Movie HighLow

Jaksot

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  NINE DAYS (2021) |The Masterpiece Nobody Saw (High) 15.09.2026 37min

  We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live? That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear. In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works. The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends. One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate. We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening. The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone. Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the
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  THE PRESTIGE (2006) | Nolan's Secret Hiding in Plain Sight (High) 08.09.2026 27min

  We went High on The Prestige, and this is one of those Highs where the movie almost feels built for this podcast. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is not just a movie about magic. It is a movie constructed like a magic trick, and the more you watch it, the more you realize Nolan has been showing you the secret from the beginning. He tells you what the trick is, puts the evidence in front of your face, and then waits for you to notice. That is why this movie keeps getting better every time we return to it. The secret impresses no one. It is the trick you use it for. That line is the whole philosophy of the movie. The Prestige is about obsession, performance, sacrifice, ego, grief, rivalry, and the terrible things people will do to be the one left standing when the audience applauds. In this episode, we revisit The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Michael Caine as Cutter, Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. This is one of Dom’s favorite Nolan movies, and honestly, the case is not hard to make. It has everything Nolan does best: fractured timelines, obsessed protagonists, nested mysteries, a final reveal that changes the whole movie, and an ending that does not stop asking questions after the credits roll. The first big idea we talk about is that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s love letter to filmmaking. The three parts of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, are basically the three acts of a movie. You show the audience something ordinary. You transform it into something impossible. Then you bring it back in a way that makes them wonder how you did it. Nolan understands endings better than almost anyone, and this movie is almost entirely built around the power of a final act that makes you immediately want to start the movie over. We also talk about how the opening image of the top hats in the woods becomes a perfect bookend with the final image of Angier’s bodies in the tanks. The movie begins with duplicates, death, and a mystery we do not yet understand. Then it slowly teaches us how to read what we have already seen. That is the magic trick. The movie is not hiding the secret so much as daring us to look closely enough. The performances are a huge High. Christian Bale has one of the most difficult jobs in the film because, on first viewing, he has to play Borden as a man divided by his own nature. On rewatch, once you know the truth, you realize he is playing two different men sharing one life. That makes every scene with Sarah more painful. When she says, “You don’t mean it today,” the line works one way the first time and a completely different way once you understand the trick. She is not married to a complicated man. She is married to a lie that keeps changing shape. That is where the movie’s emotional cost really lands. Sarah is not part of the trick by choice. She is collateral damage. She knows something is wrong, even if she cannot name it. The tragedy is that the person she loves is only partly available to her, and sometimes not even the right person at all. The same goes for Julia, Angier’s wife, whose death becomes the wound that drives the rivalry. These women are where the men’s obsession lands, and the movie is very clear that the cost of greatness, ego, and secrecy is not only paid by the men chasing applause. Hugh Jackman is just as strong as Angier because his performance shifts so carefully. At first, Angier feels like the more sympathetic character. He loses his wife in a horrible accident, and his anger at Borden makes emotional sense. But as the movie goes on, he becomes the more frightening figure. He is the showman who cannot invent the trick, so he steals, sabotages, and eventually builds his entire life around beating Borden. Jackman also gets to play Root, the drunken double, and that performance lets the movie show its own form
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  DISTURBING BEHAVIOR (1998) | Fisher-Price Clockwork Orange (Low) 28.08.2026 27min

  We went Low on Disturbing Behavior, but this is exactly the kind of Low we like having around. Disturbing Behavior (1998) is not a great movie, but it is absolutely a late ’90s guilty pleasure: brainwashed preppies, creepy adults, Pacific Northwest fog, alternative rock needle drops, weird cafeteria tribes, mind control surgery, and James Marsden drinking a carton of milk like the world’s oldest high school student. The episode’s central argument is that this movie has a much better idea than its final cut knows how to handle. It is a story about adults underestimating teenagers, dismissing their fear, and trying to surgically remove everything messy, rebellious, hormonal, and individual about them. Then the studio seems to have made the most thematically perfect bad decision possible: cut out the meat of the story and get to the end faster. In this episode, we revisit Disturbing Behavior, directed by David Nutter and released in 1998, as a movie that lives on a very specific shelf: flawed, compromised, overcooked, underwritten, but somehow still alive. It stars James Marsden as Steve Clark, Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner, Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick, Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott, and William Sadler as Newberry. It is one part teen thriller, one part suburban conspiracy movie, one part watered-down A Clockwork Orange, and one part vulgar episode of Dawson’s Creek with brainwashing. The premise is genuinely creepy. After a family tragedy, Steve moves to Cradle Bay, a town where the lawns are too clean, the adults are too calm, and the popular kids, known as the Blue Ribbons, act less like high school students and more like honor roll cult members. They are polite, athletic, well dressed, academically successful, and deeply punchable. At first, they just seem like overachieving suburban nightmares. But Gavin, the local conspiracy-minded outsider, knows something worse is happening. In Cradle Bay, teenage rebellion is not treated like a phase. It is treated like a defect. That is the idea that makes the movie worth talking about. The real villain is not just Dr. Caldicott. The real villain is conformity. We talk about how much this movie reflects a late ’90s fear of being processed into sameness. This was an era obsessed with nonconformity, individuality, outsider identity, and not joining the pack, even while corporations were selling that rebellion back to teenagers through Hot Topic, soundtracks, and movie marketing. Disturbing Behavior accidentally captures that contradiction perfectly. The biggest High is Nick Stahl as Gavin. He is the standout because he understands exactly what kind of movie he is in. Gavin gets a lot of stylized, overwritten late ’90s dialogue, and in the wrong hands it could have been unbearable. Stahl makes it work. He plays Gavin as a sarcastic wiseass who is smarter and more capable than anyone gives him credit for, including maybe himself. His lunchroom breakdown of all the high school tribes is a very familiar ’90s teen movie scene, but this version works because Gavin and U.V. make it funny, specific, and weirdly memorable. Another major High is William Sadler as Newberry, who might be the movie’s most interesting character. He is funny, strange, and hiding in plain sight, a janitor who clearly understands much more than anyone realizes. His rat-killing obsession feels like a metaphor for what is happening in the school, and Sadler gives the movie the kind of weirdo character-actor energy that makes it more fun than it probably has any right to be. We also give credit to the atmosphere. The Pacific Northwest setting gives the movie a cold, eerie, almost Twin Peaks quality. The cinematography has some legitimately great images: the opening cliff overlook, the Blue Ribbons silhouetted on the docks, and the smoky high school hangout spaces. The score is cheesy, but the soundtrack is a time capsule. The Flys’ “Got You Where I Want You” is still a banger, and the music video feels like its
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  PSYCHO (1998) | Copied Hitchcock Shot For Shot. What Went Wrong? (Low) 21.08.2026 28min

