Hit Factory

Get access to this entire episode, the entire Denzember catalog, and all of our premium episodes by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Denzember 2 continues with the return of Vulture Film Critic Bilge Ebiri and a spirited discussion of Russel Mulcahy's 1991 thriller Ricochet, a film of lean premise that takes its story to absolutely batshit places at every turn. With the ever-capable journeyman director Mulcahy at the helm, a sturdy script from Die Hard writer Steven E. de Souza, and committed performances from Denzel Washington and John Lithgow, the film finds a way to make every one of its scenes memorable by maintaining its ludicrous energy from start to finish and finding lurid thrills behind every corner.We begin with an appraisal of our experiences with Ricochet, and the delight of finding a film marketed as a boilerplate thriller doing everything it can to shock and disarm you. Then, we examine the deceptively intelligent plotting of the film, pitting Denzel's Assistant DA Nick Styles - an ambitious Black lawyer seeking opportunity in the justice system- against not just Lithgow's psycopathic murderer on a quest for revenge but also the collective biases of the media and elite centers of institutional power that readily see Styles as an interloper in their predominantly white spaces. Finally, we discuss the rare position of Denzel as a movie star, how he stands singularly as both an actor of profound versatility and one that inhabits an intoxicating Movie Star persona.Follow Bilge Ebiri on Twitter....Our Denzember theme some is "Funk" by Oppo.

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Denzember 2 kicks off with a conversation about Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's first collaboration, 1990's Mo' Better Blues, a film about jazz, art-making, and the pursuit of greatness at the expense of personal relationships. The terrific Minnie Zondi is our guest! We discuss the film's tepid reception upon release, and how a (predominantly white) critical audience failed to understand the political dimensions of a film about Black music and its commercial and social appropriation. Then, we reflect on Spike Lee's career and his brilliant cohort of collaborators, including composer Terence Blanchard (making his first appearance on a Spike Lee soundtrack), cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson, and the electric stylings of costume designer Ruth E. Carter. Finally, we reflect on the movie's complicated ending, and what we're to make of its reflections on artistry, family, and whether exceptional talents can hold the two in balance. Follow Minnie Zondi on Twitter. Follow Minnie on Substack. Read Minnie's Twitter thread on Ruth E. Carter's costume work for Ryan Coogler's Sinners.Get access to the whole Denzember experience, all of our premium episodes and bonus content, and an invite to the Hit Factory Discord by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our Denzember Theme Song is "Funk" by Oppo

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Better late than never, we're back with a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's recent critical and box office sensation One Battle After Another. PTA loosely adapts (and updates) Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, setting the story against the backdrop of an indeterminate moment in the 21st century to tell a story of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is dragged back into the fray when an old enemy (Sean Penn) resurfaces and threatens his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). The film represents the first time in over 20 years that Anderson has set a story in contemporary times, and he uses the opportunity to examine the current landscape of America, its political fissures, and to lay out his personal vision of a hopeful future staked out by the next generation...But Anderson also readily betrays the limits of his political vision, and his myopic understanding of the circumstances that have produced and perpetuated this country's bigotries and oppressive hierarchies. While One Battle After Another offers countless pleasures as an obeject of undeniable cinematic energy and craftsmanship, it fails to elucidate a coherent sociopolitical ideology, even as it readily co-opts and aestheticizes the langauge and iconography of radical leftwing militancy.We unpack the film's many contradictions, and key in to what makes OBAA a simultaneously riveting and frustrating watch. Then, we discuss the film's treatment of race and the cadre of brilliant Black actresses who mine depth and nuance out of Anderson's elliptical storytelling. Finally, we call for a deeper discourse about the film that makes room for its many contradictions and shortcomings, arguing that these jagged edges make the film a more urgent and enduring work than insistences on its perfection.Read Angelica Jade Bastién, on One Battle After Another at VultureRead Lyvie Scott on One Battle After Another at Inverse....Our Theme Song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Writer and critic David Hering joins us from Liverpool to discuss the final film from the ingenious Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut. Originally conceived in the 1970s as a follow-up to Kubrick's landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey as a more straightforward sex comedy, the film adapts and updates Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) into a visually stunning, phantasmagorical, and startlingly prescient dark night of the soul featuring one of Hollywood's then most famous couples that explores the psychosexual anxieties of masculinity and patriarchal power dynamics - upheld by loci of elite influence - that oppress, sublimate, and throttle our desires.We begin by examining the metatextual maelstrom surrounding the film, and how a series of distinct discourses (Kubrick's first film in over a decade, his sudden death shortly after the film's completion, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's tabloid-ready romance) united to produce a landmark film event that was met by a befuddled critical and commercial audience alike. Then, we discuss the film's milieu, its controlled artificiality, and Kubrick's masterful use of repetition to create a uniquely dreamlike essence that beguiles even as it suggests a disquieting world of influence operating just outside of our periphery. Finally, we unpack the film's mysteries and unresolved tensions; how the film's conclusion (and iconic final line) suggest a subtle defiance toward the systems of control that minimize and abstract our libidinal, desirous agency. Follow David Hering on Twitter.Check out David's work at his website.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Filmmaker Heather Landsman joins to discuss Michael Haneke's Benny's Video alongside a conversation about her latest film, the archival documentary The Best of Me, which chronicles Björk stalker Ricardo López through unvarnished, segments of his 1996 video diaries, created as a means of sharing his ideological convictions and his plan to mail the pop singer a letter bomb. The film shares some thematic connections with Benny's Video, exploring the potentially radicalizing effect of culutral ephemera, how mediation both reflects and proliferates the atomization of late capitalism, and how the distancing effect of the camera abstracts the boundaries between the incorporeal and the material. We begin with a conversation about The Best of Me, its creation, and how we should understand the case of the deeply disturbed López. Then we discuss Michael Haneke, his perspectives on violence and the media, and we take on some of the common criticisms of his work as overly didactic or sanctimonious. Finally, we look at Benny's Video, it's considerations of mediated existence in the late 20th century, and it prescience with regard to the digital unreality we all inhabit online every day in the 2020s. More info on The Best of Me can be found here. Watch the trailer for The Best of Me. Follow Heather Landsman on Twitter.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

It's Halloween, so we decided to do a "scary" one! Podcaster, author, and emissary from the City of Brotherly Love Trevor Strunk joins to discuss Robert Rodriguez's 1998 Breakfast-Club-Meets-Body-Snatchers riff The Faculty. Boasting a memorable cast of young up-and-comers and a script written by Scream-scribe Kevin Williamson, the film is both playfully self-aware and slyly subversive in its explorations of social hierarchies and the omnipresent 90s fixation with conformity to the monoculture. We begin by exploring how the film updates the Body Snatcher narrative, borrowing (and explicitly citing) the literary works of Robert A. Heinlen and Jack Finney, as well as both previous Body Snatchers film adaptations by Don Siegel and Philip Kaufman. Then, we contend with some of the movie's most intriguing premises - its assertions about capitalist hierarchies and how they maintain the oppression of marginalized out-groups as well as how American society impedes gratifying sexual expression (especially for women). Finally, we examine the deceptively cynical ending and what it suggests about the stickiness of the neoliberal order, its structural hold on the horizons of our sociopolitical imagination. Follow Trevor Strunk on TwitterListen & Subscribe to No CartridgeBuy Trevor's book Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay between Consoles and Culture Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

