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The Road Trip movie is a fertile sub-genre that allows all sorts of variations. You get  broad warm comedies like National Lampoon's Vacation, Eurotrip, and Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. Wim Wenders used the road trip to explore character growth in his incredible 1974 Alice in the Cities as did Alexander Payne in his hilarious and painful 2004 Sideways. The Road trip movie is so pliable you can make world classics like Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Wild Strawberries which used the road trip structure to allow a modernist free form exploration of memory, dream, rumination, inner monologue. None other than Martin Scorsese would crib Strawberries structure for his 2019 The Irishman. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill works to examine exactly why the road trip plot is so. . .well. . .cinematic.

It's hard to make a good political movie. Or movie about political subject matter. You're always going to alienate a group of folks or worse. Yet the best political filmmakers by bringing the funny in a comedy/satire, showing rigorous depth of thought in how they handle characters on both sides of the issue at hand, creating a work of poetic tremendous cinema earn the good will of the audience whether or not they agree.  Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at political classics like Illustrious Corpses, Stray Dog, Grande Illusion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Last Hurrah, One Two Three, To Kill A Mockingbird, Weekend, One + One, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Do The Right Thing, Lincoln, Sound of Falling to try to examine and pin point what makes them work where so many other well intentioned movies fall short.

Buckle up Secret Movie Clubbers, it's going to be a bumpy pod. Movies have always found a way back to pop culture primacy when the naysayers have prematurely tried to call cinema out for the count. Exhibit 1: just a few months ago, both OBSESSION and BACK ROOMS came out of nowhere to make a combined $1B+ IN MOVIE THEATRES powered by 18-24 year olds at the international box office on nothing budgets and stunned the world. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a (hopefully tolerable) free form approach to look at how movies can build on that and come back to the pop culture center. He looks at cost, relevancy, the need for new (non-nepotistic) blood/voices, and the willingness to take risks addressing important issues of the moment.

Though not necessarily on the tips of every cinefile's tongue, the filmmakers Ernst Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper blazed a trail and crafted a certain kind of action-adventure template that American movie making has been indebted to ever since. Even if it rarely approaches the same levels.  The duo cut their teeth on stunning 1920's documentaries including Grass and Chang before coming to Hollywood to direct narratives.  Their one-two punch shot back to back of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and their masterpiece King Kong (1933) set the standard for not only the action movie but the special effects blockbuster as well. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill digs into their filmmography in an attempt to find out what made them so incredible.

Artistic Director Miles Williams has been part of the great theater re-inventions in Los Angeles. In downtown Los Angeles alone, Miles was at the center of the Orpheum and United Artists Theater's incredible turnarounds. Several years back he took the helm of the Alex Theater movie palace in Glendale, California which hadn't shown a movie since Terminator II in 1991. This summer, the Alex became the highest grossing 70mm theater in the United States with its 6 week run of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. In this interview with Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill, Miles talks about his beginnings in live theater, his journey to the Alex, and his philosophy on programming/running a theater. For anyone working on cinema's next chapter, this is a must-listen podcast about one person is getting it done. https://www.thealex.com/ @thealex_theatre  @mileswilliams.la

Stop us if you've heard this one before. . .Curry Barker's dark horror comedy Obsession and Kane Parsons' sci-fi horror mindbender Backrooms are scrambling narratives about the decline of movie theater attendance. These two low budget horror features combined have made almost $800 million box office.  More than that, teens and twenty somethings are attending these movies in massive numbers. So what can we learn? What can we do about it to keep this sudden energy going? Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at how these two movies in 2026 have, at the very least, made everyone reconsider. Movies may just have another great era yet again...

Christopher Nolan's just released The Odyssey is another Nolan juggernaut, having made $700 million in just 12 days of release. It's also the first movie shot fully on IMAX film. And it's a certified classical epic. Often, cinema has pulled a kind of miraculous magic trick by finding technologies and film formats and the right epic material to make a movie in the theater a must see experience.  Every time the naysayers write off movies or the movie theater, sound (1920's), color (1930's), widescreen (1950's) or 70MM (1950's-1960's) or immersive 3D (2000's Avatar) and now IMAX (2000's-present) somehow brings folks back. And makes believers out of us again. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at this history of epic-film format-rejuvenation. And wonders what we might be able to learn from it.

A cult classic movie often wasn't a mainstream hit upon release. But over time, a devoted committed subculture grew around the movie with the belief, nay, the knowledge that this was a masterpiece movie.  Cult classics like Elvira Mistress of the Dark, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Eraserhead, The Big Lebowski, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, may never get the mainstream recognition or popularity of an Avatar or Sinners but to its fervent audience, the cult classic is as beloved as great literature. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill explores what makes a cult classic movie. And what we, as movie lovers and movie makers, can learn from them.

There are so many ways to end a movie. Some of the most powerful, yet hardest to do, are movie twists. This is where your entire reality and understanding of what has come before gets a kick to the head. Movies like The Sixth Sense, Psycho, Fight Club, even the wonderfully hysterical and nutty I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsey Lohan fall in this category.  The shock ending is different-it doesn't reconfigure reality but it leaves us gut-punched and stunned. Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Frank Darabont's The Mist. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at these kinds of endings and more. He also offers a COMPLETE LIST OF MOVIES DISCUSSED at beginning of pod because he's going to talk/spoil many of them. If you want, see them first, then listen here.

Aristotle in his POETICS made a simple yet incisive claim-good dramatic work has a 3 act structure-a beginning, a middle, and an end. Horace in classic Rome expanded this to a 5 act structure.  In the age of cinema, a slightly modified three act structure has been the dominant approach in American screenwriting. Yet many, if not most movies, actually deviate from this structure. And filmmakers like Kurosawa and Kubrick embrace other structures like the symphonic structure-4 movements. Yet, ultimately, many variations can still be harmonized to a progression of 3 distinct parts. Secret Movie Club programmer.founder Craig Hammill looks at Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Thin Red Line, 2001, Mad Max and many others to discuss all the different kinds of successful and discovered structures. And what that might say about an even more profound structure in successful cinematic work.

Lesson learned. Each year produces so many fascinating movies; it's better to wait and see as many as possible before recording a pre-emptive "Movies of 2025" podcast. So Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill to make up for this mistake records "Movies of 2025 Part 2". SIRAT, THE SECRET AGENT, MARTY SUPREME, SOUND OF FALLING get discussed. And Craig enters the fray with his thoughts on Spielberg's new release DISCLOSURE DAY (spoiler, ultimately he liked it).

John Carpenter explained it best. We're all seated around a campfire. The storyteller says, the evil is. . .out there and points into the darkness. That's external horror. Think Jaws, The Birds, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now same scenario but the storyteller says the evil is. . .in here and points to us, our own hearts. That's internal horror. Think Black Swan, Psycho, Twin Peaks etc. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about the interesting differences and rhymes between external and internal horror movies. And how, ultimately, most great horror movies are a combination of both.

One of the most clever ways moviemakers make new movies is to take a movie they love and invert it-do the opposite of key aspects of the movie and problem solve how to make that work. Peter Jackson famously took George Romero's zombie classic Night of the Living Dead where zombies are outside trying to get into a house and made Dead Alive where zombies are inside a house and the hero is trying to keep them from getting out. The first three Indiana Jones movies are all clever inversions of classics like Casablanca, Gunga Din, and From Russia with Love. And Casablanca gets another crazy inversion in the form of the 1946 classic Gilda starring Rita Hayworth. Secret Movie Club founder Craig Hammill dives into this fascinating way of flipping a movie on its head to make a totally new movie.

In the 1980's and 1990's, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, among many others honed their craft and proved their vision directing 3 minute music videos for MTV.  While the "music video" aesthetic was sometimes attacked as hurting cinema, in retrospect, the best directors of that generation brought a much needed innovation to movie language from which we can still take inspiration. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at this video work and notes how often the master moviemakers of a generation come out of a looked down upon medium.

Adaptation is a tricky thing no matter the source in cinema. Novels, life stories, historical events, original ideas, short stories. Adapting live theater plays is an especially tricky business. Something written to be performed live, often in 1 location/set, with concentrated poetic dialogue, plays different as a movie. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at everything from Sidney Lumet's adaptations of 12 Angry Men and Long Day's Journey into Night to all the various Shakespeare adaptations to experimental one location minimalist adaptations like Richard Linklater's 2001 Tape. His conclusion? It might help moviemakers to direct some plays to be better prepared to adapt them to the big screen.