Classic Movies Live!

In 1993, an enormous corporation gave a small group of creatives the opportunity to create their dream project based on one of the biggest media franchises of all time. Despite behind-the-scenes troubles, including a production schedule that ended up being significantly different than originally planned, the film finally released against all odds... only to be met with relative apathy from the moviegoing public. But over the years, that film would be reappraised, with new fans discovering it on home media and kicking themselves that they weren't there in the first week. Hundreds of weeks later, our hosts sat down to talk about that movie in yet another exploration of a certified classic. No, it's not Super Mario Bros.; this week, Pierre and Jeff break down Batman: Mask of the Phantasm! Written and produced between seasons 1 and 2 of Batman: The Animated Series, Mask of the Phantasm finds Batman facing his past when a mysterious figure called the Phantasm begins killing mafia bosses in Gotham City. At the same time, Bruce Wayne's old flame Andrea Beaumont comes back to town to... visit? Settle some business with her father's successor as CEO of Beaumont Industries? It's a little unclear, but it's up to the World's Greatest Detective to make it clear, and discover what Andi's been up to since they last met... and learn how this all ties back to the Phantasm. Jeff takes a few points from this review of Mask of the Phantasm by Darren Mooney on Letterboxd. Check it out, it's a good read!

This week on Classic Movies Live! our hosts take a quick detour to talk about a verified, certified classic! This is the companion piece to our previous episode on No Country for Old Men, covering the other big player at the 80th Academy Awards: There Will Be Blood! Considered by many to be director Paul Thomas Anderson's magnum opus, There Will Be Blood stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, an oil-man attempting to strike rich in the town of Little Boston. As Plainview buys up the land in town, promising untold riches and prosperity to the people of Little Boston, he runs up against Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a local preacher and "son of these hills" who is, to put it lightly, not fond of the way Plainview conducts business. There Will Be Blood would go on to be nominated for 8 Academy Awards, winning Best Actor in a Leading Role for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit. Perhaps just as impressively, it was the second movie that our co-host Jeff would see in the Dundee Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska, becoming the centrepiece of a formative experience to his development as a cinephile. You know the drill: both our hosts have seen this movie, and they've got thoughts! Are they good thoughts? Bad thoughts? Oil thoughts? Tune in as Pierre and Jeff dissect another classic movie... live!

This week on Classic Movies Live!, Ryan Gosling returns! Project Hail Mary is a new sci-fi film from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, and The Lego Movie, but most recently best-known as the Oscar-winning producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse! Written by Drew Goddard -- screenwriter of Ridley Scott's The Martian -- and adapted from a novel by Andy Weir -- the original writer of the novel The Martian -- Project Hail Mary is packed with big names behind the cameras, and Gosling and Sandra Huller aren't small names in front of the camera, either. In Project Hail Mary, a high school science teacher wakes up 11 light years from Earth, alone in a small spacecraft and no idea who he is or why he's there. Those questions are answered pretty quickly though: his name is Ryland Grace, and he's there to try and find a way to stop the sun from dying. Should be simple enough. Retrograde amnesia makes for a film where just about everything is spoilers, so keep that in mind for Pierre and Jeff's spoiler-filled discussion of Project Hail Mary! What did our hosts think of Gosling? What did they think of Huller? Is there anyone else in the movie, and if so, what did our hosts think of them? Tune in as we go through another classic movie... live!

This week on Classic Movies Live!, our hosts leave the Oscars behind to talk about what's sure to be a big player next year: Pixar's Hoppers! From Daniel Chong, director of Cartoon Network's We Bare Bears, Hoppers stars Piper Curda as Mabel Tanaka, a teenage environmental activist who transports her mind into the body of a mechanical beaver in order to save a glade near her home that's scheduled for demolition. Mabel quickly finds herself in over her head as she discovers the complexities of forest animal society, and the difficulty of communicating Mayor Jerry Generazzo's (Jon Hamm) intentions to remove the animals in favour of his pet project, a new beltway. After Elio and Inside Out 2, Hoppers feels like a bit of a deviation from Pixar's recent output, but also something of a return to form. Tune in as Pierre discuss what makes it fresh, what it says about the environment and eco-activism, and what this movie means for Pixar's future!

This week on Classic Movies Live! our hosts finish this year's Best Picture series! The Secret Agent is the second Brazilian movie in as many years to be nominated for Best Picture! A film by Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent stars Wagner Moura as Armando, a professor on the wrong side of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1977. Arguably as much a film about a man on the run as it is about life in Recife under the dictatorship, The Secret Agent stands out as somewhat experimental among this year's Best Picture nominees. It's both a movie that trusts the audience to fill in the blanks when it comes to the plot and world, and also leaves a few too many blanks for the audience to be comfortable. The Secret Agent is a film that would be difficult to have a boring conversation about, so this episode is guaranteed to be one of the best in this year's Best Picture series! What did our hosts think? Did they like it? Does that matter? Tune in to find out... Live! And stick around to the very end for our hosts' thoughts on each of the Oscars categories. In some years, naming their picks has been a matter of seconds. This time... well, it's a lot harder!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Best Picture lineup to bring you a little of bit of Canadiana. Not just any Canadiana, though, today's movie is a verified Future Classic: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie! Spinning out of the beloved cult-classic 2017 Viceland show Nirvanna The Band The Show (itself based on a webseries of the same name from 2007), NTBTSTM follows Matt and Jay as they try to get a show at the Rivoli. What starts as a crazy plan to advertise a not-yet-existent concert by skydiving off the CN Tower quickly spirals out of control, resulting in Matt and Jay briefly travelling back in time and changing their futures! If that sounds hard to follow, just imagine Back to the Future, but set in Toronto as a mockumentary. Joining us today is Allen, a personal friend of the hosts and a huge fan of the show from when it originally aired. Between Pierre, Allen, and Jeff, we've got three distinct levels of familiarity with the show, rounding out a pretty good panel to talk about Matt and Jay's misadventures in 2008! Jeff refers multiple times to this interview conducted by Peter Kuplowsky in advance of the release of NTBTSTM: https://youtu.be/14gqhme2A0Q?si=lU_L85ThiaL-Vqbz

This week we're talking about a story that was made into a movie, only to be re-made later! I'm not sure what you'd call an episode like that, but here we call it Classic Movies Live! Bugonia is the latest collaboration between Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, remaking the 2003 South Korean classic Save the Green Planet by Jang Joon-hwan. In both films, a powerful pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone/Baek Yoon-sik) is kidnapped by a down-on-his-luck man (Jesse Plemons/Shin Ha-kyun) who is convinced the CEO is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, bent on destroying humanity. Both films are comic yet tense hostage thrillers, and cutting commentaries on society in their respective release eras. What's most interesting though, is that despite being quite similar on the page -- Bugonia even taking some lines from Save the Green Planet verbatim -- the two are, thematically, quite different! In this episode, following in the footsteps of previous episodes like Classic Movies Live – Season 4, Episode 15: Do Do-Over: The Hidden Fortress/Star Wars and CML Classics – Episode 33: Infernal Affairs, Pierre and Jeff break down both Bugonia and Save the Green Planet!

This week on Classic Movies Live!, we begin our yearly series of going through all the Best Picture Nominees at this year's Oscars. As with every year, we've actually already done most of them. Check out our episodes for F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, and Sinners from throughout last year! And look forward to our remaining episodes on Bugonia and The Secret Agent coming in the next few weeks! But first, Train Dreams! Based on the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Granier, a railroad worker at the turn of the 20th century in the Idaho panhandle. Taking place over nearly 50 years, Train Dreams tracks the life of Granier as the world rapidly develops around him, while his own life progresses much more quickly than he initially expects. Pierre is away this week, but joining Jeff in his stead is friend of the show and first-time guest Victoria, who brings a background in media analysis and proximity to the Toronto film scene to talk about everyone's new favourite Joel Edgerton movie! You'll next see Victoria as part of this year's Academy of Death Racers awards! The Deathies will be hosted this year on March 14th on YouTube! What's your favourite memory associated with March 14th? Sound off in the comments below!