The fine, upstanding gentlemen of Pod Casty for Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to discuss Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, which follows a group of recently deceased people entering a state of limbo where counselors  (also deceased) help them locate their most important memory and then go about the work of turning that memory into a film that they will watch forever in eternity. The film adopts, at least in part, a docu-fiction quality, assembling talking head interviews with several non-actors telling their memories directly to camera before becoming a treatise on art-making itself, considering how cinema reflects and retains memory. We begin with a discussion of Kore-eda's formalism, and how the director embraces both the erudite affect of slow cinema and the melodramatic dramaturgy of classical narrative to mixed effect. Then, we engage the film's high concept premise, how its emboldened by its ambiguities and where the film still feels grafted to terrestrial quotidian experience. Finally, we ponder the wide array of films that deal with the afterlife as a bureaucratic machine, and whether applying systemic order to something like death is a comforting fantasy or a cloistering nightmare. Read Hirokazu Kore-eda's director statement on After Life.Listen & Subscribe to Pod Casty for Me.Follow Pod Casty for Me on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Film writer and author of the upcoming book De Palma Does Hollywood Travis Woods joins us to discuss the exemplary filmmaker and his 1993 crime masterpiece Carlito's Way, starring Al Pacino as the titular Carlito Brigante, an ex-hustler freed from prison after serving five years of a thirty-year sentence on a legal technicality who seeks to outrun the shadow of his past, resulting in tragedy. Reteaming with Pacino and producer Martin Bregman a decade after the success of Scarface, De Palma imbues his characteristically nimble, brilliant formal mastery with sweeping romance and stirring fatalism that remains one of the director's richest, most personal films. We begin with a long discussion about De Palma as filmmaker and unpack the inherent politicization of his form. Then, we talk about Carlito's Way and its place within De Palma's greater filmmography; how it splits the difference between his "one for them, one for me" routine, and how the film subverts our knowledge of De Palma's implicative form to embrace a gentler mode of his signature style. Finally, we consider the film's reflection of the political ideology of the 90s, warring between the filmmaker's materialist persuasion and the mytholigizing force of the End of History. Follow Travis Woods on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell. Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.....Our theme music is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.On the occasion of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Anotherin theaters, we look back at the director's ambitious, unwieldy, and under-loved 1999 feature Magnolia starring a massive ensemble that includes returning PTA collaborators Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall alongside a career-best Tom Cruise in a showstopper supporting turn that would net him his third (and, to date, last) Academy Award nomination for a performance. Still his longest, most sprawling effort, Magnolia is a definitively Paul Thomas Anderson picture in both milieu and concern setting its sights on flawed, idiosyncratic characters living in and around the San Fernando Valley. But Magnolia also represents a distinctive pivot in Andersons career, as he begins to operate in a decidedly more minor key that would come to define the second act of his career in the 21st century.We begin with a thorough examination of Paul Thomas Anderson as filmmaker, his strengths and his shortcomings. Then, we ask an obvious, but slyly difficult question - What exactly is Magnolia about? Finally, we discuss the film as it relates to Anderson's oeuvre, how it informs and supplements his later work and how its flaws become more apparent as his filmography evolves.Read Nick Pinkerton's piece The Master? at The Point....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

We inaugurate the late Japanese master Shinji Sōmai with a discussion of his beautiful, melancholy coming-of-age drama Moving. The film follows the young Ren as she navigates her parents' recent separation, balancing loyalties to both her mother and father, dealing with gossiping classmates, and making attempts to reconcile the marriage. With a characteristic sensitivity and perceptiveness for the experience of youth, Sōmai excavates a universe of detail from the film's simple premise, arriving at a profoundly moving and cathartic emotional climax. We begin by discussing Sōmai as director, his style, and what we think might have drawn him to stories about the occasionally painful experiences of youth. Then, we explore how the film elicits nuance within the childhood experience of familial separation, acknowledging both the grief intrinsic to such experiences and the role children play as emotional anchors for their parents. Finally, we examine Sōmai's considerations about modern Japanese life and how he rallies against conservative social positions on divorce through the film's delicate character work. The Roxie kicks off The Dream Will Never End, a career retrospective of the films of Satoshi Kon THIS FRIDAY, beginning with the new 4K restoration of PERFECT BLUE on Friday 10/3 introduced by Hit Factory Podcast! You can purchase tickets to the screening or the entire retrospective here.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish