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This week we're continuing our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "Curse of the Demon" (1957) — released in the UK as "Night of the Demon," and a film Martin Scorsese has called one of the scariest ever made. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club!

This week we're continuing our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "The Spiral Staircase" (1946) — a storm-soaked thriller about a mute servant hunted by a serial killer. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club!

In 1925, a German court ordered every copy of Nosferatu destroyed. Bram Stoker's widow had sued over the film's unauthorized take on Dracula, and the studio behind it had already gone bankrupt. But prints had been shipped overseas before the order came down, and the film outlived the court that tried to erase it. This week we're kicking off our "Horror Through the Years" theme with "Nosferatu" (1922) — F.W. Murnau's silent German Expressionist vampire film. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club!

The fleas were so bad that the Maysles brothers wore flea collars around their ankles while they filmed. The house had no running water, raccoons in the attic, and cat food cans stacked toward the ceiling — and it belonged to Jackie Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin. This week we're closing out our "September Fan Picks" theme with both versions of "Grey Gardens" — the 1975 Maysles documentary and the 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. This one also marks the end of our first full year of Movie Nights with Dad. 52 episodes, every Sunday. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on these — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club! "Little Edie" was played by Caitlin Bromberger

Dev Patel broke his hand in the first action sequence he ever directed, told his producer to keep rolling, and finished the night with a hand he described as an elephant's foot. Then Netflix bought the movie for three times its budget and left it on a shelf for three years. This week we're continuing our "September Fan Picks" theme with "Monkey Man" (2024) — a $10 million revenge thriller that was nearly never seen, pulled out of streaming limbo by Jordan Peele, and built on the legend of Hanuman. We'd love to hear your feedback, movie suggestions, and your own thoughts on this one — find us on YouTube at Movie Nights with Dad and join the discussion in the comments. New episode every Sunday at 5PM CT. Thanks for being a part of our film club!

September is Fan Picks month and the listeners chose one of the most famous films ever made. The Wizard of Oz had five directors and gave credit to one. MGM executives wanted to cut "Over the Rainbow" before release, believing it slowed the pace. The original Tin Man was hospitalized by his own makeup. Judy Garland was sixteen when filming began. It became what it is not through theaters but through television — broadcast annually on CBS starting in 1956, it found the audience a theater run never quite gave it. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

September is Fan Picks month — every film chosen from listener suggestions — and we're opening with two firsts for the show at once: our first animated film and our first film not in English. Kiki's Delivery Service was never meant to be a Hayao Miyazaki picture. He came on as producer while Sunao Katabuchi prepared his directorial debut. Miyazaki read the first draft, rewrote it, and ended up taking over entirely, expanding a planned sixty-minute special into a 102-minute feature. It rescued Studio Ghibli. Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies had earned acclaim without profit. Kiki's, released July 1989, became the first Ghibli film to succeed on initial release and the highest-grossing film in Japan that year, which paid for everything that followed. Riley leads Story and Themes. Mark takes the Acting section, bringing decades of St. Louis theater to a film with no actors on screen. There's a hot take, a rating, and an old man lying about his age. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

Mrs. Miniver won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Greer Garson, and it may be the most influential piece of wartime filmmaking Hollywood ever produced. Director William Wyler openly admitted he made it as propaganda, to pull an isolationist America toward Britain during the Blitz. Winston Churchill reportedly said it did more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers. Garson plays an ordinary English housewife holding her family together as the war closes in, and her Best Actress acceptance speech became Hollywood legend as one of the longest ever given. This week we close out our August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with a film that proved a movie could be a weapon. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

Before she made The Heiress, Olivia de Havilland took Warner Bros. to court and won. Her lawsuit broke the studio system's practice of trapping actors in endless contracts, but it cost her nearly three years off-screen. The Heiress was her comeback, and it won her a second Best Actress Oscar. There's a poetry to it. She plays Catherine Sloper, a shy young woman controlled by a domineering father and a suitor who may only want her money, who by the end refuses to let any man decide her worth. A woman who fought the most powerful men in Hollywood, playing a woman who finally stops being controlled. This week we continue our August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with a quiet, devastating film that won four Academy Awards. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

In 1938 the industry literally labeled Joan Crawford "box-office poison." Five years later MGM let her go after eighteen years. Everyone had written her off. Then she made Mildred Pierce, won the only Oscar of her career, and forced Hollywood to take her seriously again. This week we continue our August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with a noir about a mother who claws her way from waitress to restaurant empire for a daughter who despises her. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

Gloria Swanson was the biggest star of the silent era — and then the movies moved on without her. In Sunset Boulevard she plays Norma Desmond, a faded silent star clinging to a comeback that's never coming. She barely had to reach for it. Between 1934 and 1950 she'd made exactly one film. In a very real sense, she was playing herself. Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece earned 11 Oscar nominations and remains one of the sharpest, cruelest things Hollywood has ever said about itself. Real silent-era faces fill the frame, even Cecil B. DeMille, who actually directed Swanson in her prime, appearing as himself. This week we continue our August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with a performance that blurs the line between the actress and the role until you can't find it anymore.

All About Eve earned 14 Oscar nominations in 1950 — a record that stood over 40 years — and it's still the only film ever to land four female acting nominations. Two went to Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for the same Best Actress prize. They split the vote. Both lost. This week we kick off a new August theme, Classic Standout Performances by Women, with maybe the definitive one: Bette Davis as Margo Channing. Sharp, brutal, endlessly quotable. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

The same man who created James Bond also gave the world a flying car for children. Ian Fleming wrote the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang novel, and Bond producer Cubby Broccoli brought it to the screen in 1968 with Dick Van Dyke, Roald Dahl on the screenplay, and the Sherman Brothers on the songs. This is the finale of our Summer From the Stage series, and it's the one film that breaks the pattern. Every other movie this summer started on stage. This one went novel to film to stage. Mark played Baron Bomburst on stage, so he's reviewing a role he performed himself. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

Rosalind Russell doesn't play Auntie Mame so much as she detonates in every scene she's in. She originated the role on Broadway, then brought it to the screen in 1958, and the result is one of the great comic performances in classic Hollywood. This week we take on a film about a woman who's decided that living timidly is the only real failure. And Mark's got a personal way in — he played Beau on stage, so he's breaking down the role from the inside. New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.

Every week we find something to love. This week we didn't. Don't Drink the Water (1969) stars Jackie Gleason as an American tourist trapped in an embassy behind the Iron Curtain, and it may be the roughest film we've sat through in 41 episodes. But Mark played Krojack in a stage production of this — and the play works. So what happened between the stage and the screen? New episodes every Sunday at 5PM CT.