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 their working relationship, Julianne Moore becomes something like a muse for Todd Haynes. We explore their work together and the importance of signature films like Carol (2015). All that and so much Baseball, as we do a Sportcast again, to check in on the standing of the Seattle Mariners.

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 docufiction, for our latest program. My Winnipeg does not have many / any other films that are exactly like it. It is most like a silent film, despite the constant narrative that drives the story. It moves in poetic arcs through understanding spaces and places and what it means to the people who have lived there, finding that rare bottled-up filmmaking energy that seems to sprout out of Winnipeg very naturally. It's a fun and full show, as we offer our personal reflections on Guy Maddin's own personal reflections of where he's from. Won't you join us?

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 an incisive look at how the entire filmography informs one of his earliest works and how such a stylist can still find a clean fit with a surrealist biopic. Follow Perla on Insta at pxcaballero & look forward to more of her terrific insights on future programs!

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 characters for a while. You can catch up with all of Matt Farley's movies on our podcast dedicated to his filmography, Don't Let the Moterncast Get You.

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 Winnipeger John Paizs. There's something in the water, or snow, over there. It's like nothing you've ever seen before. On the other end of the spectrum, we chat about Stanley Kubrick's anarchic touchstone picture, A Clockwork Orange (1972), how we experience film in different phases of our life, and how the movie compares with the Anthony Burgess novel. This week on The Twin Geeks, it's a double bill and an awful lot of fun.

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 range of classic films is explored, centering on festival headliner Black Narcissus. We also explore the context and performance of the nitrate prints for The Third Man (1949), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair (1939), Duel in the Sun (1947), and several other special selections.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewuc1mks5dw

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 broad and international audiences.

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 for Warner Bros. Discovery and their latest rebranding exercise? Friend of the show and The Twin Geeks television correspondent Tyler Harford joins the program to discuss all this and so much more about the current state of premium television.

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-covered short film. Within our discourse, we discover a great love for the nautical adventuring series and lament the end of a certain kind of blockbuster that seemingly ended right after Verbinski's run and how the newer films also reflect a new reality.

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 and videogames. Let's-a go.

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 by hosting trivia nights, meeting one of the film’s stars, creating cosplay for conventions, modeling her cosplay for the film in magazines, and most resonantly, the idea of films being tied to important people in our lives and how they help us process feelings at just the right moment. All this, and in-depth discussions of Pokémon GO, Douglas Sirk & Hallmark Films… It’s time for a seminal sports movie classic on this week’s The Twin Geeks! Enjoy the show.

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.

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.

The Twin Geeks co-founder David Punch presents his list in this The Twin Geeks podcast special, presented by Stephen Gillespie

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!

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 string of masterful ensemble contemplations, to a rough era of uncompromised artistic efforts in the '80s, which suffer significantly in spite of his rejection of rigid studio control. The '90s saw a triumphant return for Hollywood's most notorious maverick, with both audiences and backers alike. A revived interest in Altman as a creative force allowed him to finish out his career in splendor, working up 'till his dying days on his latest project of eminent interest. Altman proved with his late-career successes that his creative well never dried, but were his final creations of the same caliber and interest as his greatest masterpieces? Tune in for our final episode discussing the entire career of the late, great, Robert Altman. 

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 bigwigs in California, it seemed like that same familiar fate was destined for Robert Altman, too. But in 1992, Altman had his comeback, and in such a way that couldn't have been more perfect for the man who spent his entire time in the sun bucking the profit-driven conventionality of the Hollywood system. The Player was an incisive mockery of Hollywood using the tools of its myriad stars and rote ideas against itself, and it was a resounding success. Because even more than a happy ending or a tragic downfall, Hollywood loves to be cynical about itself.

Throughout his career, Altman had always prioritized an interest in his actors, and that reputation now returned its favor in a career-saving way. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to work with Altman, and so when the time came to enlist a gargantuan cast of Hollywood's most famous names, everyone came on board, solidifying the inside-nature of The Player while also building its audience appeal for an artistic swing that couldn't miss. Altman carried over this clout and size to subsequent projects throughout the '90s, following up his massive hit with an amalgam adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories in Short Cuts (1993) and a comic exposé of the Paris fashion scene in Prêt-à-Porter (1994). He returned to his roots with a jazzed-up gangster flick set in his home town, Kansas City (1996) before trying something completely new by making a conventional no-frills thriller. The Gingerbread Man (1998) was adapted from an incomplete John Grisham novel, and its failure to impress either audiences or critics dampened the high Altman was riding from his nominal comeback, already on the downslide thanks to the middling reception of his previous two films.

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 one-man performance from Phillip Baker Hall. On the other you have something like Fool for Love (1985), an oddball testimony of toxic relationships that occasionally dips into the surreal and esoteric, with no clear reasoning or well-defined characters to ground its unaccountable departures. He did make at least one studio film between now and his eventual Hollywood comeback, a supposed satire on the burgeoning teen comedy genre called O.C. and Stiggs (1985), based on a beloved National Lampoon article from the time. Altman himself considered it a total failure, and the questionable politics and sensibilities of the story somewhat call into question the sensitive and socially intuitive Altman we thought we knew from a few films back.

And if that doesn't assure you completely of his lack of consideration for marginalized characters, then the unmitigated offenses of Beyond Therapy (1987) will surely remind you that the '80s were a time bereft of needed allies. Fear not, though, as promises of the breakthrough to come manifest in a television mini series he did with Tim Roth and Paul Rhys on the life of Vincent van Gogh that was later truncated and released theatrically, appropriately called Vincent and Theo (1990). There's something about the tragic arc of the famous Dutch artist's failed career that fascinates us cinematically. He's been the subject of so many films, even to this day. It seems only natural that as individual an artist as Altman would take a stab at capturing his life and emotions on celluloid, with greater insight and sensitivity towards his plight than most other hagiographic renderings have lent him.

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 would allude him. Peculiar oddities like A Perfect Couple (1979) and HealtH (1980) estranged him from producers in Hollywood, on top of already being something of a pariah for his maverick-like approach to directing his pictures, and they were looking for any reason to box him out for good. After the perceived disaster of his big-budget Popeye adaptation (which was actually a financial success), Altman was booted from Hollywood and forced to take up work on the stage. Subsequently, he adapted Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Streamers (1983) into critically successful works that, while no boon with audiences nor studio heads, revived his flagging reputation in the eyes of critics around the world. The '80s was certainly no high point for Altman's directorial career, but it was certainly not a wash either.