Prior to Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Oscars tended toward stately, serious picks. But now we see stranger and more daring fare creeping in - so tonight MG looks at how the Daniels' started clearing this path with their beautifully low-budget epic Swiss Army Man; and look at where it's led us - Emma Stone's Oscar win for her role as the wild Bella Baxter in Poor Things!

By now, we're used to the Coen Brothers' penchant for goofy comedy, from the musical massacre in Buster Scruggs to the suggestive Navy dance number in Hail Caesar. But Blood Simple, their debut film, had been a grim, Sundance-friendly noir - so in 1987, no one suspected their sophomore effort would turn out to be a slapstick classic! Join MG as we take on Raising Arizona!

AI's surprising growth has many people feeling nervous about the future - so tonight MG takes a look at two of the best in a long line of cautionary tales about renegade robots!  First up, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, about a very strange and dangerous Turing test - followed by the groundbreaking original version of Westworld from Michael Chricton, the master of theme-parks-gone-wrong!

From Pasolini to Mel Brooks, there's little that we at MG love more than films that offend the tender sensibilities of mainstream culture.  And rarely has mainstream culture been more in need of offense than today - so tonight MG takes on a movie that has Twitter clutching its pearls: Emerald Fennell's Saltburn!

Beginning with 1954's Gojira, Toho Studios' Godzilla series went on to become one of the most beloved franchises in movie history - and over the decades, it's been many things: sometimes political, sometimes silly, sometimes scary. But with Godzilla Minus One we can now add...profoundly emotional? Join us as MG crowns the new King of the King of Monsters!

David Fincher has long been on the cutting edge of the killer/thriller genre, reinventing it many times over his career with classics like Se7en, Zodiac, Mindhunter, and Gone Girl. But with his latest Netflix-backed effort, he both cuts new ground - and, in a weird way, gets back to basics: join us as we look at The Killer, and its classic inspiration, Le Samouraï!

AI rising up and conquering humanity has been the subject of hundreds of films from Westworld to The Terminator - but tonight we feature a couple of films that suggest reality will be more insidious than that! Join us for the little-known 70s time-capsule Colossus: The Forbin Project, followed by Spike Jonze’s chatbot-gone-rogue love story, Her!

With the betrayal of Watergate and the release of the Pentagon Papers, America in the 1970's was a haunted, disillusioned society, and much of that stress can be seen in the films of the period. But MG argues that, even in a decade that brought us Apocalypse Now and Three Days of the Condor, no director was more plugged into this paranoid zeitgeist than Alan Pakula! Join us for his twin masterpieces, Klute and The Parallax View!

For decades, John Wayne's westerns created a vast mythology of America's early days that papered over historical truth in favor of heroic white male ego-fantasies. But towards the end of his career, two films stand out wherein he questions these narratives and his role in them - join us as we take a look at his masterpiece The Searchers, as well the Coen Brother's reinterpretation of his classic True Grit!

Disney spent 350 million making the pretty-fun Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and 288 million making the downright awful Black Widow.  But even though the combined budget of tonight's double feature wouldn't have covered craft service for those movies, each packed to the brim with incredible concepts and beautiful images.  Join us as we talk about Gareth Edwards' Monsters and Brit Marling's Another Earth!

Happy Halloween from MG! Tonight, pour yourself a nice pumpkin spice martini and cozy up to our Exorcist double bill! First up is William Friedkin's 1973 masterful original, featuring a decade-best performance from Ellen Burstyn as a possessed kid's beleaguered mom - then we follow it up with the film's second (and darkly comedic) sequel, Exorcist III - directed by the book's author, William Peter Blatty!

Jake Gyllenhaal has had an incredible career, working with a wide range of directors from Ambulance's Michael Bay, to Okja's Bong Joon Ho, to Zodiac's David Fincher.  But two filmmakers in particular saw him as more than a great actor - they saw him as a muse, and built movies around his unique voice.  Join us tonight as MG takes on Richard Kelly's iconic Donnie Darko and Denis Villeneuve's underseen Enemy!

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have teamed up on a number of 'learning-to-be-real' stories - and their collaboration went global this year with the year's undisputed megahit, Barbie. But MG argues that while it might not be in the billion-dollar club, their actual best team-up sits comfortably beside a defining classic of the genre: join us tonight for our pod on Frances Ha and The Graduate!

