Hello! Long time no post! Alissa is writing her book and Sam is working on [REDACTED] and we have let this fall by the wayside a little bit in the interest of drawing out the length between episodes, since we have precious little time to record these days. But we really ought to announce that sort of thing in the future, and for this we apologize. We have a very fun episode for you today, a little out of date but none the worse for wear, with the great Mason Mennenga, on James Wan’s...

Hello! We are back with friend of the pod Jamelle Bouie to talk about the new Batman flick, which is good. We hope you enjoy it! Soon Alissa’s book will be out and we will announce the winner of our subscriber contest! This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Batman is...

Hello! We have acquired a wonderful producer, John Kemp, an old friend of Sam’s who offered to help a bit ago and whom Sam in his generalized lack of organization finally followed up with much more recently. John’s great, as you can hear, and we’re thrilled to have him aboard. This may also mean a more regular pod sked for a bit, and as such, we offer yet again a plea to subscribers: Please become one! This month (April, not March, as Sam says on the pod), if you subscribe, we will enter you...

Hello! Today we watched the critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated 138-minute $75 million Netflix dramedy Don’t Look Up so you don’t have to! We hated this. We hated it so much we didn’t have the heart to make a guest watch it. Sam is kind of ranty on this one. If you like hearing him angry, please subscribe. If you can’t do that (we understand!) please leave us a good review on your podcatcher of choice (but especially Apple Podcasts) so that more people can hear us. It’s the...

This episode we have the marvelous Helen Shaw, New York magazine’s theatre critic, to talk about Joel Coen’s new film of Macbeth, which we all enjoyed immensely. The movie can be streamed on Apple TV and might still be in theaters; it’s good. Watch it. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Secret of Kells is copyright 2009 Cartoon...

We got to have Jeffrey Overstreet back! Hooray! Jeff is the author of the Auralia’s Colors fantasy novels and Through a Screen Darkly, as well as being writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University. We hope you enjoy this one. It’s free, but please subscribe if you haven’t! Jeff, Alissa, and Sam are talking about The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s 2009 animated fantasy feature about the preservation of the great illuminated book of the gospels. Our theme song is Louis...

Details, credits, errata: Merry Christmas! This week’s episode is about The Muppet Christmas Carol, NOT A Muppet Christmas Carol, or Carol. Or Scrooge. Or Scrooged. There are lots of versions of the Charles Dickens novella, which you can see in its original manuscript form here. You can also visit it in person at the home, now museum, of real-life Scrooge JP Morgan! This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing! or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you...

Details, credits, errata: It is a two-episode week! Sam has finally gotten around to editing our episode on Free Guy, a very good one, if we do say so ourselves. The movie is fun! It’s neither a stone classic nor something we feel the need to apologize for inflicting on you, but it is fairly new and we do have to spoil it for you a bit to talk about it, so check it out before listening to the pod if that kind of thing bothers you. This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing! or...

Details, credits, errata: This week’s returning guest is the wonderful Tyler Huckabee, of Relevant magazine! He knows his Jack Kirby upside-down and backwards and he was definitely the guy to talk abou Eternals, Chloe Zhao’s new, much-discussed Marvel movie. It is… okay? There’s a lot of theology in it. This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing! or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you! Our theme song is Louis Armstrong...

Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is Meg Conley, the terrific writer of homeculture, a newsletter about, uh, home culture! It’s very good and you may have seen it around as Meg’s work often attracts the kind of attention that elevates thoughtful writing into the general discourse. Meg was incredibly forthright and insightful about this week’s movie, Arrival, one of our favorites, and very open and honest about her own life in the Mormon church, as well. We thank her for it. This is...

Details, credits, errata: This week we watched Netflix’s incredible, terrifying show about [SPOILER] and Christian theology, Midnight Mass, which I don’t think I call Black Mass during the episode but if I do, please know that Alissa has already teased me about it and you will only be encouraging her if you do the same. Black Mass isn’t very good, whereas Midnight Mass is. Our guest us the delightful Andy Levy, costar of the only watchable show Fox News ever broadcast, Red Eye (long since...

Details, credits, errata: This week Alissa and I watched Dogma, Kevin Smith’s goodhearted, filthy movie about theology and goofy stoners, a film that is very easy to watch but very hard to see! Alissa notes that there’s a YouTube upload and an Internet Archive version, neither of which seem terribly legit but since there’s no way to stream the movie or buy it from the distributor, we do not recommend watching a bootleg version but we also do not have an alternative. Sam mentioned Terry...

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great Vinson Cunningham, theater critic at The New Yorker, essayist, humorist, and all-around terrific writer whose work we heartily recommend to you. We watched P.T. Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, beloved of our hosts but new to Vinson. Vinson is really wonderful and open about his own experience of charismatic worship and we are very happy to have him on this one. Our...

Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is Friend of the Pod Isaac Butler, journalist and cultural historian who has a new and very good book called The Method coming out in February; he would be grateful if you’re able to toss him a pre-order—he’s a terrific writer and you won’t regret it. He also hosts a podcast of his own, Working, at Slate. Check him out! The movie we’re talking about is David Lowery’s The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, and Joel Edgerton. It’s...

Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is the delightful Lyz Lenz, returning to watch another awkwardly erotic 1950’s Biblical epic with us. It’s a goofy one. Our film is The Prodigal, a notorious turkey that lost the studio a ton of money despite having the beautiful Lana Turner as a fertility priestess. It is, as you might imagine, “based on” the parable from the Gospels in only the loosest possible sense of that phrase. Please buy Lyz’s books! They’re good. Our image is a gorgeous...

Details, credits, errata: Welcome back! We took a break and now are thrilled to return to you with a new episode about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake, and guest Jeff VanderMeer, short-story writer and novelist whose masterly book Annihilation got made into a terrific movie by Alex Garland and whose books Hummingbird Salamander and A Peculiar Peril are both very well-reviewed (and good!) and available at Midtown Reader signed and inscribed, should you so choose,...

Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great comics writer Mark Russell on the pod to discuss another 1980’s classic action movie, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi satire Robocop, much of which has come to pass in the years since its release. Mark calls it the best of the superhero movies; we are inclined to agree. It adapts and sends up all kinds of cool and weird comics without smoothing out any of their rough edges, and, of course, manages to be very much its own...

This week we are privileged to have the great Gregory Thornbury, author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music and some terrific essays as well, notably this one on QAnon, to talk with us about The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary about the late, supernaturally gifted, near-unknown singer-songwriter whose struggles with bipolar disorder kept him out of the public eye even as he amassed a following of similarly talented people. Also, demons. Demonology is...

By epbechthold - de.wikipedia epbechthold, CC BY-SA 3.0. Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is friend of the pod and all-around good guy Spencer Ackerman, who won the Pulitzer and the IRE Medal for his work on the Guardian’s Snowden coverage team and a National Magazine Award for his reporting on anti-Muslim training materials used to teach FBI recruits. His book Reign of Terror, which builds on that excellent reporting, is due out from Viking on August 10; you can pre-order it...

Photo by Nicolás Pérez, used with our thanks under CC BY-SA 4.0. Details, credits, errata: This week’s film is another A24 horror picture, Saint Maud, director Rose Glass’s first movie and a terrific flick Alissa has been trying to get Sam to watch for months. It has pretty much everything we like to talk about on this podcast, so it’s just the two of us this week, and we think you’ll dig the discussion. Our header image on the website this week is a picture of a polychrome wood carving of...

Details, credits, errata: Saddle up your horses, we’re back and want to thank you so much for your patience during our unannounced week off. We have some great episodes banked and here’s the first of them: friend of the pod Emily VanDerWerff returns with her friend Cassie LaBelle to talk about, appropriately, A Week Away, country music video director Roman White’s sophomore feature film, a Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) jukebox musical set at a church camp and distributed through...

Details, credits, errata: This week’s episode is about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic film of faith, missionary life, and repressed desire, Black Narcissus, as chosen by our wonderful guest, Jessica Winter, an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the new novel The Fourth Child, which Alissa read, loved, and recommends to all of you. Our image is a still from the film; the hat, we are reasonably certain, is a mashed-up bycocket, though we welcome correction on this...

A toy of Ripley 8 (Sigourney Weaver) from NECA’s Alien Resurrection toy line. Details, credits, errata: This week we had the wonderful Sarah Welch-Larson, Alien franchise scholar extraordinaire, on to discuss the least-loved and weirdest movie in the series, Alien Resurrection. It was great. You can read an excerpt from Sarah’s excellent book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, here at RogerEbert.com, you can follow her on...

Details, credits, errata: This week we have the delightful Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor of American Theatre magazine and contributor to America, The New York Times, and many other discerning publications, and absolutely one of our favorite people. His terrific pitch was to watch Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent drama The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of many movies made from the story of Joan’s trial, largely because, as Rob observes, there’s lots of documentary material about the trial, notably...