  We went Low on Psycho (1998), and not in a fun, “this is secretly fascinating” way. This might be the most frustrating Low we have covered, because Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is not just a bad remake. It is a remake that keeps copying the body of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while missing the soul. The problem is not that remakes are automatically inferior. Some of the best genre movies ever made are remakes. The problem is that this movie breaks the one rule a remake has to follow: add something without taking away what already worked. That is the central argument of the episode. Everything this version attempts to add, from color to extra shock imagery to Norman Bates masturbating at the peephole, actively makes the original feel smarter by comparison. It copies Hitchcock’s choices while removing the reasons those choices mattered. In this episode, we talk about Psycho, directed by Gus Van Sant and released in 1998, as one of the strangest remake experiments in studio history. This is the infamous almost shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1960), now in color, set in the late ’90s, and starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, Anne Heche as Marion Crane, Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis, Julianne Moore as Lila Crane, William H. Macy as Arbogast, and Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. We start by making something clear: remakes are not the problem. John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and different versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers prove that remakes can be brilliant when a filmmaker has a new angle, a new nightmare, or a new reason to revisit the material. But Psycho (1998) does not feel like a movie with a new idea. It feels like a post-Good Will Hunting vanity experiment that somehow became a major studio release. There are a few highs, and we give the movie credit where we can. The casting is at least interesting. Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis is probably an improvement over the original version of the character. Making Sam more rugged, blue collar, and believable as a hardware store owner gives him a little more texture. Anne Heche is also better than her Razzie nomination suggests. In the early scenes, she finds a way to take the original dialogue and make it feel more modern, sharper, and less melodramatic. Her Marion has a harder edge, which makes sense for a late-’90s version of the character. We also liked Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. In the original Psycho, the psychiatrist explanation at the end is one of the weakest parts of the movie because it goes on too long and feels too theatrical. Forster plays it much cleaner, faster, and flatter, almost like he is reading the facts instead of performing a lecture. That is one of the few places where the remake finds a small way to improve a specific piece of the original. The opening shot is another technical high. Hitchcock wanted to move from the city into a hotel room in a way that 1960 technology could not fully support. Van Sant can actually execute that idea more fluidly. We also noticed the little detail of the fly buzzing in the opening hotel room, which creates a subtle bookend with the ending and Mother’s “I wouldn’t even harm a fly.” That is the kind of addition that works: small, connected, non-destructive. But then the movie gets to the Bates Motel, and the whole thing starts falling apart. The first major problem is the decision to shoot in color. Hitchcock could have used color in 1960, but black and white was a defining part of Psycho’s visual identity. Removing it means the remake needs a new visual idea, and Van Sant seems to land on green: green dress, green sheets, green credits, green everywhere. But what does it actually mean? Greed? Envy? Rot? Money? The movie keeps underlining the color without turning it into a real idea. Then there is Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, which becomes one of the episode’s biggest debates. We respect the swing. Coming off Swingers, it is interesting that Vaughn wanted to show another side o
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  PSYCHO (1960) | The Movie That Knows What's Wrong With You (High) 14.08.2026 28min

  We went High on Psycho, because this is one of those movies that is not just important because film history tells us it is important. Psycho (1960) still has teeth. It still feels dangerous. It still knows how to get under your skin, not just by scaring you, but by making you question where your sympathy is going while you watch it. That is the real genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It does not simply show us a murder and ask us to be horrified. It moves us through the story in a way that makes us complicit. First, we understand why Marion Crane steals the money. Then we feel her panic on the road. Then she is murdered in the shower. And somehow, only a few minutes later, we are watching Norman Bates try to sink her car into the swamp and quietly thinking, please go down. That is the trick. Hitchcock does not just kill the person we thought the movie was about. He starts moving our morals around. In this episode, we revisit Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1960, as one of the most groundbreaking horror-thrillers ever made. The film stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Gavin as Sam Loomis, and Martin Balsam as Detective Arbogast. We talk about why the movie still works even when you already know the twist, and how the second viewing becomes a completely different experience from the first. The first major High is Bernard Herrmann’s score, which somehow did not even get nominated for an Oscar. That feels insane now, because the music is inseparable from the movie’s identity. The score attacks before the story even begins. The strings feel like guilt, panic, split identity, and violence all at once. It sounds like the movie is being cut into pieces, which is exactly what Hitchcock is about to do to the audience’s trust. We also talk about how much Hitchcock lets the camera tell the story. Psycho is full of visual storytelling that does not need dialogue to explain itself. Marion does not have to announce that she is going to steal the $40,000. Hitchcock pushes in on the envelope, pans toward the suitcase, and we understand the decision forming in her mind. The opening shot does something similar on a larger scale: the camera moves toward Phoenix, toward a hotel window, toward a private room where people are doing things they maybe should not be doing. From the beginning, the movie makes us feel like we are watching something we are not supposed to see. That becomes one of the episode’s biggest ideas: Hitchcock makes us complicit before Norman ever enters the movie. Marion is wrong to steal the money, but the movie gives us just enough context to understand her desperation. She is trapped in a life that feels too small. She wants a future with Sam Loomis, but money keeps standing in the way. The man flashing the cash is a creep who treats $40,000 like disposable “buying off unhappiness” money. So when Marion runs, we know it is wrong, but we are already leaning toward her side. Then Anthony Perkins enters the movie, and everything changes. Perkins as Norman Bates is the biggest High of the episode. He does not play Norman like a monster. He plays him as shy, boyish, awkward, wounded, and almost sweet. That is what makes him terrifying. His harmlessness is the disguise. The stammer, the smile that hangs a beat too long, the nervous posture, the way he seems both eager for connection and afraid of what connection might awaken in him, all of it makes Norman feel like a new kind of screen monster. The parlor scene is where the whole movie starts to reveal itself. Marion and Norman sit among the stuffed birds, talking about his mother, but really talking about him. When Norman says his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds,” the movie is basically telling us the ending if we know how to listen. The birds matter. The framing matters. Norman’s fixation on preserving passive things matters. He wants to control what might leave h
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  MADAME WEB (2024) | Franchise Homework Disguised As A Movie (Low) 07.08.2026 24min