We're back with some new films, a new guest, and a new episode of Director Showdown! In this series, we pit 64 of the biggest directors to debut since 1998 against each other in a head-to-head tournament to determine the greatest director of the last 28 years! In the last episode, occasional Oscar rivals Bong Joon-ho and Adam McKay faced off with two films about classism and economic collapse. In the battle between Snowpiercer and The Big Short, McKay narrowly snatched victory, defeating his quadruple-Oscar winning opponent! Speaking of snatching things... this week we're talking about heists! Sort of! First on the ticket is a director prizing quality over quantity. Despite a filmography of only 4 films, Marielle Heller has made a name for herself with high-profile, buzzy titles that always get at least a little awards attention. Her film Nightbitch got Amy Adams a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy, her film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood got Tom Hanks an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The film we're talking about today, Can You Ever Forgive Me? netted Academy Award nominations for both of its main stars, Richard E Grant for Best Supporting Actor, and Melissa McCarthy for Best Lead Actress, as well as a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for writers Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is of course a biopic about Lee Israel, a biographer who in the 90s became infamous for forging literary letters in the style of authors such as Noël Coward, Fanny Brice, and Ernest Hemingway. McCarthy plays Israel in perhaps her greatest role to date, bringing just the right mix of misanthropy and charm to really centre this fusion of a biopic and a crime thriller. Heller's opponent is the ever-illustrious Guy Ritchie! Coming up alongside Matthew Vaughn in the early 2000s, Ritchie would make a name for himself with films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and later the Sherlock Holmes series starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. He's also the director who gave audiences their first taste of Jason Statham, who has himself become an institution in the 25+ years since his breakout role in Lock. Ritchie's followup to Lock would be the riotous ensemble heist film Snatch, about two boxing promoters who get in over their head at the same time as a group of small time criminals get their hands on a rare diamond. Those two plots, initially unrelated, intertwine in hilarious, almost Looney Tunes-esque ways as each group repeatedly fail their way upwards. Starring Statham alongside Brad Pitt, Stephen Graham, and Lennie James as everyone's favourite character Sol, Snatch has stood the test of time to become regarded as one of Ritchie's best films, as well as one of the most popular in each of the aforementioned actors' filmographies. (Editor's Note: Jeff claims repeatedly in this episode that Sol is "the driver." This is not true: in scenes featuring Sol and his gang driving, Sol sits next to the driver) Joining us today is a guest last heard on our 2025 Year In Review episode, and before that Kickin’ It With Kendrick, Episode 3: The Twilight Saga. That's right, Kylie from the Academy of Death Racers is back! Like all our guests, Kylie has a bit of a bias towards one of our competing films. Can you guess what it is before she tells you? And will Kylie's favourite come out on top? Tune in to find out in today's episode of Director Showdown! This episode was inspired by Rotten Tomatoes' Best Director Showdown, which was conducted among RT users over the summer of 2023. The results of that competition are summarized in this article. Special thanks this week to our good friend Cris, who made the cover art for this episode! Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd to see more of her artwork, film opinions/reviews, or both!

It's our first episode of 2026! Kind of! More importantly, it's the season premiere of Classic Movies Live! and this week, our hosts are talking about the sister movie to last year's The Smashing Machine, directed by the Safdie that Venice forgot. In Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie, Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet) needs cash now to get to Japan to prove he's the best table tennis player in the world. Chalamet gives his best performance yet as the ego-centric, driven Mauser, as he comes face to face with mob bosses, actresses, and the richest man in the world played by Kevin O'Leary, in his quest to be the best! We've already spoiled that Chalamet is great in this movie, but how is it overall? How is Tyler the Creator in his first role? How is Odessa A'zion, most recently seen in I Love LA, in what could be her breakout role? How is that guy from Dragon's Den that we all usually hate? I hope you're as excited as the writer of this description for the first episode of yet another year of Classic Movies... Live!

