On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “A Time to Kill,” Joel Schumacher’s 1996 adaptation of a 1989 John Grisham novel by the same name. Starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey, with supporting performances from Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Cooper, “A Time to Kill” concerns the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, a black man on trial for capital murder after...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 cyberpunk action film directed by Robert Longo and adapted from a William Gibson short story of the same name, by Gibson himself. “Johnny Mnemonic” stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, Ice-T and Dina Meyer. In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain. He takes a job that requires...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Laura Hudson (formerly of Wired and The Verge) watched the 1995 cyber-thriller “Hackers,” directed by Ian Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco, with supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Jillette, Wendell Pierce, Marc Anthony and Felicity Huffman. “Hackers” centers on Dade Murphy, alias “Zero Cool,” who made hacking history 7 years before the events...

In this week’s episode of the Patreon we discussed Sidney Lumet’s heady Cold War thriller Fail Safe, based on a novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, published in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fail Safe stars Henry Fonda, Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton and Larry Hagman with cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld. The story moves between three characters: U.S Air Force General Black who has been having a recurring dream in which a Spanish matador...

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Michael Bay’s weirdly prescient action thriller, “The Rock,” released in 1996 and starring Sean Connery, Nicholas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn and William Forsythe. The supporting cast is also chock full of compelling character actors, including John Spencer, Philip Baker Hall, John C. McKinley, Tony Todd and Bokeem Woodbine. In “The Rock,” Ed Harris plays General Francis Hummel, a disillusioned Vietnam War vet who is angry with the...

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched director Brian De Palma’s 1996 adaptation of Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Czerny (Kittridge!), Emmanuelle Béart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas and Vanessa Redgrave. It was shot by frequent De Palma collaborator Stephen H. Burum and edited by Paul Hirsch. Screenplay by David Koepp and Robert Towne. Mission: Impossible, based on the television series, was the inaugural project of Tom Cruise’s...

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched the 1996 action thriller slash high school drama The Substitute, directed by Robert Mandel — a prolific television director — and starring Tom Berenger, Ernie Hudson, Diane Venora, Marc Anthony, Luis Guzmàn and William Forsythe. In The Substitute, Berenger plays Jonathan Shale, a Vietnam veteran and mercenary who takes a break from the business of wet work after a botched operation in Cuba where several of his men were killed. He returns...

For this week's Patreon episode, we watched the 1976 thriller "Marathon Man," directed by John Schlesinger, written by William Goldman, and starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, William Devane and Marthe Keller.

Welcome back to Unclear and Present Danger! It’s our first episode of the new year and we’re here with a pretty fun movie — “Executive Decision,” directed by Stuart Baird, produced by Joel Silver and starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, Steven Seagal and many others. Music by, as you might expect, Jerry Goldsmith. In “Executive Decision,” an intelligence analyst played by Russell and a group of commandos, led by Seagal, must infiltrate a passenger...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger — the last episode of the year! — we watched Tony Scott’s 1995 submarine action thriller, “Crimson Tide,” starring Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Viggo Mortenson and James Gandolfini, among many others. And to discuss “Crimson Tide,” we have an esteemed guest! Tony Gilroy, who you may know from his work on the Bourne films, political thrillers like “State of Play,” “Beirut,” legal thrillers like “Michael Clayton” or the recent Star Wars...

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Jamelle and John watched “City Hall,” a 1996 political drama directed by Harold Becker and starring Al Pacino, John Cusack, Danny Aiello, Bridget Fonda, David Paymer and Martin Landau. You’ll also notice a beardless Richard Schiff, Lauren Velez, and Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. In “City Hall,” Cusack plays Kevin Calhoun, the loyal deputy to Mayor John Pappas, played by Al Pacino. After a young boy and a police detective are killed in a...

On this week’s podcast, Jamelle and John watched the legendary Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1996 action thriller “Broken Arrow,” starring John Travolta, Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Delroy Lindo and Howie Long. In “Broken Arrow,” a rogue pilot, Air Force Major Vic Deakins, played by Travolta, steals two nuclear weapons with the intent to sell them back to the United States government for a profit. His co-pilot, Captain Riley Hale, played by Christian Slater, is left for dead during...

This week on the Patreon, Jamelle and John were joined by Beverly Gage — a professor of history at Yale University and author of "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century" — to discuss Clint Eastwood's 2011 J. Edgar Hoover biopic, simply titled "J. Edgar." We had such a good time discussing the movie with Professor Gage that we thought we should share this episode on the main feed as a bonus!

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John watched Oliver Stone’s 1995 dramatization of the life and career of President Richard M. Nixon, appropriately titled “Nixon.” Like Stone’s other mid-century political film, “JFK,” it stars a murderer’s row of A-listers and character actors: Anthony Hopkins, Joan Allen, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, Paul Sorvino, Mary Steenburgen, James Woods, Powers Boothe, Tony Goldwyn, J.T. Walsh and many, many others. To talk “Nixon” we were joined by the great Nicole...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “The Enemy Within,” a 1994 remake of John Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May,” starring Forest Whitaker and Jason Robards. Like the original film, “The Enemy Within” concerns a military plot to depose the president and take control of the U.S. government. Like the original film, our hero is an Army advisor who would rather defend the Constitution than his superiors. And like the original film, the story is a...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “Hidden Assassin” — also released under the name “The Shooter” — a 1995 action drama directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Dolph Lundgren and Maruschka Detmers. In “Hidden Assassin,” Lundgren plays a U.S. Marshall, Michael Dane, tasked with arresting a woman, played by Detmers, suspected of assassinating the Cuban ambassador to the United States. Time is of the essence; the Secretary of State will meet with his...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “12 Monkeys,” the 1995 science fiction film from Terry Gilliam starring Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer. “12 Monkeys” is an adaptation of sorts of a 1962 French short film “La Jetée,” in which scientists in a post-nuclear apocalypse future send a man back and forward through time in an effort to save their present. The man eventually succeeds in his mission, only to be killed...

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John were joined by Linda Holmes of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Our to discuss the 1995 political romantic comedy “The American President,” directed by Rob Reiner, written by — you guessed it — Aaron Sorkin, and starring Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, David Paymer, Samantha Mathis and Michael J. Fox, among others. “The American President” stars Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd, a widow, who falls in love with an environmental...

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John were joined by Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker magazine to watch and discuss 1995’s GoldenEye, the first James Bond film of the 1990s and the first James Bond film of the post-Cold War era. GoldenEye is the seventeenth film in the James Bond series and the first to star Pierce Brosnan, who would go on to star in three subsequent pictures, all of which we will eventually cover on the podcast: Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die...

For this week’s episode, we watched the 1995 coming-of-age tale slash Vietnam War movie slash crime thriller “Dead Presidents,” produced and directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. It stars Larenz Tate, Keith David, Chris Tucker, N’Bushe Wright, Freddy Rodriguez and Bokeem Woodbine. “Dead Presidents” is the story of Anthony Curtis, a soon-to-be high school graduate from the Bronx who chooses to join the Marines in search of his own destiny. The year is 1969 and he is sent to Vietnam, leaving...

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John watched Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 cult favorite Strange Days, a collaboration with James Cameron inspired by the political and social turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although not quite “cyberpunk” — it isn’t a William Gibson pastiche like its contemporary Johnny Mnemonic — Strange Days borrows heavily from the genre and its various conceits. Strange Days stars Ralph Fiennes as protagonist Lenny Nero, Angela Bassett as “Mace,” Juliette Lewis as...

This week, Jamelle and John were joined by scholar and author Sam Goldman to watch and discuss the1994 alt-history thriller “Fatherland,” a made-for-HBO adaptation of Robert Harris’ 1992 novel of the same name. Both the novel and the film take place in a 1964 where Nazi Germany won the war in Europe. In the week leading up to the 75th birthday of Adolf Hitler, and the opening up of diplomatic relations with the United States, an investigator in the SS looks into the suspicious death of a...

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by the Josie Duffy Rice of the Unreformed podcast to discuss “The Net,” a 1995 techno-thriller, directed by Irwin Winkler and starring Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam and Dennis Miller. The Net was one of several films in a mini-genre that you can describe as, “What if computer technology was used for evil?” Contemporaries include Hackers and Enemy of the State, both films we will eventually cover on this podcast.

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the satirical sci-fi action thriller “Demolition Man,” starring Sylvester Stallone as “John Spartan,” a Los Angeles city police officer who is cryogenically frozen as punishment for a failed rescue attempt; Wesley Snipes as “Simon Phoenix,” his primary antagonist; Sandra Bullock as a cop in the sterile, Brave New World-esque future society in which the film takes place; and Nigel Hawthorne as the leader of that...