  We went LOW on Madame Web, and this is not one of those sneaky affectionate Lows where we secretly want to defend the movie. This is a real LOW. Madame Web (2024) has psychic spiders, future Spider-Women, a villain trying to prevent his own death, a 2003 setting, Pepsi product placement, Uncle Ben, Peter Parker’s birth, and Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant paramedic who can see time fold in on itself. That should at least be interesting. Instead, Madame Web feels like a movie that is not interested in being a movie. It is interested in being phase one of a cinematic universe rollout. It does not tell a complete story so much as scatter breadcrumbs for possible future stories that, after this thing landed, nobody seemed especially excited to see. Coming right after our Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse episode made the contrast even worse. One movie says anyone can wear the mask. This one says nobody gets to wear the mask yet because Sony’s calendar has not approved it. In this episode, we talk about Madame Web, directed by S.J. Clarkson, as a movie with a handful of workable ingredients and almost no idea how to turn them into a meal. The film stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a New York paramedic who develops premonitions after a near-death accident. She ends up protecting three teenage girls, Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon, and Mattie Franklin, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor, from Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim, a spider-powered villain who believes they will eventually kill him. That is not the worst setup in the world. In fact, we try to be generous early on and point out that Cassandra’s power could have worked. The idea that she does not just have a traditional Spider-Sense, but instead experiences fragments of the future before snapping back into the present, is actually a decent cinematic hook. There is a version of this movie where her powers feel less like a gift and more like a panic attack. She sees terrible things, does not fully understand them, and has only seconds to change the outcome. The problem is that the movie keeps using that idea as a substitute for action instead of a way to create action. A good set piece should escalate. It should have geography, cause and effect, danger, improvisation, and momentum. In Madame Web, too many scenes play like rehearsal footage for something that has not happened yet. We see the bad version, time snaps back, and then Cassandra avoids it. After a while, the premonitions stop building suspense and start draining it. The train sequence is the first time the movie almost works. Cassandra is trying to protect the girls, Ezekiel is hunting them, and her visions give her just enough information to move them out of danger. For a couple of minutes, we can see the shape of a better thriller. We compare it to Minority Report, where Samantha Morton’s character guides Tom Cruise through a mall using flashes of what is about to happen. That is the best version of what Madame Web is trying to do. This movie gets maybe ten percent of the way there and then gives up. The 2003 setting is another idea that could have been interesting. If the movie wanted to use that period to avoid smartphones, explore post-9/11 New York, or build some specific cultural texture, that could work. Instead, it mostly drives past a Blockbuster Video and hopes millennials clap. Worse, the movie keeps making choices that do not even feel right for 2003. Information moves too quickly. The period details feel shallow. The setting becomes another ingredient the movie refuses to cook. Then there is Dakota Johnson’s performance, which becomes the most visible problem because she is at the center of everything. To be fair, the script gives nobody good dialogue, emotional reality, or a playable arc. But Johnson’s line readings are so flat and detached that it starts to feel less like Cassandra Webb is emotionally guarded and more like Dakota Johnson is angry she has
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  SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) | Understands Spider-Man Better Than Any Other Movie (High) 31.07.2026 22min

  We went High on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and honestly, this might be the easiest High we have done in a while. Not because there is nothing to talk about, but because the movie knows exactly what it is doing. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is not just a great animated superhero movie. It is the best Spider-Man movie because it understands Spider-Man as an idea: anyone can wear the mask, everyone gets knocked down, and nobody knows they are ready until they jump. That is what makes this movie feel so fresh. It takes one of the most rebooted, reworked, overexposed characters in pop culture and somehow makes him feel brand new without betraying what Spider-Man means. Miles Morales is not a gimmick, a replacement, or a remix for the sake of it. He is the perfect way into the story because his whole journey is about realizing that being Spider-Man is not about being Peter Parker. It is about choosing to get back up. In this episode, we revisit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, and talk about why it still feels like such a major turning point for superhero movies and animated films. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, the movie stars Shameik Moore as Miles Morales, Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker, Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy, Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron, Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis, Luna Lauren Vélez as Rio Morales, Liev Schreiber as Kingpin, and Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir. That is a stacked cast, but the movie never feels overcrowded. Somehow, it throws the whole Spider-Man toy box at the screen and keeps the emotional center completely clear. The biggest thing we talk about is the movie’s three core themes. The first is the most obvious: anyone can wear the mask. That line could have been corny, but the movie earns it. Miles is a Brooklyn kid dealing with school, parents, expectations, awkwardness, fear, and the terrifying realization that he has been handed a responsibility he does not know how to carry. The randomness of the Spider-Man origin matters. A normal kid gets bitten, gets power, and has to decide what kind of person he is going to be. The second theme is that whatever you are going through, someone else understands. That is why the multiverse works so well here. In a lot of modern superhero stories, the multiverse feels like a machine for references and cameos. In Into the Spider-Verse, it is a machine for empathy. Miles thinks he is alone, and then the universe literally breaks open to show him that he is not. Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker, and Spider-Ham are all different, but they share the same loss, weirdness, isolation, and responsibility. They all know what it feels like to be the only one, until they realize they are not. The third theme is the one that makes the movie really land: Spider-Man always gets back up. We talk about how the movie uses that idea over and over until it becomes the emotional spine of the story. The final fight, with Miles down and his father yelling, “Get up, Spider-Man,” works because the whole movie has been building to that moment. It is not about whether Miles is strong enough. It is about whether he can believe he is ready before anyone can prove it to him. We also spend a lot of time on the animation, because this movie looks incredible. It does not just look like animation inspired by comic books. It looks like a comic book came alive: halftone dots, paneling, motion smears, texture, color, frame-rate choices, and images that feel printed instead of polished into plastic. The style has become more common since, but this movie still feels like the one that blew the doors open. The heart of the episode, though, is the relationship between Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker. Middle-aged, divorced, sweatpants Spider-Man is a perfect idea, but the movie is smart enough not to turn him into a bitter joke. Peter B. is tired, out of shape, and
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  GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) | IP Karaoke (Low) 24.07.2026 29min

