Denzember concludes as Journalist and host of the Turbulence podcast Séamus Malekafzali returns to the show to discuss Edward Zwick's 1998 geopolitical thriller The Siege, a film about a Muslim terrorist cell wreaking havoc on New York City, the resultant fear it stokes, and the vidictive results of martial law being enforced in an American city. L…

Get access to this entire episode, the entire Denzember catalog, and all of our premium episodes by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Roger Ebert Associate Editor Robert Daniels returns to the show to once again discuss the work of Denzel Washington and Spike Lee, this time unpacking his brilliant 1998 sports drama He Got Game. The f…

Denzember continues with Culture Kitsch host Bobbi Miller joining us to discuss Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing. Following his successful Henry V adaptation, Branagh returned to Shakespeare for a much airier, light-hearted affair, fashioning the classic play into an immensely pleasurable studio romantic comedy w…

Get access to this entire episode, the entire Denzember catalog, and all of our premium episodes by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Denzember 2 continues with the return of Vulture Film Critic Bilge Ebiri and a spirited discussion of Russel Mulcahy's 1991 thriller Ricochet, a film of lean premise that takes its story to absolutely …

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Denzember 2 kicks off with a conversation about Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's first collaboration, 1990's Mo' Better Blues, a film about jazz, art-making, and the pursuit of greatness at the expense of personal relationships. The terrific Minnie Zondi is our guest! We discuss the film's tepid reception …

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Better late than never, we're back with a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's recent critical and box office sensation One Battle After Another. PTA loosely adapts (and updates) Thomas Pynchon's 1990 n…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Writer and critic David Hering joins us from Liverpool to discuss the final film from the ingenious Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut. Originally conceived in the 1970s as a follow-up to Kubrick's landmark 200…

Filmmaker Heather Landsman joins to discuss Michael Haneke's Benny's Video alongside a conversation about her latest film, the archival documentary The Best of Me, which chronicles Björk stalker Ricardo López through unvarnished, segments of his 1996 video diaries, created as a means of sharing his ideological convictions and his plan to mail the p…

It's Halloween, so we decided to do a "scary" one! Podcaster, author, and emissary from the City of Brotherly Love Trevor Strunk joins to discuss Robert Rodriguez's 1998 Breakfast-Club-Meets-Body-Snatchers riff The Faculty. Boasting a memorable cast of young up-and-comers and a script written by Scream-scribe Kevin Williamson, the film is both play…

The fine, upstanding gentlemen of Pod Casty for Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to discuss Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, which follows a group of recently deceased people entering a state of limbo where counselors (also deceased) help them locate their most important memory and then go about the work of turning that memory into a film that …

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Film writer and author of the upcoming book De Palma Does Hollywood Travis Woods joins us to discuss the exemplary filmmaker and his 1993 crime masterpiece Carlito's Way, starring Al Pacino as the titular Ca…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. On the occasion of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Anotherin theaters, we look back at the director's ambitious, unwieldy, and under-loved 1999 feature Magnolia starring a massive ensembl…

We inaugurate the late Japanese master Shinji Sōmai with a discussion of his beautiful, melancholy coming-of-age drama Moving. The film follows the young Ren as she navigates her parents' recent separation, balancing loyalties to both her mother and father, dealing with gossiping classmates, and making attempts to reconcile the marriage. With a cha…

Film writer and critic Brendan Hodges joins to discuss Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a self-proclaimed love letter to the filmmaker's WWII veteran father and all the fighting men of the Second World War. Visceral, upsetting, and deeply conflicted, the film formally disavows many of Spielberg's more populist tendencies as director and crea…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. CW: Discussions of cinematic sexual assault and violence. Film Critic Lex Briscuso joins us to discuss Satoshi Kon's masterful animated psychological thriller Perfect Blue. The film follows Mima, a former J-…

Filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell (Miss Me Yet, Attention Shoppers) joins us to discuss Last Action Hero, a meta action comedy featuring too many ideas, a healthy serving of great jokes, and a fascinating reckoning for its star Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was aging into the second act of his movie star career. We begin with a conversation about the …

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Associate Editor at Roger Ebert Robert Daniels joins to discuss the latest Spike Lee joint Highest 2 Lowest, a loose reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 procedural masterpiece High & Low that marks the fift…

We inaugurate (and conclude) our coverage of Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène with a discussion of his 1992 feature Guelwaar, the late filmmaker's only work of the decade. In essence a minor comedy of errors revolving around the misplaced body of a departed community leader and political agitator, Guelwaar transforms several times over into a prof…

3D artist, animator and director of the new film Boys Go to Jupiter Julian Glander joins us to discuss the live wire pleasures of SLC Punk! starring Matthew Lillard as a Stevo, a brash, blue-haired anarchist punk rocker who, alongside his best friend Bob, seeks meaning in the aimlessness of Salt Lake City, Utah. Though set amidst the deeply conserv…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. More new movie talk as we take on the most divisive film of the summer, Ari Aster's COVID-era neo-western Eddington. The film follows Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, NM who - frustrat…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Writer, academic, and prestigious poster Peter Raleigh earns his hat trick, returning to the Factory Floor to discuss Abel Ferrara's philosophical vampire film The Addiction. Shot in stark, vivid black & whi…

We welcome the esteemed critic, journalist, and podcaster Jourdain Searles to the show to discuss Quentin Tarantino's seminal third feature Jackie Brown, an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch that also serves as Tarantino's love letter to Blaxploitation cinema and one of its defining stars, Pam Grier. We begin with a discussion of Bla…

Vulture and New York Magazine film critic Bilge Ebiri returns to discuss Bernardo Bertolucci's stunning mood piece Little Buddha, a rich and evocative story of an American family who travel to Bhutan after learning their son may be the reincarnation of the spiritual leader of a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks. The film also chronicles chapters in t…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We're back with more Danny Boyle coverage, this time discussing his latest film 28 Years Later, the long-awaited sequel to Boyle's own 28 Days Later (as well as its sequel 28 Weeks Later) that bracingly reje…

Film journalist and friend of the show Brandon Streussnig returns to discuss Danny Boyle's debut film Shallow Grave, a British riff on the 90s neo-noir template, self-described by Boyle and his collaborators as their take on the Coen's Blood Simple. The film chronicles a trifecta of beautiful, sociopathic yuppies sharing an Edinburgh flat (Kerry Fo…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We went exceptionally long on the late John Singleton’s undersung period western Rosewood, a film (and filmmaker) whose fingerprints are all over Ryan Coogler’s recent box office sensation, Sinners. Rosewood…

We stayed up for three consecutive days without sleep and kept at least one hand on a microphone at all times in order to test our mettle and discuss S.R. Bindler's 1997 "gawkumentary" Hands on a Hardbody, a story of 23 contenstants in Longview, Texas squaring off in a competition of stamina to win a Nissan hardbody truck. Over the course of three …

This is a re-upload for Spotify of a conversation originally held in November of 2023. Hit Factory wishes to extend our deepest gratitude and reverence to the National Music Publishers’ Association - tireless defenders of intellectual property, guardians of taste, and brave crusaders against independent podcasts that allegedly included a brief clip…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We got our hands on Sofia Coppola's diary and read it to try and make sense of her dreamy, quietly devastating debut The Virgin Suicides. Adapted from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel of the same name, Coppola's …

We finally bring the brilliant, indelible work of Claire Denis to the pod with a discussion of her 1994 TV movie U.S. Go Home. Produced as part of the anthology series Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age… alongside work from other French visionaries like Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas and André Téchiné, Denis' film is an elliptical, compas…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. David Cronenberg returns to the big screen this week with The Shrouds, perhaps his most autobiographical film to date. The film involves grieving tech entrepreneur Karsh (played brilliantly by Vincent Cassel…

The Roxie Theater, a San Francisco landmark in the Mission District, is one of the oldest continuously operated cinemas in the United States, with its history tracing back to the early 1900s. Recently, The Roxie kicked off the public phase of their fundraising campaing, Forever Roxie, in order to purchase their buidling, invest in technology upgrad…

We inaugurate the brilliant Taiwanese master Edward Yang with a conversation about his transcendent 1994 social satire A Confucian Confusion. Following up his staggering masterwork A Brighter Summer Day, Yang turned his attention to Taipei in the 1990s at the height of its rapid evolution into a port city of global capital and the effects this shif…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Xuanlin Tham, author of the new book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene returns to the show to discuss the Wachowskis' debut feature - the sharp, sexy sapphic neo-noir Bound. Embolde…

Film critic and author A.S. Hamrah joins for a conversation on his recent Fast Company piece "Hollywood’s obsession with AI-enabled ‘perfection’ is making movies less human", which details some alarming (and frankly, depressing) recent use cases of A.I. in both studio blockbuster fare and awards-contending independent releases like Brady Corbet's T…

Returning friend of the show Comrade Yui swings by to discuss the 1994 Full Moon direct-to-video masterwork Dark Angel: The Ascent. The story follows the exploits of a bored, beautiful young demon Veronica Iscariot (Angela Featherstone) as she defies the orders of her parents and the rules of hell to visit Earth and walk among the humans. It's not …

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We're back talking about the recently-released Babygirl, directed by Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn. Despite some initial apprehensions based on the discourse and reviews from trusted sources, we b…

Fan favorite Hard Mike returns to the show alongside newcomer Syd Bricks to discuss Paul Schrader's Affliction, one of the filmmaker's most well-observed explorations of addiction and the generational cycles of suffering that manifest as a result of leaving personal trauma and pain unresolved. The film follows Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse, an alcoh…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Film critic Eamon Tracy returns to the show to discuss Renny Harlin's mountain-bound Die Hard riff Cliffhanger starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, and Michael Rooker. A taut, well-staged action thrill…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. It's a New Year and we don't feel any different! In typical Hit Factory fashion, the simple task of creating an "In/Out" list for 2025 became a discussion about the infantilization of culture, embracing cine…

Brooklyn-based writer and editor Robert Rubsam joins to discuss the work of Terence of Davies and his 1992 masterwork, The Long Day Closes. An impressionistic evocation of memory and sensation, the film is the culmination of Davies' early autobiographical period, exploring the roughly 5 year period between when the filmmaker's abusive father died a…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. We discuss the winner of our latest Patreon poll: Aki Kaurismäki's The Match Factory Girl, the story of a young working class woman, Iris, looking for love and a sense of belonging in industrialized Helsinki…

Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author Adam Nayman joins us to look back at Billy Bob Thornton's directorial debut and acting showcase Sling Blade. Once considered a high-water mark of 90s American indie cinema success within popular culture and the awards circuit, Thornton's film is now often relegated to 'curio' status; a fascinating time cap…

London-based film writer Esmé Holden joins us to discuss David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly. Based on the Tony Award-winning David Henry Hwang play - itself based on the the real life relationship between Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a Beijing opera singer - Cronenberg's film embraces the conventions of melodrama while thoughtfully exploring gend…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. Following our conversation with the film's director Pascal Plante, we dive into one of the year's best films, Red Rooms: a thriller tailor made for our disaffected, hyper-mediated moment that asks many unset…

Filmmaker Pascal Plante (director of Red Rooms, one of our favorite movies of the year) joins to discuss Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar's 1996 debut, Thesis. While riveting simply at the topical level of its tense genre thrills, the movie also metatextually concerns itself with the moving image as a mediated reflection of our corporeal realit…

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month. George Washington University ungergrad and Liberal Currents contributor Sami Gold just informed us that there's an election coming up in the good ol' US of A, so we decided to discuss a foundational text of …

An impromptu decision to do something "Halloween-y" led us to 1994 meta-slasher Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the seventh installment in the long-running A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, which sees Craven returning to the director's chair for the first time since the original installment and OG Nightmare final girl Heather Langenkamp returning, p…

Justice Warrior Ben Clarkson returns to discuss the 1997 action thriller The Jackal, starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, and Sidney Poitier in his final film role. Ostensibly a remake of the the 1973 Fred Zinneman film The Day of the Jackal (itself an adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's 1971 debut novel of the same name), the film attempts to update…

Writer, curator, and author of the upcoming book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene, Xuanlin Tham joins us to discuss the work of Taiwanese New Wave director Tsai Ming-liang and his 1994 film Vive L'Amour. It's a quietly devastating exploration of longing, desire, and urban alienation about a trio of young Tapei residents w…