In the season finale of Classic Movies Live!, our hosts talk about 6 movies they haven't had the chance to talk about yet! With help from many special guests! Join us as Pierre and Jeff discuss their favourite films of the year, including plenty that are just too strange for us to have devoted a full episode to. Additionally, our hosts discuss the current state of the film industry, and what it's like to see a film in 2026! In this episode, be prepared for minor spoilers for Lilo & Stitch and Jurassic World: Rebirth. Major spoilers (potentially) for all of the following: Kokuho Predator: Badlands 100 Meters HIM Resurrection Materialists Of the above films, Jeff reviewed Kokuho and HIM for Contra Zoom Pod, and you can find those reviews here: Kokuho, HIM. Special thanks to all the guests featured in this episode, including: Dakota Arsenault from Contra Zoom Pod, last heard on CML in Episode 6 of our Director Showdown Series! Dakota especially liked our Frankenstein & The Bride and Apichatpong Weerasethakul vs. Ava DuVernay episodes! We especially liked CZP's K-Pop Demon Hunters and VIFF episodes! Pedro Lima, last heard on Season 6, Episode 19: TIFF Preview. Pedro writes reviews for several outlets, including Contra Zoom Pod, Shortstick, Movies We Texted About, and Keith Loves Movies. Pedro wrote a wonderful review of the film Dry Leaf over at Movies We Texted About. Kylie Corcoran, last heard on Kicking It with Kendrick Episode 3: The Twilight Saga. rach, last heard on Season 5, Episode 3: The Zone of Interest. And Jason Christian of Cold War Cinema. We especially enjoyed Jason's episodes on Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Pickup On South Street While he isn't featured on the episode, longtime friend of the show Ben also conducted an excellent interview with Celine Song, director of Materialists, which you can check out directly on YouTube.

Merry Christmas! To celebrate the holidays this year, we're taking things back to one of our favourite series on this show. In fact, long-time listeners may remember that our current cover art template was pioneered with an episode on the second movie in this series. The series I'm talking about, of course, is James Cameron's Avatar. And today, we're talking about the end of the current saga (but unlikely the last film in the series): Fire and Ash. Fire and Ash picks up right where The Way of Water left off. The Sullys have helped to save the Metkayina tribe, but lost their eldest son, Neteyam, in the process. Everyone's favourite tulkun, Payakan, has also defied his people's non-violent ways. And of course, Colonel Miles Quaritch barely managed to escape with his life. It's increasingly clear that proximity to the Sully family makes anyone a target, but as the Sullys attempt to escape back to the forest alongside wind traders, they're ambushed by the mysterious ash people, a tribe of Na'vi who believe Eywa has forsaken them. If you're not an Avatar-head, a better way to describe the film might be that Fire and Ash continues to explore the series' themes of belonging, reincarnation, and colonization, this time through characters that haven't gotten their time in the sun in previous movies. The film continues to amaze visually, pushing the boundaries of what movies can look like. The plot grounds itself in familiar territory in order to dive deeper into the philosophies and psyches of its characters. Like The Way of Water and Avatar before it, Fire and Ash truly is a sight to behold. ...and perhaps that gives away our broadest thoughts on it, but nevertheless our hosts have lots to say! Tune in to hear it all this week on Classic Movies Live!

This week on Classic Movies Live, our hosts talk about Shakespeare! Specifically, William Shakespeare, and even more specifically, the rendition of William Shakespeare played by Paul Mescal in Chloe Zhao's most recent film Hamnet. Hamnet is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, recounting the story of a tragedy in the life of The Bard that preceded the writing of his play Hamlet. Focusing primarily on his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and her life in Stratford-upon-Avon raising their children, Hamnet is a story about absent fathers, overprotective mothers, and the grief that sets in when everything you do just isn't enough to stop the worst from happening. Hamnet marks a major career milestone for Zhao. Coming off of Marvels The Eternals, it's significantly lower budget, but more traditionally fictional than her previous film Nomadland. It's her first time working with Mescal and Buckley. And certainly not least of all, it's her second time winning TIFF's People's Choice Award! Will it also be her second film to go big at the Oscars? Tune in as our hosts talk about one of their most hotly anticipated films of the year... Live!

This week on Classic Movies Live!, our hosts review the biggest movie of the year! Zootopia 2 picks up right where the first one left off. Judy Hopps is the first bunny cop in Zootopia, and reformed criminal Nick Wilde is the first fox cop, and Hopps' new partner. After busting Mayor Bellweather in the first movie, Hopps and Wilde are on an ambitious streak of overachieving, and starting to get sloppy as they try to leave their fellow police in the dust. After an animal trafficker gets away on Hopps and Wilde's watch, the duo is suspended... just in time to learn about a planned heist that threatens to turn the entire society of Zootopia on its head! Zootopia introduces Andy Samberg, Fortune Feimster, and Ke Huy Quan to the budding billion-dollar franchise, and brings back all the voices and talent that made the first one what it was. We didn't have the opportunity to talk about the first Zootopia on this show, so we never got around to exactly what that first one was... let's remedy that this week! ...Live!

It's time for the long-awaited episode 8 of Director Showdown! In this series, we pit 64 of the biggest directors to debut since 1998 against each other in an elimination bracket to determine who will walk away the greatest director of the last 27 years! In the last episode, we saw a clash of titans with Apichatpong Weerasethakul vs. Ava DuVernay, both with a film about how the sins of the past inform the issues of the present. Between Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Origin, the Palme d'Or winner ultimately came out on top, with Weerasethakul taking the record for first-round winner with the longest surname! This week, we try to imagine a world without capitalism... and end up just imagining the end of the world instead! Up first, we have another Palme d'Or winner. Hailing from South Korea, Bong Joon-ho really made a splash in the West when his 2019 film Parasite became the first Asian movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Of course, by the time it won, it was hardly a surprise: Parasite had already picked up the Palme d'Or and 3rd place at the TIFF People's Choice earlier that summer! But before Parasite, Bong had already established himself with films like Memories of Murder, The Host, and even a couple of Hollywood films like the Netflix-released Okja. Today, our hosts talk about Bong's biggest sci-fi hit: Snowpiercer. Starring Chris Evans, John Hurt, and Song Kang-ho, Snowpiercer is a climate-conscious thriller about a popular uprising on the world's last surviving train during a new ice age. Opposite Bong is Adam McKay! A longtime collaborator of Will Ferrell, McKay cut his teeth in comedy with films like Talladega Nights, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and The Other Guys. In recent years, McKay pivoted slightly, moving away from outright comedies and into comedically-tinged political dramas. In recent years, McKay's even proven himself a regular at the Oscars with films like Vice and Don't Look Up -- which we covered in episode 18 of our series Losing It Over Leo. But the first of those dramedies was the Ryan Gosling/Christian Bale/Steve Carrell-starrer The Big Short. Centred around a group of Wall Street investors who recognize the subprime mortgage bubble before it became the subprime mortgage crisis, The Big Short tells the true story of how a handful of millionaires profited off the misfortune of a whole country. It also does a great job of answering the question on everybody's minds: what is a "subprime mortgage"? Joining us today is a repeat guest: Mark Morgan of Rambling Cinema! Mark was last heard on Match 4 of Director Showdown, where his passionate advocacy for Darren Aronofsky was ultimately unsuccessful in carrying the mother! director to victory. Will his favourite prevail in this episode? You'll have to tune in to find out! This episode was inspired by Rotten Tomatoes' Best Director Showdown, which was conducted among RT users over the summer of 2023. The results of that competition are summarized in this article. Special thanks this week to our good friend Cris, who made the cover art for this episode! Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd to see more of her artwork, film opinions/reviews, or both!

This week on Classic Movies Live! our hosts talk about the winner of the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival! Sentimental Value reunites director Joachim Trier with star Renate Reinsve to tell the story of Nora, a Norwegian theatre actress in the middle of a bold new production of Hamlet whose life is thrown into disarray by the reappearance of her film director father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard). Gustav wants Nora to star in his latest film, a deeply personal story that he claims he wrote specially for her. Nora, of course, wants no part in it, so Gustav instead casts American superstar Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to play the lead instead. Sentimental Value is an affecting story about relationships that may as well be impossible to fix, and people unable to communicate with each other. A story about things going unspoken that makes surprisingly effective narrative use of that unspokenness. Between an amazing script, great performances from all three leads, and Trier's unique deadpan sense of humour, it's a film that shouldn't be missed! So luckily, our hosts didn't miss it! Check out our thoughts on this eventual classic movie... live! ...and also in this episode, we talk about a new release reuniting the Four Horsemen of Magic! We saw that one, too!