, Scott Adkins, and more.On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by writer-director Joe Carnahan to discuss how “The Rip” grew out of deeply personal real-life experience, why confinement can be more terrifying than scale, collaborating with Damon and Affleck as producers, and why character-driven crime stories continue to pull him back more than any franchise machinery.

There’s a certain kind of midnight movie that feels like it crawled out of an alley, brushed itself off, and dared you to follow it home. “Night Patrol,” the new wild horror stew from writer-director Ryan Prows, is exactly that. A vampire flick with cop-movie nerves, magic, and a nasty little conscience, it’s the kind of film that can play as pulpy, borderline campy fun and still leave you chewing on bigger questions about power, ideology, and what “monsters” really look like when the credits roll.On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by Justin Long and CM Punk (Phil Brooks) to talk about the film, their characters, and the strange, rewarding contradictions baked into Prows’ nightmarish world.For Justin Long, the role arrived at a time when his career seemed to be moving with wild, genre-hopping momentum, but he’s not exactly sitting at home drawing a master plan on a whiteboard.

There’s a specific perverse pleasure in watching a murder mystery show that knows exactly when to let you feel confident and exactly when to pull that confidence out from under you. Netflix's “His & Hers” does that trick over and over again. You think you’ve got a handle on it. You start building your little internal conspiracy corkboard. Then it quietly slides one detail out of place, and suddenly the whole picture looks different.The series follows Anna (Tessa Thompson), a once‑prominent journalist who returns to her hometown just as a murder investigation begins to unravel long‑buried secrets. Told through competing points of view between Anna and her estranged husband, Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal), the show builds its tension around who controls the narrative, and what happens when truth becomes a weapon rather than a destination. The ensemble cast also includes Jon Bernthal, Pablo Schreiber, Marin Ireland, Sunita Mani, and more.

Disaster movies are built to end things. Cities collapse, the planet cracks open, and whatever survives crawls out into the credits. Sequels are supremely rare because escalation usually feels beside the point. But “Greenland 2: Migration” exists because director Ric Roman Waugh never viewed the first film as a one-off thrill ride. For him, it was always the opening chapter of a single emotional story about family, survival, and legacy.The sequel again follows the Garrity family as they must leave the safety of the Greenland bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the decimated, volatile wasteland of Europe in search of a new home. The film stars Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis, William Abadie, and more.On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by director Ric Roman Waugh to discuss why “Migration” was never conceived as a traditional sequel, how emotion allows spectacle to breathe, reuniting with Gerard Butler for their fourth collaboration, and balancing franchise expectations with the fear of repetition.

The Wasteland doesn’t care who you are. It burns everyone the same. "Fallout" returns for Season 2 with a broader canvas and more confidence, expanding its ensemble-driven apocalypse while keeping its eye on the emotional wreckage left behind. Set in a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, the series follows citizens forced to survive in underground bunkers while the surface world fills with radiation, mutants, bandits, and moral rot. The show stars Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Moisas Arias, and more.Joining Bingeworthy for this episode is Walton Goggins, who returns as Cooper Howard / "The Ghoul," and he’s quick to frame Season 2 as an evolution rather than a victory lap. Having lived through shows that found new depth after their first year, he knows the difference between simply getting louder and genuinely digging in. “If you can get a Season 1 right, if you tell a story that moves you or makes you feel something, then with the second one, if you care about it as much as the people on this show care, you can really dig deeper,” Goggins said. “That’s what these writers did. That’s what these directors did. Everybody showed up and gave their best every single day.”

Holiday horror is usually all tinsel and trauma, but the new remake of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" decides it also wants to add a warm hug, a nervous breakdown, and a full-blown Nazi Christmas party for good measure. Director Mike P. Nelson takes the infamous killer Santa premise and rebuilds it as a supernatural slasher with a bruised, endearing Hallmark heart at the center, following a gentler, wounded version of Billy Chapman and the woman who accidentally falls in love with the monster in the red suit. It is romantic, nasty, and weird in exactly the right Christmas-y ways.On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by star Rohan Campbell and director Mike P. Nelson to delve into reinventing a cult slasher, balancing sweetness with splatter, staging set pieces like a Nazi Christmas party and a nightmare ball pit, and exploring where a potential sequel could take Billy and Pam.

