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!