  We went Low on Ghostbusters (2016), but not for the reason the internet spent a decade screaming about. The problem was never that women were the Ghostbusters. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are all funny performers, and there is absolutely a version of this cast that could have worked. The problem is that this movie never feels like it has a strong reason to exist beyond the fact that Ghostbusters is a valuable brand. That is the real issue we keep coming back to in this episode. Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters does not feel like a movie made from love, enthusiasm, or a killer comic idea. It feels like intellectual property karaoke: a studio taking a song everyone already knows, handing the mic to talented people, and hoping recognition will do half the work. The result is not offensive so much as frustratingly forgettable. It has proton packs, ghosts, slime, cameos, the logo, the car, and the song, but very little of what made the original stick. Main Discussion In this episode, we finally watched Ghostbusters (2016), directed by Paul Feig and released in 2016, after talking about Bridesmaids the week before. That comparison matters, because a lot of the same creative energy that works beautifully in Bridesmaids works against this movie. Bridesmaids thrives on looseness, riffing, escalation, and performers finding comedy inside emotionally clear scenes. Ghostbusters tries to use a similar improvisational approach, but this is a bigger genre machine. It needs a stronger spine. The movie follows Erin Gilbert, played by Kristen Wiig, who is trying to be taken seriously in academia when an old paranormal book reconnects her with Abby Yates, played by Melissa McCarthy. Abby is working with eccentric engineer Jillian Holtzmann, played by Kate McKinnon, and eventually the team is joined by Patty Tolan, played by Leslie Jones, an MTA worker with a deep knowledge of New York history. Together, they uncover supernatural activity tied to Rowan, a lonely hotel janitor trying to open a portal between the living and the dead. That sounds like enough for a fun sci-fi horror comedy, but the movie never really builds momentum. We talk a lot about the baggage this movie carried before it even came out. Fans had spent years hearing rumors about a real Ghostbusters 3 with the original team. Then Harold Ramis passed away in 2014, and that version of the dream died with him. When this reboot arrived with a new cast, new continuity, and no real continuation of the original story, it was always going to face resistance. The discourse around the movie got ugly fast, and we do not excuse the sexist, racist, or misogynistic backlash. But we also think that backlash created a shield around the movie, where it became harder to say the simpler truth: the movie just did not look very good, and then it was not very good. You cannot guilt people into liking a blockbuster. You have to make it undeniable. There are highs, though. The biggest is Kate McKinnon as Holtzmann, who comes closest to creating something that feels new and specific to this version. She has the energy of a lab goblin in goggles, a mad scientist who may or may not understand normal human behavior. The Pringles “salty parabolas” line, the mannequin bit, the gun lick, the sideways delivery, all of that gives the movie some actual comic texture. The problem is that Holtzmann is mostly a vibe. She is funny to watch, but the movie never gives her a real arc or builds anything around her. We also talk about Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the impossibly beautiful and impossibly stupid receptionist. There is a funny inversion in taking Thor and making him the bimbo secretary, and Hemsworth commits to the bit. The “Michael Hat” joke works, and some of the physical comedy lands. But even that joke gets pushed too far. Kevin starts as a funny reversal and slowly becomes another sketch character the movie keeps returning to without enough variation. The real Low is t
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  BRIDESMAIDS (2011) | Friendship, Failure, and Food Poisoning (High) 17.07.2026 26min

  We went High on Bridesmaids, because this is the kind of studio comedy we just do not get enough of anymore. It is loud, gross, awkward, emotional, over-the-top, and built around the kind of female friendship that movies still do not explore as often as they should. Bridesmaids (2011) is not just “women doing a Hangover.” That undersells what makes it work. This is a movie about watching your best friend move into a new phase of life while your own life is actively falling apart. That is the real engine of the movie. Annie Walker, played by Kristen Wiig, is not simply jealous that Lillian is getting married. She is grieving the version of their friendship where she was the first call, the default person, the one who mattered most. The wedding is the MacGuffin. The actual story is what happens when adulthood starts pulling a friendship apart, and one person is not ready to let go. In this episode, we revisit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig and written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, as one of the last great mid-budget studio comedies of its era. It came out in 2011, right near the end of a run where movies like this could still become huge cultural events: big cast, big set pieces, quotable lines, emotional core, and enough room for performers to actually play. The movie stars Kristen Wiig as Annie, Maya Rudolph as Lillian, Rose Byrne as Helen, Melissa McCarthy as Megan, Wendi McLendon-Covey as Rita, Ellie Kemper as Becca, Jon Hamm as Ted, and Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes. That cast is loaded, and the movie knows how to use them. It has the rhythm of sketch comedy, the looseness of the Judd Apatow comedy era, and the emotional structure of a friendship breakup movie. What makes Bridesmaids special is that it treats female friendship with the same insecurity and arrested development that male friendship comedies had been mining for decades. Annie and Lillian are not polished movie-women sipping wine and dispensing life advice. They are goofy. They put chocolate on their teeth in a restaurant. They do weird voices. They make each other laugh in the way only people with years of shared history can. The movie needs that early coffee shop scene because it proves the friendship before Helen shows up and starts threatening it. Helen, played perfectly by Rose Byrne, is one of the smartest parts of the movie. On the surface, she is Annie’s nightmare: rich, composed, elegant, socially polished, and seemingly designed in a lab to replace her. But the episode gets into how Helen is not just a villain. She is lonely too. Her perfect life is a performance, and by the end, when she admits she does not really have female friends and barely sees her husband, the movie lets her become human instead of just leaving her as the rich mean-girl obstacle. Then there is Melissa McCarthy as Megan, which is still one of the funniest breakout comedy performances of the 2010s. It is easy to forget now how fresh that performance felt at the time, because so many later movies tried to turn McCarthy into some version of Megan again. But here, it works because Megan is not just random chaos. She ends up having the clearest emotional function in the movie. When Annie is at her lowest, Megan is the one who tells her the truth. She does not coddle her. She calls her out. “You’re your problem, Annie. And you’re also your solution.” That is real friendship. We also spend a lot of time on the movie’s set pieces, because Bridesmaids has several all-timers. The engagement party speech scene is brilliant because it keeps going past the point of comfort. Annie and Helen keep taking the microphone, escalating the emotional warfare, and the longer it lasts, the funnier and more painful it gets. The food poisoning dress fitting is probably the scene most people remember, and for good reason. It is gross, obviously, but it is not just gross to prove that women can do bodily-function comedy too. The joke has structure. Helen refuses the sketchy restaurant food, ev
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  HOOK (1991) | Spielberg at Sentimentality Overload (Low) 09.07.2026 36min