Childhood fears, bedtime monsters, and the hazy membrane between imagination and trauma collide in “Dust Bunny,” the feature directorial debut of Bryan Fuller, a filmmaker whose storytelling instincts have always lived in the space between the two B’s - beauty and brutality. It is a film that feels handcrafted out of nightmares and fairy-tale sugar, a creature feature through the eyes of a child who sees the world in magic and menace at the same time. Rich with color, shadows, and emotional ambiguity, it is unmistakably a Bryan Fuller movie, which is to say that it’s tender, violent, mischievous, and sincere in equal measure.Joining The Discourse in today’s episode is Bryan Fuller himself, the writer and director behind shows like “Hannibal,” “Pushing Daisies,” “American Gods,” and “Star Trek: Discovery” (in its early days). Fuller’s signature blend of genre storytelling and emotional excavation finds a new form here as he steps behind the camera for his first feature-length film, crafting a story about a little girl who hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed and discovers that nothing is simple when your fears have roots. The film stars Mads Mikkelsen, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, Sophie Sloan, and Sheila Atim.

There’s refined British comedy, and then there’s “Fackham Hall,” a movie that waltzes in wearing period-accurate garb on the outside and immediately trips over the furniture. It’s the kind of delightfully silly romp where aristocrats brood, servants scramble, romance simmers, relatives wed, and the background is working twice as hard as the actors to steal every scene, like “Downton Abbey” politely offering you tea while “Airplane” swaps the sugar for gunpowder. Set between the wars, the film follows starry-eyed servant Eric and rebellious aristocrat Rose as their forbidden attraction detonates inside a household already teetering on the edge of absurdity. The ensemble includes Thomasin McKenzie, Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Tom Felton, and a sprawling cast of blissfully serious performers.Joining The Discourse in today’s episode are “Fackham Hall” director Jim O’Hanlon and star Thomasin McKenzie, who break down how the team crafted a period comedy where the jokes never stop multiplying and the sincerity has to be played with absolute conviction.

Kingstown never sleeps. It snarls. It churns. It eats the weak. With “Mayor of Kingstown” returning for Season 4, the Paramount+ thriller doubles down on the brutal machinery of power, corruption, and survival that has defined the series from the beginning. But this year, something shifts. A storm hits the city in the form of Edie Falco, who joins the show as Nina Hobbs, the new prison warden and a razor-sharp antagonist to Jeremy Renner’s battered fixer, Mike McLusky.Joining Bingeworthy for this episode are Jeremy Renner and Edie Falco, who break down the fierce chess match between Mike and Nina, the sense of doom that defines their characters, and the existential question haunting this season.READ MORE: ‘IT: Welcome To Derry’: Andy & Barbara Muschietti, Jason Fuchs & Brad Caleb Kane On Pennywise’s Origins, Their Multi-Season Plan, And Their Experience on ‘The Flash’ [Bingeworthy Podcast]Renner said the fun of their dynamic comes from how quickly civility slips into threat. He explained that their very first exchange set the tone. “From our first scene, it’s like the lightest version of that, but it does just keep going, that chess match. But it’s really good writing and when it’s not, we fix it. And the job’s easy and it becomes fun when you have really talented people to work with. You can really find nuances to things and not be like, it’s not posturing. It becomes a really wonderful dance.” He added that beneath the barbs, both characters genuinely want some level of cooperation. “We are not playing like we hate each other. We want to work through this, but this is what I got to do.”

In Derry, the past never stays buried. Set in 1962, "IT: Welcome to Derry" rewinds Stephen King’s nightmare town to a moment of postcard innocence and slowly peels the veneer off to show the rot underneath. The new HBO series acts as a prequel to "IT" and "IT: Chapter Two", following the Hanlon family as they’re pulled into another brutal cycle of disappearances, hauntings, and a certain grinning figure who feeds beneath the streets. Bill Skarsgård returns as Pennywise, joined by newcomers James Remar, Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, and Chris Chalk.Joining host Mike DeAngelo for the podcast are executive producers Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, along with co-showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, who walk through how this new cycle came to life and why the Kingverse has far deeper corners than the films could ever reach.