Every now and then, a film critic puts their money where their mouth is and makes a movie for themselves - and sometimes they even prove to be true masters of the craft: Paul Schrader and Francois Truffaut, for example. But MG argues that one of the most impressive debuts of all time is someone who is now a bit forgotten - film historian and Orson Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich - whose incredible one-two punch of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon made him the toast of the town in the...

Have Margot Robbie and a dead theoretical physicist saved theaters from Covid? Are we recovered from the filmic scurvy of watching nothing but Netflix dating competitions for two years? It’s been a long time since we at Martini Giant have seen a packed house for would be blockbusters like these, so it looks like this brilliant bit of counterprogramming may have done the job! Let’s talk Barbenheimer!

Barbie's Margot Robbie leads Damien Chazelle's three-hour epic Babylon, with a screenplay inspired by Gene Kelly's bona fide masterpiece Singin' in the Rain - and before its release, the studio thought they had the Oscars all locked up! But theatergoers felt very differently - alternately offended and bored by the endless over-the-top antics of the drug-dizzy plot, audiences stayed away in droves, making It the one of the biggest bombs of the past few years! Were they right? MG compares it...

Starting with David Fincher's The Social Network, corporate mythologizing has become a major genre, with more and more entries every year - from Danny Boyle's Jobs, to Apple's Tetris, to Hulu's Flamin' Hot movie - based on the creation of spicy Cheetos no less. Have we slipped a peg culturally, since the days of Ghandi and Ali? Or will tonight's double feature of Air - the Air Jordan story - or Blackberry, the fall of the world's most popular handheld device, change MG's mind?

MG is excited to welcome Lily Nichols back to the show with a double feature of surrealist strangeness!  First up we look at a fascinating Belgian comedy called The Brand New Testament, in which God's daughter comes to Earth to fix everything he did wrong -  then we take on Jean-Pierre Jeunet's landmark romantic masterpiece Amélie, who's brilliant visuals and bold new filmmaking reinvigorated French cinema in the early 2000s nearly as much as Jean Luc Godard's Breathless did in the 1960s!

Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen are two of the most successful leading men in movie history, yet they appealed to wildly different audiences: McQueen was the master of detached cool in road romances like The Getaway or the experimental Thomas Crown Affair, whereas Reynolds exuded easy, relatable charm in everything from Gator to Hooper. But their biggest hits came from a single genre: the car chase movie! So buckle up for tonight's double feature of Bullitt and Smokey and the Bandit

Clint Eastwood has directed over 40 feature films, and is now working on what he says will be his last movie, called Juror No. 2 with Nicholas Holt and Toni Collette. So to celebrate, Erick, Chris, and Daniel have chosen three films apiece to serve to celebrate his towering and incredibly varied career. There are, of course, a couple of classics - but also a few picks might be new to many listeners! Come join Martini Giant in wishing this master a happy 93nd birthday!

These days, Jack Nicholson seems to have settled happily into the role of world's-most-casually-dressed-Lakers-fan, but in the 1970's he was arguably the greatest new actor since Brando.  Even before he perfected his explosive rage act for Kubrick's The Shining, he had come to symbolize America's collective frustration, betrayal, and anger at the collapse of the Hippie dream - and no films capture that sadness more accurately than Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail!

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture in part because it was a rebuke of Oscar-bait pretension with its non-western story, diverse cast, and fun unpretentious style - whereas in the leadup to the awards, many avoided the frontrunner, Todd Fields' Tar, because it appeared to be old-school Oscar: a ponderous, self-serious reinforcement of the Great Art. But tonight, along with the gentle indie Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, MG argues that classical doesn't necessarily...

When the Coen Brothers’ comic-noir masterpiece The Big Lebowski hit theaters in 1997, it fizzled with both critics and audiences - but it has since cemented its position in the pantheon of classic sendups of Los Angeles culture to the point that nearly everyone these days knows "the Dude abides."  But Gen-Xers will remember that, for the longest time, the go-to for Los Angeles quotes was a movie that has now completely disappeared from the public consciousness: Steve Martin's LA Story!

Woody Allen's and Diane Keaton's Oscar-winning masterpiece Annie Hall was a major hit in 1977, and laid out the blueprint that rom-coms and relationship comedies have been following ever since, as its self-aware, realistic dialogue, hilarious cast of supporting characters, and postmodern structure have become a sort of international standard. So for tonight's double feature, we decided to pair it with one of the most recent and best examples: Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World!