Happy New Year's, everyone! In honor of 2021 coming to a close, we're discussing George Cukor's appropriately named Holiday (1938). Cary Grant plays Johnny, a self-made man who is engaged to Julia, the daughter of a wealthy man of business. Johnny is an independent spirit who sees business only as a means to an end, and has no interest in accumulating wealth. He hopes to amass enough money to "retire" young, giving him time to go on adventures and discover more about himself, and then return to the workforce later in life once his money has run out. He finds the family he is poised to marry in ..read more

Merry Christmas, everyone! We hope you're having a lovely holiday. On that note, we're continuing our series on holiday movies with arguably the biggest one of all, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey (James Stewart) is a would-be adventurer and entrepreneur who has, throughout his life, continually postponed and sacrificed his ambitions for the betterment of the people around him. He has suffered for years from bitterness over those sacrifices, as well as insecurity over his perceived failure to make an impact on the world. Then, one night he's driven to suicidal thoughts over ..read more

Sorry about the delay! Today, we're beginning our series on holiday films with everyone's favorite sorta kinda Christmas movie, Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan. We all know the story - a group of well-heeled European terrorists-turned-thieves take over an LA skyscraper during a Christmas party, and it's up to one good cop on the loose in the building to muck up their plans. The story itself is well-trodden territory, but there's novelty in the protagonist, a fallible and vulnerable everyday cop who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, during an era in which action movie heroes wer ..read more

We're finishing up our series on Audrey Hepburn with one of her last roles, in Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed (1981). Hepburn plays Angela, the wife of a wealthy European businessman who has hired John Russo (Ben Gazarra) to spy on her out of suspicion of infidelity. Russo and Angela wind up becoming involved, however, which parallels Russo's colleague Charles (John Ritter) falling in love with the woman he is tailing, Dolores (Dorothy Stratten). All manner of other hijinks ensue, in a film that mixes screwball comedy with hardboiled noir and brings the trappings of Classic Hollywood to ..read more

Happy belated Thanksgiving! We apologize about the delay in getting this episode up. For our penultimate Audrey Hepburn film, we're talking about Charade (1963). Hepburn plays Regina Lampert, who returns home from vacation to find her husband has been murdered and her house has stripped clean. She soon becomes harassed by a trio of thugs who claim she has $250,000 that belongs to them, and is told by the CIA that they want the money, as well. To make matters worse, her one supposed accomplice throughout this order (played by Cary Grant in one of his last, great roles) keeps changing his identi ..read more

In our second episode on Audrey Hepburn, we're taking a look at 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a young, quirky "cafe society" girl in New York City in the early 60s. She catches the eye and fascination of a young writer who has just moved into the same apartment building as her. The two form a friendship over the course of the film that begins to build to romantic feelings, which jeopardizes her pursuit of a wealthy husband - as well as her preference to keep her emotions and her vulnerability at arm's length from everyone around her. Breakfast at Tiffany's was d ..read more

Hello, listeners! Today, we're kicking off a series on the iconic Audrey Hepburn, and we're starting with her Hollywood debut: Roman Holiday. Hepburn plays a princess who feels trapped by the pressures and responsibilities of her status. While on a tour of Europe, she decides to abscond in the middle of the night, to at least briefly leave her responsibilities behind and experience Rome the way common people are able to. In the process, she meets Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), a reporter who realizes who she is and decides to manipulate the situation in order to get an explosive article. Soon, ho ..read more

We hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween! To cap our series on Universal Monster Movies, we're taking a look at the last really iconic horror creation the studio produced, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. After partial, fossilized remains of a strange, human-like amphibious creature are found in a remote Amazonian location, a small team of researchers is dispatched to try and find the rest of the remains in hopes of it leading to a scientific breakthrough. Shortly after their arrival, however, they begin to be terrorized by a still-living creature that appears to be from the same spe ..read more

For part 3 of our series on classic Universal Monster movies (and the last to actually post before Halloween!), we're taking a look at The Wolf Man (1941), directed by genre-filmmaking stalwart George Waggner. Lon Cheney Jr. (following in his famous father's footsteps) plays Larry Talbot, who has returned home following his brother's death in a hunting accident. Shortly after doing so, he's bitten by a werewolf, and subsequently becomes one himself (but only when the moon is full and the wolf's bane is in bloom, of course). He then finds himself in the position of trying to convince his father ..read more

Welcome back, listeners! For the second installment in our Halloween series, we're looking at another James Whale: The Invisible Man (1933). Claude Rains plays Dr. Jack Griffin, a scientist whose research has resulted in him becoming invisible. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to turn himself back. Additionally, the experiment has had the unfortunate side effect of turning him completely insane. This drives him to ever-escalating displays of his power, starting with childish pranks but soon moving to murder and acts of destruction, while both the police and his former colleagues try to figur ..read more