  On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Hook, but this is one of those Lows that comes with a lot of affection. We love so much of this movie. We love Robin Williams as Peter Banning slowly finding his way back to Peter Pan. We love Dustin Hoffman chewing through every syllable as Captain Hook. We love Rufio, Smee, the Lost Boys, the practical Neverland sets, the John Williams score, and the fact that this movie has lived rent-free in the heads of an entire generation. The problem is that Hook (1991) is not lacking magic. It has too much of it. This is Steven Spielberg turned all the way up: big feelings, big music, big sets, big reaction shots, big sentimental buttons on top of other sentimental buttons. The heart of the movie works. Sometimes it works beautifully. But then Spielberg keeps underlining it, circling it, adding one more speech, one more tear, one more “Mommy,” one more floating old man, until the movie starts giving itself a toothache. In this episode, we revisit Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1991, as a movie that feels almost impossible to judge cleanly. It is technically a Low, but it is also a movie with images, performances, and emotional beats that still absolutely work. The big argument is that Hook could have been close to a perfect kids’ adventure movie if someone had been willing to trim the fat. The setup is strong: Peter Banning, played by Robin Williams, is a work-obsessed corporate lawyer who has forgotten that he was once Peter Pan. He misses his son Jack’s baseball game, takes business calls during his daughter Maggie’s play, and treats family time like an interruption. When Captain Hook kidnaps his children and drags him back to Neverland, Peter has to rediscover imagination, play, and the part of himself he abandoned when he grew up. That idea is great. It is simple, emotional, and very Spielberg. The movie works best when it connects Peter becoming Pan again with Peter becoming a better father. The scene where Moira, played by Caroline Goodall, tells Peter that his children still want to play with him but will not want that forever is one of the best scenes in the film. Watching it as a parent makes it hit even harder. It is not just a speech about “work less, love your kids more.” It is about how quickly childhood disappears while adults are busy convincing themselves that everything else is urgent. We also spend a lot of time on the things Hook gets absolutely right. Rufio, played by Dante Basco, is the biggest High. He was created for this movie, but he feels instantly iconic: the hair, the chant, the rivalry with Peter, the moment he kneels and gives the sword back. He makes complete sense as the teenager the Lost Boys would rally around after Pan disappeared. His death still hits, maybe too hard, but the character himself is one of the movie’s great inventions. Bob Hoskins as Smee is another huge High. Every time he shows up, the movie gets funnier. He and Hoffman have a perfect rhythm together, and Hoffman’s Captain Hook might be the definitive live-action version of the character for a lot of people who grew up with this movie. He is theatrical, pathetic, vain, dangerous, funny, and totally obsessed with the rematch he has been waiting decades to get. The Lost Boys scenes are where Hook feels most alive. Their practical sets, basketball courts, skate ramps, ragtag costumes, and late ’80s / early ’90s energy give Neverland a tactile quality that would probably be flattened into green-screen sludge today. We talk about how the sets look like sets, but in a way that works. Neverland feels like a giant playground built out of memory, fantasy, and production design money. And then there are the three scenes we think are almost perfect. The Moira speech. The “Oh, there you are, Peter” scene, where Pockets stretches Peter’s face until he sees the boy underneath. And the imaginary dinner scene, where Peter finally learns to play again and the empty plates fi
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  JAWS (1975) | Less Is More (High) 03.07.2026 35min

  We went High on Jaws, because of course we did. But the reason Jaws (1975) still works is not just “the shark is scary.” The shark is barely in the first half of the movie. What makes Steven Spielberg’s Jaws an American classic is restraint: character, geography, patience, silence, dread, and the confidence to let the audience imagine more than the movie actually shows. That is the whole argument of this episode. Jaws became the modern blockbuster, but what modern blockbusters often forget is that this movie is not great because it is big. It is great because it knows exactly when to be small. The broken shark did not ruin the movie. It saved it. Spielberg had to withhold the monster, shoot from its point of view, lean on John Williams’ score, and build suspense out of what we cannot see. Limitation forced creativity, and the result is one of the most perfectly constructed thrillers ever made. In this episode, we revisit Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1975, as the movie that changed summer movies forever while also teaching a lesson Hollywood mostly misunderstood. It stars Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as Quint, Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody, and Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn. Yes, it is a shark movie. But more importantly, it is a movie about a town, a family, a local economy, fear, denial, responsibility, and three men who all understand the shark differently. We start with the thing everyone knows: the John Williams Jaws theme. There is no way to talk about this movie without talking about those two notes. But what we focus on is how simple the theme is, and why that simplicity matters. The shark is not a complicated villain. It swims. It eats. It keeps coming. The music becomes the shark’s identity long before we actually see the creature. It is not overworked or overexplained. It is primal, repetitive, and inevitable. That simplicity carries into Spielberg’s direction. We talk a lot about Jaws as a “less is more” movie, especially compared to the kind of overstuffed spectacle that followed in its wake. Spielberg does not show the shark too early. He builds Amity Island first: the beach, the politics, the holiday weekend, the local business panic, the normal rhythms of a community that does not want to believe something monstrous is in the water. That is why Chief Brody works so well as the center of the movie. He is not a superhero. He is a nervous police chief afraid of the water, trying to do the right thing while everyone around him tells him not to overreact. We get into how Brody knows, almost immediately, that something is wrong after Chrissie’s death. He wants to close the beaches. The mayor stops him. And when Alex Kintner is killed, the guilt lands on Brody in a way that feels deeply human. One of our favorite scenes in the whole movie is not a shark attack. It is Brody sitting at the kitchen table after Mrs. Kintner slaps him, completely wrecked, while his young son Sean imitates him. Brody starts making faces back at him, then asks for a kiss “because I need it.” That moment is why Jaws is not just a monster movie. It is grounded in family, shame, fear, and love. We also dig into Matt Hooper, who arrives as science, money, expertise, and impatience with small-town nonsense. Hooper is arrogant, but he is right. He validates what Brody already knows. When he examines Chrissie’s remains, the whole scene plays on his face, because his reaction tells us everything we need to know. Then there is Quint, one of the greatest character introductions in movie history. Before he even speaks, his nails on the chalkboard cut through the chaos of the town meeting. Robert Shaw makes Quint feel like a man carved out of salt, trauma, and stubbornness. He is not just hunting a shark. He is hunting something that has been chasing him since the USS Indianapolis. The movie’s second half is where we really light up. Once the Orca leaves A
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  SUPER MARIO BROS. (1993) | Never Deserved The Hate (Low) 26.06.2026 27min

