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Aaron Sorkin goes back to Facebook. The Social Reckoning stars Mikey Madison as whistleblower Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong as a Mark Zuckerberg who has run out of places to look away. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Justin Jaeger take the whole thing apart.Is this the Sorkin movie that finally respects the record, or just his most convincing one yet? Does the January 6 war room land as a reckoning, or let Facebook off easy? And how much Sorkin is too much Sorkin? The panel does not agree.The Film Board is a monthly deep dive on new theatrical releases from The Next Reel family of film podcasts. Links & NotesThe film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd, and follow The Next Reel while you're there.What's real. Jeff Horwitz walked through what the film gets right, from the burner phone to the backyard meetings, in an account summarized by Hollywood Life. Pete's point about why Haugen joined Facebook comes from her own Senate testimony, where she said someone close to her had been radicalized online. For the full hearing, Just Security's recap covers the day.Where Charlie came from. Bill Burr's character was inspired by early Facebook investor Roger McNamee, who is also an executive producer on the film. Sorkin told Vanity Fair why the name had to change (via Business Insider).More Sorkin. The West Wing, the measuring stick for the whole panel. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, home of Tommy's favorite smart-person stumble. Steve Jobs, Pete's other example of Sorkin compressing time. And from The Film Board archive: The Trial of the Chicago 7, Molly's Game, and Being the Ricardos.Referenced on the show. All the President's Men, the movie this one desperately wants to be. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the high-water mark for sexy research. Schindler's List, Tommy's red-coat comparison. The Breakfast Club, the fist pump Pete saw coming and fell for anyway. Oppenheimer, JJ's case study in stakes that didn't land for him. The Big Short, Steve's reminder of how little changes after the outrage.The rest of the family. The Next Reel with Andy Nelson and Pete Wright. Sitting in the Dark with Tommy, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete. Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson. Movies We Like. All five under The Next Reel Family of Film Shows.Support the show. Become a member for $5 a month or $55 a year and get every episode early and ad-free, plus member bonus episodes across all five film shows. Come argue with us in the TruStory FM Discord. Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Primetime is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Ocean Murff have a seat in Lance Oppenheim’s sting house to ask who the predator really is: Robert Pattinson’s ego-cracking Chris Hansen, Merritt Wever’s unapologetic producer, the Perverted-Justice volunteer at the keyboard, or everyone watching. The panel splits hard on whether Decoy Dan’s SAG card is a happy ending, whether Alex Winter’s DA earns any sympathy, and whether a movie built to look like TV belongs on a theater screen at all. Content note: this episode discusses suicide and crimes against children.Links & NotesThe film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd, and follow The Next Reel while you’re there.Where the story comes from. Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire piece “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die”, the account of the Texas sting that Ajon Singh adapted for the screenplay.The documentary we kept bringing up. Predators (2025), David Osit’s documentary about To Catch a Predator. It’s where Tommy and Steve met the real Decoy Dan, Dan Schrack, and it’s now on Ocean’s watchlist.More from the director. Lance Oppenheim’s documentaries Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire, and Spermworld, the last now at the top of Pete’s list. Letterboxd’s interview with Oppenheim covers the fever-dream approach.The ad before the movie. The real Chris Hansen bought pre-show ads in front of every screening to plug his streaming service, TruBlu. Pete was late and missed it, so he watched it on YouTube instead.Where we’ve been with Pattinson. The Batman, Mickey 17, and The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer.Mad as hell. Pete puts Pattinson’s Hansen in the same class as Peter Finch’s Howard Beale, and The Next Reel covered Network years ago.And last month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day • Small Potatoes, Big Feelings.Referenced on the show. Booksmart and Vacation (2015), Tommy’s proof of Skyler Gisondo’s comedy range. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a reminder of what else Alex Winter has done. Lost, the polar bears beating Hansen in the ratings. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the time slot Hansen inherits. Severance, which, with this film, has Merritt Wever ready for a comedy.The rest of the family. The Next Reel with Andy Nelson and Pete Wright. Sitting in the Dark with Tommy, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete. Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson. Movies We Like. All five under The Next Reel Family of Film Shows.Support the show. Become a member for $5 a month or $55 a year and get every episode early and ad-free, plus member bonus episodes across all five film shows. Come argue with us in the TruStory FM Discord. Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audibl...

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger, Ocean Murff, and Matthew Fox debate spider puberty, the Jean Grey of it all, whether Peter Parker is secretly the villain of his own franchise, and one very bad post-credits scene. Full spoilers. Ratings from 3.5 stars to a full five.Links & NotesThe film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd, and follow The Next Reel while you're there.Where the title comes from. "One More Day" ran from late 2007 into 2008 and ended with Peter trading his marriage to Mephisto in The Amazing Spider-Man #545, by J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada. "Brand New Day" picks up the very next month in #546, with Steve McNiven on art and Dan Slott kicking off a run that lasted a hundred issues.Frank Castle's first appearance. The Amazing Spider-Man #129, February 1974, by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, and John Romita Sr. The Jackal hires him to kill Spider-Man. Marvel's own Punisher reading guide starts in the same place.Where we've been on this beat. Spider-Man: No Way Home is the spell that started all of this. Into the Spider-Verseand Across the Spider-Verse are the films Matthew still thinks are the best of the bunch. Thunderbolts* is where Yelena and the mental-health throughline come from. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is Cretton's first MCU outing and where Banner's inhibitor turns up. Captain America: Civil War is Peter's introduction, and the moment Matthew says this movie finally rhymes with. Captain America: Brave New World is the Harrison Ford cherry-orchard fight Tommy holds up as the opposite of good stunt work. Deadpool & Wolverine is the last time Fox mutants crossed this street. Avengers: Endgame held the opening-day record until Friday.Tommy's joke, explained. Yes, we really did an episode on The Finest Hours.And last month. The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer — the other Tom Holland movie in theaters right now, and the one Tommy pairs this with.Referenced on the show. The Punisher: One Last Kill, the Disney+ special Steve watched for homework and Ocean advises against. Legion, Noah Hawley's FX series, which Tommy credits for making Jean Grey's power set legible to him. Fallen (1998), his touchstone for the body-hopping possession relay. X-Men: The Last Stand, the mutant cure Ocean invokes when he describes Peter's suppression device. Wonder Man, Cretton's Disney+ series, which Pete would like everyone to appreciate — and which really did get canceled after one season. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, where Sony dropped the Fresh Start suit as a free update three days before release.The rest of the family. The Next Reel with Andy Nelson and Pete Wright. Sitting in the Dark with Tommy, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete. Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson. Movies We Like. All five under The Next Reel Family of Film Shows.More from this panel. The Ethical Panda, home of Superhero Ethics and Star Wars Generations. The Adrian Moment. Marvel Movie Minute. Make Me a Nerd with Mandy Kaplan.Support the show. Become a member for $5 a month or $55 a year and get every episode early and ad-free, plus member bonus episodes across all five film shows. Come argue with us in the TruStory FM Discord. Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media:

Christopher Nolan does not do anything small, so of course his Odyssey is shot entirely on IMAX film, scored on Bronze Age instruments, and staged with a sixty-foot practical Cyclops in an actual cave full of actual bees. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Ocean Murff, and Steve Sarmento pull up an oar for The Film Board's monthly round-table to figure out what all that machinery is actually in service of — because the surprising thing about The Odyssey isn't the spectacle. It's that Nolan takes Homer's victory lap and turns it into a reckoning.Full spoilers throughout. The board digs into how the film reframes the hero: Matt Damon's Odysseus is a man who's very good at winning and increasingly sick about what winning costs, the Trojan Horse recast from clever trick to war crime, the whole story quietly asking whether "war hero" is a contradiction in terms. They get into Nolan the skeptic making a fantasy — the gods pushed to the psychological margins, Athena reimagined as guilt wearing Zendaya's face — and how a stacked cast (Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson as a suitor you will genuinely want dead) grounds all the myth in something human.But the craft you guys… Ludwig Göransson's relentless, orchestra-free score built from gongs and scrap metal; the editing that makes a 172-minute movie move; the new camera Nolan had built and the reels that had to change every three minutes mid-scene. Steve saw it in the pristine 70mm format and comes back a little evangelized. Is a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score is earned or just the Nolan logo doing its work? What is the film is really saying about who we root for in a war? Plus, stick around past the credits for a genuine argument about whether the gods exist in this movie at all.The Film Board is a monthly round-table on new theatrical releases. Part of The Next Reel family of film shows at thenextreel.com. Links & NotesChristopher Nolan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — the interview Pete cites, where Nolan says Oppenheimer is the only reason this got made. YouTube · Deadline recap"Blucifer" — the Denver airport horse Pete wants to stab. It's Luis Jiménez's "Blue Mustang," and, fittingly for this episode, a piece of it fell on and killed the artist before it was finished. Blue Mustang – WikipediaThe Sea Peoples / Late Bronze Age collapse — the real history behind "we are the people from the sea." Sea Peoples – Wikipedia · Late Bronze Age collapseHow Göransson built the score — no orchestra, Bronze Age instruments, thirty-five gongs, scrap metal. VarietyThe custom IMAX camera and 70mm format we kept raving about. PetaPixel: IMAX's new large-format film cameraErrol Morris's "Interrotron" — Tommy's reference for the mirror rig that let Damon and Hathaway fake eye contact. Interrotron – WikipediaThe Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes — the 98% critics / 96% audience split we land on. Rotten Tomatoes Read-alongs (Homer & friends)Homer's The Odyssey — the source; Pete's got the audiobook queued on Libby. Free text: Project GutenbergVirgil's the Aeneid — Steve's "same war, Trojan side" reference. Project Gutenberg Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Steven Spielberg is seventy-nine years old, and he just made the movie where the government finally stops lying about aliens. Disclosure Day caps the loose trilogy he started with Close Encounters and E.T. — private awe, then childhood friendship, and now a global broadcast that yanks the curtain back on all of it. This month the Film Board gathers to toss about whether the old master still has the magic.Full spoilers, of course. The panel digs into Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as the searching heart of the thing, Colin Firth's body-hopping menace, the cosmic-FaceTime dinner table, a train sequence that actually pays off its punchline, and a panic attack they call of the most accurate they’ve ever seen on screen. They argue the device nobody understands (Duraflame theory included), the news-station climax, and a big-swing ending that stops cold at the moment of disclosure and whispers a single word.Then the larger brawl: whether a 79-year-old's plea for empathy and transparency lands in a cultural moment where the same disclosure could just as easily become a hunting license.The Film Board is a monthly deep-dive on new releases, part of The Next Reel family of film podcasts. Want to hear more? Over on Make Me A Nerd…Disclosure Day is the back half of a Spielberg conversation Steve already started. Over on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy hands him the mic for Close Encounters of the Third Kind — one of his top five films of all time — and gets the full package: curiosity, obsession, government lies, blinking lights, and questionable parenting. It's the hunger for connection that Disclosure Day spends fifty years catching up to. Mandy arrives late to the party, but by the end she understands exactly why this movie meant — and still means — so much. If you want the origin point of every instinct this new one is paying off, that's the room.Make Me A Nerd • Close Encounters with Steve Sarmento Over on The Next Reel…Pete Wright and Andy Nelson took Close Encounters apart for the Next Reel's Original Sci-Fi series — the three existing cuts of the film, what's different, why the changes were made, and which to watch — plus an older-and-wiser reckoning with how the parenting of both Roy and Gillian now feels incredibly poor. The private-awe-versus-government-stonewall DNA that Disclosure Day scales up to a global broadcast starts right here. The Next Reel • Close Encounters of the Third Kind 🎬 Watch & Discover🍿 Watch: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Seven years after The Rise of Skywalker, the saga finally got off the couch, and what it brought back was a tin-canned dad, a green gremlin, and a teenage Hutt with a glandular disorder. The Film Board lands split right down the middle, mostly in the affectionate way. Everyone agrees the adventures of Grogu are the heart of the thing. Everyone also agrees the plot is thin enough to read a newspaper through, and that this plays less like a movie than like the best three episodes of a Mandalorian season nobody got to make.Pete, JJ, and Ocean are joined by Matthew Fox, host of the Star Wars Generations podcast, and the table works through all of it: whether a jacked, English-speaking Rotta the Hutt is the dumbest swing or the most heroic one (Ocean is buying, Pete is not), why Sigourney Weaver got cast in a role that forgot to be a character, the Martin Scorsese cameo that weirdly lands, and the swamp sequence where Grogu plays caretaker to a poisoned Mando and the whole room finally forgets it is watching a puppet. Ocean makes the case for television as the franchise’s natural home, Pete keeps glancing over his shoulder at Andor, and somebody floats the idea of just letting Matthew run Lucasfilm.The scores are in, and the panel landed in a tight cluster. Ludwig Göransson’s score gets the home-run vote. The swole Hutt gets the side-eye.Connect with the ShowThe Film Board is part of the Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts. Find everything at thenextreel.com. Follow the show and rate every movie with us at letterboxd.com/thenextreel. Get member-only extended episodes at trustory.fm/join.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: Apple TV | LetterboxdOriginal Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Project Hail Mary gives us a spider-shaped rock creature with no eyes, no face, and a simplified vocabulary who makes a choice so selfless that four grown men on a podcast had to take a beat. That's the kind of movie this is. Andy Weir's third novel has been adapted by Lord and Miller — the filmmakers who made you cry about a Lego — and the result is a two-and-a-half-hour space movie where the most compelling relationship is between Ryan Gosling and a practical puppet made of granite.Pete, Tommy, Steve, and JJ dig into all of it: the parallel storylines that cut between Grace's amnesia-fueled space crisis and his reluctant conscription on Earth, the razor wire on the inside of the fence, Sandra Hüller's karaoke scene that had JJ in a puddle, and why Greig Fraser and Paul Lambert called this the most complex film they've ever worked on — including two Dune movies. The panel splits on whether the earthbound story or the space-bound story lands harder, and Pete makes a case that the movie's real antagonist isn't a villain at all but the weight of impossible choices.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: Apple TV | LetterboxdOriginal Theatrical Trailer📚 Adapted from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Ghostface is back. Sidney Prescott is back. Kevin Williamson — the writer who started it all in 1996 — is back, this time in the director's chair. And The Film Board is here to pick through the wreckage. Pete Wright convenes the panel — Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan — for a full-spoiler autopsy of Scream 7, the franchise's seventh installment and its most complicated origin story yet. The film arrives trailing the collapse of a whole other movie: Melissa Barrera's firing, Jenna Ortega's departure, two directors exiting before a frame was shot, and Neve Campbell finally getting what she was owed to come back. What ended up on screen bears those scars — and the panel doesn't look away from them. There's plenty to argue about. Tommy arrives as the franchise's longest-tenured Film Board voice and delivers his most critical take yet — the kills are flat, the villain reveal is the weakest in franchise history, and the AI deepfake conceit is nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Steve, against form, finds himself in the film's corner: the Sidney-Tatum mother-daughter dynamic gives him something real to hold onto, and he'll take that over clever-but-hollow any day. Mandy had a genuinely good time, found Anna Camp's casting as transparent as a freshly-cleaned window, and would very much like Tatum's next chapter to be a musical. Pete sits somewhere in the middle — glad to have Kevin Williamson back, troubled by what he had to work with, and still thinking about the better movie that never got made. They get into the production chaos, the Barrera-shaped hole in the script, the question of whether the AI angle says anything worth saying, the correct use of a panic room, the mystery of a certain line reading, and whether Scream 7 has dethroned Scream 3 at the bottom of the franchise pile. 🎬 Watch & Discover 🍿 Watch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd📽️ Original Theatrical TrailerBecome a Member of The Next Reel Family of Film ShowsIf you like this ep... check out some other horror favorites from across the Next Reel Family! Scream (2022) • The Film Board • January 18, 2022 With: Ocean Murff (host), Tommy Metz III Where the Film Board's Scream run begins. Ocean and Tommy dig into Radio Silence's relaunch — Woodsboro, the Carpenters, and a film that earns real affection while already showing the cracks Tommy will spend two more episodes cataloguing. His 1.5 stars for Scream 7 are a long way from where he started here. Scream VI • The Film Board • March 14, 2023 With: Pete Wright (host), Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger New York, no Sidney, and the episode where this panel finds its Scream voice. Steve calls the villain motivation the franchise's Achilles heel — a verdict that lands even harder when you hear how Scream 7's killer reveal plays out. The complaints are all road-tested here first. Last Woman Standing • Sitting in the Dark• March 28, 2025 With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan Dias The evolution of the Final Girl from Janet Leigh to the present day, examined through Prey, Sweetheart, and The Invisible Man. Scream 7 hinges on Sidney Prescott as the franchise's ur-Final Girl and closes by anointing Tatum as the next one — this is the essential companion. Mommy Acts This Way Because She Loves You • Sitting in the Dark • May 30, 2025 With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan Dias Horror's obsession with maternal protection, control, and what happens when the drive to shield your child from harm becomes its own kind of damage — through Run, Goodnight Mommy, and mother! Steve's reading of Scream 7 as fundamentally a story about Sidney's fear of visiting her own trauma on Tatum lands squarely in this episode's territory. Rug Pullers: Topsy-Turvy Horror Twists • Sitting in the Dark • August 29, 2025 With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust Three films built entirely around the sucker punch — Ghostwatch, Barbarian, Strange Darling. If you want context for why the Film Board found Scream 7's killer reveal so deflating, this is the episode that sets the bar for what a well-earned horror twist actually requires. Tommy's Terror Trope Tutorials: Book of the Vampyre and Final Girls • Sitting in the Dark • April 28, 2023 With: Tommy Metz III, Pete Wright, Ray DeLancey Tommy builds the theoretical groundwork on the Final Girl as a horror archetype — where it comes from, what it asks of its protagonist, and whether it holds up. Essential backstory for understanding why Tommy holds the Scream franchise to the standard he does, and why this movie's handling of Sidney and Tatum hits so differently once you've heard him make that argument.

This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright drags Andy Nelson, Tommy Metz III, and Steve Sarmento into an emergency bonus hearing because Andy texted, essentially, “We can’t skip a month. Also I found a movie.” That movie is Mercy, a slick, noisy, deeply committed screenlife thriller where Chris Pratt wakes up strapped into a futuristic execution-chair-courtroom and has 90 minutes to prove he didn’t kill his wife. The judge is an AI who looks like Rebecca Ferguson. Which is frankly unfair to every other AI.From there, it’s a full-spoilers sprint through a world where justice is software, surveillance is just “normal life,” and every single camera on Earth is apparently pointed at exactly the wrong moment. The panel fights over what Mercy thinks it’s doing (a cautionary tale about AI and institutions) versus what it actually does (a pulpy, coincidence-powered ride that occasionally forgets its own premise and wanders off toward terrorism and explosions).Andy is… not having it. Steve is torn in the way only a lover of scrappy sci-fi concepts can be: “It’s messy, but I’m intrigued.” Tommy—who walked in expecting bargain-bin January nonsense—ends up delighted, especially after an accidental 3D screening turns the whole thing into a theme-park attraction where the chair is the main character. Pete tries to keep the court metaphor alive long enough to pronounce a verdict, but keeps getting distracted by the movie’s most dangerous idea: not the AI, but the assumption that the only way to get “justice” is if the system can see literally everything.Also: yes, we talk about the wind. The screens have wind.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | LetterboxdOriginal Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright sits down with Tommy Metz III and Steve Sarmento to wrestle with a question that keeps resurfacing throughout Avatar: Fire and Ash: how can a movie built with such extraordinary care feel so strangely forgettable?James Cameron’s return to Pandora is, once again, a monumental technical achievement. The scale is enormous. The craft is meticulous. The effort behind it is undeniable. And yet, as the conversation unfolds, the panel keeps circling the same uneasy feeling—that the film never quite gives its spectacle anything meaningful to serve.The discussion ranges from Cameron’s latest performance-capture and adaptive frame-rate experiments to the franchise’s growing habit of mistaking motion for momentum. There’s real admiration for the artists who built this world, paired with frustration over a story that repeatedly rushes past its most interesting ideas. Themes of environmentalism, colonialism, faith, and family surface again and again, only to be flattened by familiar beats, unresolved questions, and a narrative that seems unwilling to slow down long enough to let any of them land.By the time the conversation reaches ratings, the outcome feels less like judgment and more like inevitability—the natural endpoint of trying, and failing, to locate the film’s emotional center.🎬 Watch & Discover🍿 Watch Now: Apple TV | Letterboxd📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible

A locked church. A sermon mid-amen. A knife that absolutely should not be where it is. This month, The Film Board turns its attention to Wake Up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the most austere—and maybe most confrontational—entry yet in Rian Johnson’s whodunit canon. From the opening minutes, the film dares the audience to argue with it: what you just saw could not have happened… and yet here we are.Pete Wright is joined by Steve Sarmento, Mandy Kaplan, and Tommy Metz III to wrestle with a mystery that swaps billionaire excess for spiritual rot, replacing champagne flutes with hymnals and certainty with something far more dangerous. The panel digs into Johnson’s tonal gamble—less joy, more gravity—and whether a franchise built on clever fun can survive a movie so willing to sit in moral discomfort.The conversation dives deep into the film’s mechanics: the church as a performance space, the precision of the Lazarus door, the way light itself becomes a narrative instrument, and how the film quietly trains you to look without ever announcing it’s doing so. There’s admiration for the film’s rewatchability, its refusal to hide answers offscreen, and its confidence in letting silence—and doubt—do real work.Benoit Blanc, played once again by Daniel Craig, emerges subtly transformed: less showman, more listener. The panel explores what it means for a great cinematic detective to say “I don’t know” and mean something different every time. Along the way, there’s sharp appreciation for Josh Brolin’s venomous Monsignor Wicks, Glenn Close’s inevitable gravitational pull, and a stacked ensemble that understands exactly when to lean in—and when to get out of the way.🎬 Watch & Discover🍿 Watch Now: Netflix | Letterboxd📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible

“Stop filming me!” The Film Board Gathers! This time, they're racing through Edgar Wright's adaptation of The Running Man, a sharper, more faithful take on Richard Bachman’s/Stephen King's dystopian manhunt. Glenn Powell stars as Ben Richards, sprinting for survival and truth in a world where entertainment is weaponized and every choice is content. Pete Wright leads Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Matthew Fox, and Mandy Kaplan through a deep dive into this reimagining. The panel tackles everything from Josh Brolin's corporate menace to Coleman Domingo's pitch-perfect propaganda host, debating how Wright balances King's nihilistic source material with Hollywood's need for hope. They explore the film's commentary on surveillance, media manipulation, and AI deep fakes, all while questioning whether Wright's signature style gets lost in the chase. While the group largely praises Powell's charismatic lead performance and the film's updated themes, they clash over the rushed ending and whether dystopian tales can (or should) offer uplift in 2025. The conversation ranges from adaptation choices and censorship quirks to Michael Cera’s panic room and the eerie prescience of King's original vision. Is this a faithful sprint through broken society or just dystopia with a Disney sheen? Grab your tracking beacon, dodge the drones, and find out as the Film Board breaks down every checkpoint of The Running Man. (Just watch out for those AI face swaps.) 🎬 Watch & Discover 🍿 Watch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer📚 Adapted from The Running Man by Stephen King as Richard BachmanSupport The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts: Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts: Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us: Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream: Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible

Greetings, Users! The Film Board Gathers again—this time to boot up TRON: Ares, Disney’s latest attempt to update a franchise that still doesn’t understand what “updating” means. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan log on to debate Jared Leto’s turn as an AI messiah with great hair and no emotional bandwidth, and Greta Lee’s heroic attempt to act her way out of the mainframe.The panel tackles the film’s tangled themes—AI, empathy, and whatever Jared Leto thinks a “character arc” is—before turning to the one thing everyone agrees on: the Nine Inch Nails score absolutely slaps. The music may be futuristic perfection, even if the story feels like it’s still buffering from 2011.So, is TRON: Ares a bold leap into a new digital age or just a flickering screensaver of nostalgia and noise? Plug in, charge your light disc, and find out as the Film Board decodes every pixel of this glowing glitch in the Disney matrix.Film SundriesWatch: Apple TV | LetterboxdOriginal Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible

Paul Thomas Anderson just made an action movie you can take your in-laws to without a 20-minute lecture about American masculinity and bowling metaphors. One Battle After Another is PTA’s $175 million plunge into the now, mixing the absurdity of a stoner dad in a bathrobe with a razor-sharp allegory about fascism, power, and family. Leonardo DiCaprio leads as a washed-up revolutionary trying to rescue his daughter (Chase Infinity) from Sean Penn’s snarling, broken military villain, and the result is both wildly funny and uncomfortably timely.Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, and Steve Sarmento dig deep into the contradictions and triumphs of the film. They debate Sean Penn’s feral Lockjaw, the Christmas Adventurers Club (absurdist satire or terrifying cabal?), and the grounded humanity of the father-daughter story that anchors the spectacle. From Benicio del Toro’s Zen “Sensei” to Johnny Greenwood’s jagged score to the breathtaking desert chase sequence, the conversation unpacks how PTA manages to hold together chaos, comedy, and heartbreak in a film that already feels like one of the year’s defining works.As always, the panelists disagree (sometimes passionately) on the ending, the satire, and whether it all needs that extra denouement in Office 55. But they unite on one point: this is the kind of audacious, ambitious, theatrical cinema you absolutely need to see on the biggest screen you can find.Links & NotesWatch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | LetterboxdOriginal Theatrical TrailerVery Loosely Adapted from Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Thomas Pynchon Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible

Case Notes, August 30th, 2025: A suspiciously cozy murder mystery has been committed. The suspects—Tommy Metz III, Mandy Kaplan, Steve Sarmento, and Justin “JJ” Jaeger—have assembled remotely, each with their own dubious alibis and hot takes. The film: The Thursday Murder Club, Netflix’s big adaptation of Richard Osman’s beloved novel. The crime? A charming cast, a confusing mystery, and a script that may or may not have committed third-degree exposition.This month’s Film Board roundtable dives headfirst into the soft lighting and softer stakes of this senior-led whodunit. JJ comes in as the film’s most vocal defender, praising its character-driven structure and comparing it (gasp!) to Knives Out. Tommy and Steve are less convinced, calling the movie pleasant but forgettable, faulting everything from flat cinematography to emotionally neutered finales. Mandy, the show’s resident Osman superfan, mourns the depth lost in translation from page to screen. Pete, meanwhile, accuses Chris Columbus of directing every scene like it’s the trailer—and not in a good way.From plot structure and adaptation choices to the aesthetics of Cooper’s Chase and the misuses of Sir Ben Kingsley, this episode covers it all. Was it a missed opportunity or just an okay pizza? Can Helen Mirren’s exposition dumps be forgiven? Did we really need the cold case? Should somebody address the case of Jonathan Pryce?If you love spirited disagreement, spoilers aplenty, and occasional emotional whiplash caused by the word “cake,” this is your episode.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: NetflixOriginal Theatrical TrailerAdapted from The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next Reel Film PodcastSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible