Claim OwnershipSecret Movie Club Podcast
Subscribed: 9Played: 186
Subscribe
© Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
Description
Movie theaters by movie makers for movie lovers.
245 Episodes
Reverse
The character actor is one of the most important yet least discussed aspects of cinema. Whether it's Thelma Ritter as a no nonsense feisty nurse in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Eli Wallach as a captivating roguish bandit in Leone's The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly or Tilda Swinton in almost about anything, character actors provide a rhythm, contrast, opposite color that provides shape, dynamism, form to a film. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at why the character actor is so critical to a movie's success and some of the greatest practitioners of the craft.
Like all American tribes in the melting pot, Jewish-Americans express their identity in their art. Maybe nowhere as strongly as in cinema. Secret Movie Club founder Craig Hammill, who has a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, looks at just a few of the many great movies that get at being Jewish-American. Movies like the 1980's hit Dirty Dancing, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, Mike Nichol's The Graduate, and Claudia Weill's Girlfriends among many others. If you've ever had a heated debate at an engaged Jewish-American table, you know what it's like to dig into these things. This podcast can only be a prologue to the many complex issues that could be discussed. But hey. . .at least it's a start.
Today we talk about 12 fascinating movies from 2025. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer starts with the movies he still needs to see (The Secret Agent, Marty Supreme), the movies he felt were essential (Sinners, Mission Impossible 8, Cover Up, Sentimental Value) and what other 2025 movies (Highest 2 Lowest, Train Dreams, One Battle After Another, Weapons) might say about our current cinematic moment. Craig is fighting the flu so he tries to keep everything mercifully to the point. Please let us know your thoughts and the 2025 movies you loved that you think we need to see by emailing us at: community@secretmovieclub.com
Yes, they're connected by name. Yes, they're connected by being born within 9 months of each other. Yes, they're connected by their crazy talent to bring the best out of the sci-fi, horror, fantasy genres. But filmmaker Steven Spielberg and best-selling writer Stephen King are most connected by being in the rarefied extremely small subset of creative artists who have both climbed to the top peak of commercial AND artistic success. Spielberg movies like Duel, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. and King works like Carrie, The Shining, It, The Stand, Wizard and Glass have had blockbuster success while also being genuine explorations and expressions of their creators' obsessions. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill devotes the last podcast of 2025 to a deep dive into what traits and characteristics unite the two artists and what we might learn from them. (We'll be back with our next new pod, SMC Podcast #205-The Movies of 2025 on Friday, January 9, 2026). Happy holidays and happy new year.
Christmas movies are a genre unto themselves. And Classic Hollywood Christmas movies are a special part of that genre. Holiday movies made in Hollywood's heyday of the 1930's-1940's. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at five favorites-Frank Capra's 1946 It's A Wonderful Life, Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 The Shop Around the Corner, Preston Struges' 1944 The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Vincente Minnelli's 1944 Meet Me In St. Louis, and W.S.Van Dyke's 1934 The Thin Man. Interestingly, all these classic use dark subject matter-contemplated suicide, financial stress, murder, small town scandal-to contrast and thus emphasize Christmas themes of redemption, family, second chances. We also take a look at two modern classics-Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa and how they share much the same DNA as their classic Hollywood counterparts.
What is it about the Italians? The rich food. Thousands of years of incredible art and sculpture and music. Something's in the blood over there that produces a high concentration of moviemakers with incredible lush styles: Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento to name just a few. This week, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill riffs on what it means to be a "stylist". And why Italian masters like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica don't quite feel like part of that category because other traits of their moviemaking dominate. Craig also tries explores why, even if your aesthetic is different, studying stylists is key to the craft.
Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi dystopian noir Blade Runner where a disillusionedd private eye/cop/robot hunter Harrison Ford tracks down and falls in love with "Replicants" or robot cyborgs made to look like humans is a pinnacle of the sci-fi dystopian genre. Blade Runner presents a disturbing, overpopulated, megalopolis Los Angeles and explores sci-fi questions of what it means to be human, to exist, to live. Dystopia movies like Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Mike Judge's Idiocracy, show humanity and society hanging on but everything falling apart. These are movies just before the apocalypse. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at many of these movies and how years like 1971 and 2006 when the US was at war both internally and internationally produced dystopia sci-fi classics that mirrored our own anxiety and worry.
To celebrate our 200th podcast, we take a look at some of the less screened and spoken about movie masterpieces that give us "that feel". Movies like Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, Forman's The Fireman's Ball, the Coens' Barton Fink, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire among many others are what Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill calls "lightning bottle movie masterpieces". Movies that give you "that feel" of electric, exciting "I want to do this" moviemaking. We discuss 15 movies in all, including asserting that Citizen Kane, as discussed as it is, is taken for granted and underrated now. Our hope here is that you'll go check out or re-watch a few of these movies and seek out cinema that gives you "that feel" to make amazing movies.
Filmmaker Blake Winston Rice returns to the pod to talk about his most recent short, DISC, starring Victoria Ratermanis & indie phenom Jim Cummings and how it premiered at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). Blake joined us on SMC Pod #182 to talk about how his short TEA got into the Cannes Film Festival and what it was like to actually attend the world's greatest film fest in person. Now Blake returns to talk about Toronto which is in the Top 5 world film fests and often viewed as the springboard for moviemakers ahead of awards season. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill and Blake talk about what a moviemaker needs to do these days to keep the needle moving forward towards feature work, financing, and career-building.
October is Halloween season. And Halloween season is always a good time to discover (or re-discover) some of the more hidden yet just as brilliant horror gems in the genre. From Carl Theodor Dryer's 1932 dreamlike VAMPYR to Lucio Fulci's 1971 blunt yet Hitchcockian LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN to Zach Cregger's 2022 breakthrough comedy-horror freakout BARBARIAN to Don Siegel's & Clint Eastwood's 1971 slice of Southern Gothic fever revenge THE BEGUILED to Bill Gunn's 1973 black politics, power, and sexuality art horror GANJA & HESS, these are the movies that will blow your mind. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes you on a spooky tour through the shadow galleries of the vast crypt of horror movie masterpieces.
In the final part of our three part 2025 series, Is This Cinema?, we look at the 2010 boundary pushing shocking controversial A SERBIAN FILM co-wri & directed by Srdjan Spasojevic which has its advocates like moviemaker Eli Roth and its detractors (many many others). Actor, moviemaker, musician Andras Jones (who did NOT see the movie) and Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (who did) use the movie (which did play big festivals around the world) as the launching point for the third part of their conversation about what actually defines cinema. Andras and Craig work to dig down on what the basic elements are that define cinema. Citizen Kane and Pink Flamingos both come up. And surprisingly Andras and Craig do ultimately come to a definition that works for both of them.
One of the greatest American movie trilogies has been right under our eyes for decades. Francis Ford Coppola's & team's The Godfather Parts 1, 2, and 3 form one of the most impressive three part movie projects ever attempted. It's easy to overlook this since The Godfather 3 came out 16 years after The Godfather 2 and is not considered at the same level as the first two movies. And yet, despite its definite shortcomings, The Godfather 3 is still one of the best movies of the 1990's and a fascinating and FITTING conclusion to the tragedy of Michael Corleone. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at what it took to make the three movies (it was always a fight) and how they fit together to form one of the few great Shakespearean level tragedies of American cinema.
Sometimes you have to go see a movie in a theater no matter what. That's a great thing. Auteur moviemaker Paul Thomas Anderson's just released One Battle After Another, shot on the 35mm Vistavision format, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn about a stoner Dad ex-revolutionary trying to save his daughter is just such a movie. What's illuminating, for better and worse, is realizing even with a dynamite movie like this one, the 2025 theater experience needs work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks his theater experience, his admiration for Anderson's movie, and his thoughts-good, bad, ugly-about what where theater going is at in 2025.
It's one thing to be scared by a ghost story, vampires, or masked killers menacing horny teens in summer camps. It's another thing when you see a movie that forces you to confront horrors that happen everyday around the world. Movies like Hector Babenco's 1981 Brazillian neorealist Pixote about a 10 year old juvenile delinquent struggling in the corrupt reform schools and even more brutal streets. Movies like Elem Klimov's 1985 Come & See which follows wide-eyed Florya as he joins Belurusian partisans in World War II to fight invading nazis only to witness humanity's capacity for limitless atrocities. Movies like Lee Daniel's Precious about a teen girl who has to assert her own dignity in the face of rape, incest, and societal neglect. Movies like Lucas Moodysson's Lilya-4-Ever about how teens can suddenly find themselves being sex-trafficked. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at these and other movies in a search to define what exactly makes these movies so powerful and unbearable.
A movie star has "it". You can't learn it. You can't fake it. The camera loves you. The audience wants you. Great actors may never be movie stars but they often have long, rewarding careers filled with powerful work even if they never get that huge paycheck. What's interesting though is how often big stars are determined to be recognized as great actors or vice versa. And it's that grain of sand that often makes a dynamic career. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at movie stars, great actors, and everything in between like Louise Brooks, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Paul Newman among others and tries to figure out. . .what exactly makes a movie star.
One of the fascinating ironies about Los Angeles is that it is often movies in heightened genres like noir that best capture what the city really feels like to those born and raised in it (like this podcaster). Movies like Billy Wilder's acidic Hollywood takedown classic Sunset Boulevard and Roman Polanski's & Robert Towne's 70's new cinema classic Chinatown show sides of the city with a denizen's inside baseball knowledge. But there's also a neorealist strain in the films of John Cassavettes, Charles Burnett, and others that shows Los Angeles from a working class and middle class ground level. The way we actually live our life here. And finally, oddly, 60's and 70's B movies like 1977's totally couldn't be made today "The Van" show LA as it is because the moviemakers couldn't afford a budget to dress it up. They just shot what they could and captured LA without any soft lighting or makeup. Join Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (a 4th generation Los Angelino) as we discuss some of the known and underground gems that shine a real light on the city we who live here love.
The Impressario is an archetype the movie industry sorely needs right now. Lorne Michaels, co-creator and longtime producer of Saturday Night Live offers a template and some surprising subtle lessons in what characteristics are needed to thrive in the long game. Michaels is one of the last of a breed that started at the very beginning with boy genius MGM studio head Irving Thalberg and includes folks like agent Sue Mengers, producer Kathleen Kennedy, manager Bernie Brillstein among others. Folks who can aggregate talent, people, power to make a mind boggling body of work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the characteristics these folks share in the hopes we can learn something for the next chapter of cinema.
1920's German expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did more than inspire a whole kind of cinema-it also became the great-grandparent of a genre. The mind-bending dive into the psyche genre that saw three of its greatest examples all influence each other: Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona which begat in many ways Robert Altman's 1977 3 Women. And all those movies consciously or unconsciously begat David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the journey of inspiration of all these movies as well as side trips to other great examples of the genre like David Fincher's Fight Club, Roman Polanski's Repulsion, and Darren Aronovsky's Black Swan.
RKO needed money fast in 1943 and they brought on David O Selznick protege Val Lewton to head a unit devoted to cheapie horror movies. The rules-use their titles like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man-then figure out the rest. Lewton miraculously created a cycle of incredible atmospheric literate horror movies, several masterfully directed by genre master Jacques Tourneur, that helped revive the career of Boris Karloff, introduce subtexts like repressed sexuality, acceptance of death, compulsion, and influence many artists like Martin Scorsese and Harlan Ellison. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive into a cycle of movies that prove you can make greatness if you accept your limitations and turn that into the engine of your creativity.
The Western genre is a home grown art form like jazz and rock and roll. And it occasionally produces really strange and wild movies. Marlon Brando's incredible 1961 One Eyed Jacks is a western that takes place on California beaches with a psycho-sexual Oedipal focus on a rebel, a father figure, and a step-daughter. Other eccentric westerns like Budd Boetticher's minimalist 1956 Seven Men From Now, John Huston's & John Milius's counter-culture The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, Clint Eastwood's supernatural revenge High Plains Drifter, and S. Craig Lawler's near Cormac McCarthy unbelievably gory yet gripping Bone Tomahawk are all beautiful bizarre outliers. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive and looks at around a dozen of the most eccentric westerns ever made.
Comments
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States