  On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Super Mario Bros., but with a pretty major asterisk: this movie never deserved the hate it got. We won't argue that Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a great adaptation, or that it cleanly captures the spirit of the Nintendo games, or that the story makes sense in any normal way. It is messy, compromised, weird, overdesigned, and occasionally completely insane. But that is also what makes it so much fun to watch.  In 1993, Mario did not really have a movie-ready story. He had a brother, a princess, a turtle monster, coins, pipes, mushrooms, Goombas, and a lot of jumping. So directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton had to invent a live-action movie from a video game that was basically pure iconography. What they invented is bonkers, but it is also far more creative than people give it credit for. In this episode, we revisit Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario, Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. The movie was a box office disaster, got hammered by critics, and became the go-to example for why live-action video game movies were supposedly doomed. But watching it now, the story is a lot more complicated than that. The first big argument we make is that the usual complaint against this movie, that it is too different from the games, does not totally hold up. Different from what, exactly? By 1993, Super Mario Bros. was a beloved franchise, but it was not some dense cinematic mythology. There was not a sacred three-act Mario text waiting to be adapted. The movie takes the basic material and turns it into a parallel-universe dinosaur dystopia where a meteor split reality in two, mammals evolved in our world, reptiles evolved in Dinohattan, and a missing meteorite shard could merge both dimensions. That is not faithful in a literal sense, but it is an actual idea. Honestly, Super Mario Bros. was doing the multiverse before the multiverse became every studio’s favorite emergency button. Dinohattan is basically Jurassic New York, and the movie’s weirdness is part of what makes it interesting. It is not the Mushroom Kingdom from the games, but it has its own grimy, steampunk, fungus-covered personality. We talk a lot about the Blade Runner comparisons, but what stood out on this rewatch was how much the movie also feels like it is chasing the shadow of Tim Burton’s Batman. It takes something bright, silly, and childish, then tries to make it darker, stranger, and more adult. That approach clearly did not work for everyone, but we have a lot of affection for it. Kids’ movies in the ’80s and early ’90s were just different. They were allowed to be creepy, gross, inappropriate, and occasionally traumatizing. Super Mario Bros. fits right into that era alongside things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Batman, and The NeverEnding Story. The movie has strippers, fascist cops, fungus rebellion, de-evolution machines, and Goombas with tiny heads and giant bodies. Is that a weird fit for Mario? Absolutely. Is it boring? Not even for a minute.  We also give the movie credit for how many game references it actually does work in. The rocket boots turn Mario’s jumping into something that can function in live action. Big Bertha becomes a human version of the giant red fish. The Shy Guy influence shows up in the masked construction-site goons. The flamethrowers nod toward the fire flower. The fungus becomes a strange version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Even the idea of the king being transformed into fungus feels like it has roots in Super Mario Bros. 3, where kings are magically turned into other creatures. The movie is not accurate, but it is not careless. The casting is another place where the movie works better than its reputation. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo actually have a believable older brother / younger brother rhythm. Hoskins has that gruff, working-class warmth, and Leguizamo gives Lu
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  WHIPLASH (2014) | In Spite Of Fletcher? Or, Because Of Him? (High) 18.06.2026 38min

  On this week's Movie HighLow, we go High on Whiplash because it is one of the rare movies about greatness that does not let greatness off the hook. It looks like an inspirational story about a young jazz drummer pushing past his limits, but the more we talk about it, the darker it gets. Whiplash (2014) is not just asking whether Andrew Neiman becomes great. It is asking what he has to cut out of himself to get there. That is the real question of the episode: does Andrew become great in spite of Fletcher, or because of him? And the uncomfortable answer we keep circling is that it might be because of him. That does not make Fletcher right. It does not make his abuse noble. But it does make Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash a much more complicated movie than a simple mentor-from-hell story. This is a movie about ambition, control, humiliation, obsession, and the cost of becoming the person you think you’re supposed to be. In this episode, we dig into Whiplash, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, and why it still hits like a snare drum to the face. The movie stars Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman, a young jazz drummer at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, and J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, the terrifying conductor who treats music education like psychological warfare. The movie won Oscars for Simmons, editing, and sound mixing, and honestly, all three wins make perfect sense. This thing is built like a pressure cooker. The central debate is Andrew’s transformation. By the time we get to the final performance at Carnegie Hall, Andrew does become something different. He takes control of the stage, pushes past Fletcher’s sabotage, and turns “Caravan” into a declaration of war. But we also talk about how even in that moment of victory, he still hands control back to Fletcher. That final exchange of looks between them is thrilling, but it is not cleanly triumphant. Andrew gets Fletcher’s approval, and that might be exactly the problem. We spend a lot of time on Fletcher because J.K. Simmons gives one of those performances that feels almost unfair to everyone else in the movie. He is part jazz instructor, part drill sergeant, part horror villain. The “not my tempo” scene is the obvious centerpiece, but what makes Fletcher so scary is not just that he screams. It is that he knows exactly when to lower his voice, when to charm, when to humiliate, and when to make an entire room afraid to breathe wrong. He does not simply teach through fear. He builds a world where fear is the tempo. The episode also gets into Fletcher’s philosophy, especially the idea that there are “no two words in the English language more harmful than good job.” We do not dismiss that line outright, which is part of what makes the conversation interesting. There is something seductive about Fletcher’s argument. Maybe comfort does kill greatness. Maybe some people only reach their full potential when someone refuses to let them settle. But the movie also gives us Sean Casey, the former student whose story reveals the human wreckage behind Fletcher’s method. For every Andrew who might become Bird, there may be someone else who gets destroyed. Miles Teller’s performance as Andrew is another major High. He has to start the movie with this open, almost boyish hunger and then slowly harden into someone who has internalized Fletcher’s cruelty. We talk about the family dinner scene as one of the clearest examples of that shift. Andrew is patronized by relatives who do not understand what he is chasing, and he finally snaps back with the kind of contempt Fletcher has been teaching him. The “Lincoln Center” gut check from his father is brutal because it cuts through Andrew’s self-mythology for just a second. That father-son relationship, with Paul Reiser as Andrew’s dad, becomes one of the most emotional parts of the discussion. His father is not trying to crush him. He is trying to keep him human. The movie theater scene with the Raisinets is small, but it says so mu
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  THE HAPPENING (2008) | Be Scientific, Douchebag (Low) 12.06.2026 33min

  The Happening is a bad movie with a genuinely good idea trapped inside it, which might be the most frustrating kind of bad movie. On paper, M. Night Shyamalan making an R-rated eco-horror film about nature turning against humanity should at least be creepy. The planet mounting a defense against us? Plants communicating through airborne neurotoxins? Mass panic spreading through the Northeast? There is a real movie in there somewhere. But The Happening (2008) keeps finding the least frightening version of every possible choice. Wind blows through trees. Grass sways. People stare blankly. Mark Wahlberg says science words like a man who has never been inside a classroom voluntarily. And somehow, a movie built around mass suicide, environmental collapse, and social breakdown becomes funny in ways it absolutely does not seem to understand. That is why this episode goes Low. Not because the concept is worthless, but because the execution is so bizarre that the movie becomes less of a thriller and more of an accidental comedy about hot dogs, lawnmowers, lemon drinks, and the least convincing science teacher in film history. In this episode, we try to answer the obvious question: is The Happening still terrible, or has time been kinder to it? After rewatching it, the answer is that it is still terrible, but in a way that is almost impossible to look away from. This is not some forgettable bad movie where nothing happens. Too much happens. People jump off buildings, feed themselves to lions, lie down in front of lawnmowers, and deliver lines like they are speaking a language recently invented by aliens. We spend a lot of time talking about where The Happening sits in M. Night Shyamalan’s career. This is not a lazy “Shyamalan was never good” conversation. He had already made The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, so we know he understands suspense, dread, silence, and atmosphere. That is part of what makes this movie so confusing. He takes a concept that could work and then builds it around one of the least cinematic villains possible: the wind. And that becomes one of our biggest problems with the movie. Wind, trees, and grass are not automatically scary just because the score says they are. You can only cut to ominous leaves so many times before the threat starts to feel like aggressive landscaping. Because the plants themselves cannot do much visually, the movie leans on the suicide imagery, and the best version of that comes right at the beginning. The construction worker scene is probably the movie’s strongest sequence. It is eerie, simple, and genuinely upsetting. Bodies falling one after another from a building is an image that actually works. But after that, the movie keeps trying to escalate, and the deaths start getting more ridiculous than horrifying. The lion scene. The lawnmower scene. The shotgun house. The movie clearly wants these moments to be shocking, but they often play like slapstick with blood. We also get into the whole neurotoxin explanation, which sounds science-adjacent until you think about it for more than five seconds. If the toxin shuts off self-preservation, does it also shut off pain? Reflexes? Panic? The basic human instinct to move when something horrible is happening to your body? The movie wants the rules to sound scientific, but every new death makes the logic feel shakier. Then there is Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore, one of the strangest pieces of casting in modern studio horror. We talk a lot about how hard it is to buy him as a gentle, thoughtful science teacher. It is not just that he feels miscast. It is that every line seems to become more awkward once he says it. “Be scientific, douchebag” basically becomes the thesis statement for the whole performance. Zooey Deschanel as Alma has her own problems too. While she is not inherently a bad actress, this movie gives her almost nothing that works. Her relationship drama with Elliot is supposed to give the story emotional w
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  TAXI DRIVER (1976) | Martin Scorsese’s Most Disturbing Masterpiece (High) 05.06.2026 36min

  Taxi Driver is not great because Travis Bickle is cool, misunderstood, or secretly right. It is great because Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Robert De Niro, and Bernard Herrmann drag us close enough to understand him without ever letting us feel safe around him. That is the central tension of this Movie HighLow episode: Taxi Driver (1976) still feels disturbingly alive because the movie understands loneliness before it becomes ideology, isolation before it becomes violence, and fantasy before it becomes a headline. Fifty years later, Scorsese’s film still has a pulse because it does not flatter the audience. It asks us to sit in Travis’s cab, hear his thoughts, absorb his disgust, watch him mistake obsession for purpose, and then deal with the fact that the world might reward him anyway. That is why this one goes High. Not because it is easy to watch, but because it gets harder to shake every time you revisit it. This episode digs into Taxi Driver as one of those movies that may not fully hit the first time you see it. The argument here is that good movies provide answers, but great movies ask questions, and Taxi Driver is nothing but questions. What does Travis Bickle actually want? Is he trying to save anyone, or just looking for somewhere to aim all that rage? Is the ending real, fantasy, afterlife, media mythmaking, or some nightmare combination of all of it? A huge part of the conversation centers on how Paul Schrader’s script builds Travis through voiceover without using it as a shortcut. The journal entries are not just exposition. They are a trapdoor into Travis’s head. Lines like “my life needed a sense of someplace to go” become the key to the whole character. Travis is not tethered to anything. He has no politics, no real relationships, no taste, no emotional vocabulary, and no understanding of how to live among other people. So when Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, appears to him as an angel in the filth, he turns her into a symbol before he ever sees her as a person. That failed date with Betsy gets a lot of attention here because it is one of the most tragic and uncomfortable scenes in the movie. Travis has the right impulse at first. He works up the courage to speak to her, asks her out, and somehow gets further than he has any right to get. But then he takes her to a porn theater because that is the only version of “the movies” he knows. The episode’s take is that this is what makes Travis so disturbing and sad at the same time. He is not trying to offend her. He simply has no idea how warped his own normal is. The discussion also spends time on the movie’s split structure: the first half built around Travis’s fixation on Betsy, the second around his fixation on Iris, played by Jodie Foster. Foster’s performance is described as especially upsetting because she is both performing adulthood and visibly still a child. The diner scene, where Iris behaves like a kid while trying to act like someone much older, becomes one of the clearest examples of how finely tuned the film’s supporting performances are. And then there is Harvey Keitel as Sport, a character who is charismatic for about half a second before the horror of what he represents takes over. The episode points out how strange and important the scene between Sport and Iris is because it is the one major moment that steps outside Travis’s direct point of view. In a movie so locked into Travis’s head, that break matters. The biggest High, though, is Scorsese’s direction. The episode keeps coming back to how subjective the filmmaking is: the Alka-Seltzer fizzing like pressure in Travis’s skull, the cab being washed by fire hydrant water like some failed baptism, the camera drifting away from Travis during his painful phone call because even the movie can barely stand to watch him. Taxi Driver is not just about a man losing his grip. It is shot like the grip is already gone. Bernard Herrmann’s score also gets singled out as essential. It moves bet
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  Movie HighLow Returns June 5th! 25.05.2026 1min

  Movie HighLow is back. After a very reasonable, not-at-all-concerning multi-year pause, Dom and Dee return June 5 with new episodes about the best and worst that cinema has to offer. Some episodes are HIGH episodes: classics, masterpieces, and movies worth revisiting. Some episodes are LOW episodes: disasters, trainwrecks, and movies where you start wondering if anyone on set knew they were making a movie. And sometimes, the best movies have lows, the worst movies have highs, and a few movies leave us completely confused by both. Subscribe now so the first new episode is waiting for you when Movie HighLow returns June 5. Send your HIGHS and LOWS to [email protected].
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  THE FANATIC (2019) | A Complete Tonal Mess (Low) 13.02.2021 37min

  This movie never decides what it wants to be. In The Fanatic, you’ve got a character study, a thriller, and a dark comedy all fighting each other… and none of them really win. And somehow, that’s what makes it so... fascinating?   We break down: Why the tone is completely all over the placeThe strange (but committed) performance from John TravoltaHow the movie keeps undercutting its own serious momentsAnd why this story almost works… but never quite gets there   👉 It wants to be disturbing👉 It ends up being confusing👉 And sometimes… accidentally funny   🎧 Listen on your favorite platform: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-highlow/id1494972813 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5F6GMoqeJcahbZtk592a9a   📲 Follow Movie HighLow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviehighlow
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  GIGLI (2003) | A Hollywood Disaster That Embarrasses Everyone (Low) 30.07.2020 1t 21min

  GIGLI is more than a notorious flop. In this episode, we get into why it feels so uniquely humiliating: a tabloid-era Bennifer vehicle, a studio-mangled gangster movie turned awkward rom-com, and a cast stranded inside material that never finds the right tone. We talk about the film’s broken kidnapping plot, Ben Affleck’s bizarre performance choices, Jennifer Lopez’s underwritten “tough” character, the movie’s wild tonal swings, and the sense that everyone involved is trapped in a project that got away from them. We also get into the larger story around the film, including Martin Brest’s career after the release, the movie’s overstuffed two-hour runtime, and the one stretch almost everyone remembers: Christopher Walken somehow wandering in and stealing the whole thing. Is Gigli truly a disaster… or is there something weirdly fascinating hiding underneath?   🎧 Listen on your favorite platform: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-highlow/id1494972813 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5F6GMoqeJcahbZtk592a9a   📲 Follow Movie HighLow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviehighlow
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  BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) | Why It Still Feels Like Movie Magic (High) 30.04.2020 1t 14min

  BACK TO THE FUTURE is one of those movies that can feel endlessly familiar and still hit like the first time. In this episode, we get into why Robert Zemeckis’ classic still feels so alive: the perfect Marty McFly and Doc Brown pairing, the airtight script, the escalating stakes, the DeLorean as an all-time great movie image, and a finale that still plays like pure cinematic adrenaline. We also talk about Michael J. Fox’s performance and why it was so essential, the emotional weirdness of Marty becoming his mother’s crush, the brilliance of Hill Valley as a self-contained world, Alan Silvestri’s score, the joy of the Johnny B. Goode sequence, and why the last stretch at the clock tower remains one of the great endings in blockbuster filmmaking. Plus: a few nitpicks, some sequel talk, and a firm stance that this is one movie Hollywood should leave alone. ⚡ 1.21 Gigawatts of analysis. Let’s go.   🎧 Listen on your favorite platform: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-highlow/id1894669466 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5F6GMoqeJcahbZtk592a9a   📲 Follow Movie HighLow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviehighlow  
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  TITANIC (1997) | Overrated… or a Masterpiece? (High) 16.04.2020 1t 13min

  James Cameron’s TITANIC is one of those movies that became so huge it almost invited backlash, but revisiting it now, the real story is why it still lands. In this episode, we talk about the film as both a massive technical achievement and an unapologetically emotional crowd-pleaser, with a romance that can feel corny and deeply effective at the same time. We get into James Horner’s haunting score, Cameron’s mix of practical and digital effects, Kate Winslet’s central performance, Billy Zane’s gloriously hateful villainy, the movie’s class politics, and the way Titanic balances historical tragedy with pure Hollywood melodrama. We also talk about where the movie feels most alive, where it shows its seams, and why Rose’s story ultimately carries more weight than the film’s more formulaic love-story mechanics.   🎧 Listen on your favorite platform: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-highlow/id1894669466 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5F6GMoqeJcahbZtk592a9a   📲 Follow Movie HighLow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviehighlow