by Adam Riske

Nominated for “Best Makeup” at the Academy Awards. It lost to Pan’s Labyrinth.

• Best Scene/Moment: Not much to choose from so I guess anytime Christopher Walken shows up. He and Adam Sandler have good chemistry.

• Best Song: “Someday” by The Strokes.
• Best Merch: A “Click Movie Premiere Promo Baseball Black Visor New” for $29.97. It makes sense to me that there were Click visors because the type of dude who would go up to you and rave about Click probably would wear a visor -- backwards and upside down.

• Director Grade: Click was directed by Frank Coraci.
Great Movies: The Wedding Singer
Good Movies: N/A
OK Movies: The Waterboy, Around the World in 80 Days
Bad Movies: Click
Unseen By Me: Murdered Innocence, Zookeeper, Here Comes the Boom, Blended, The Ridiculous 6, Hot Air
Overall Grade: C+

• Double It with This 2006 Movie: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby• Year 2006 Movies to Trailer Before Them: The Benchwarmers, Grandma’s Boy, Underworld: Evolution

• Ella McCay or Click? Ella McCay

• Mall Movie? This is one of the classier Adam Sandler comedies but not enough to play the fancy theater in town. This would still play at the mall.

• Only in 2006: A movie about a universal remote.

• Scene Stealer: Christopher Walken.

• I Miss: 2000s comedies. In hindsight, it was a pretty great era (era).

• I Don’t Miss (tie): Rob Schneider playing ethnicities other than his own and the truly terrifying de-aging makeup on Julie Kavner and Henry Winkler.

• 2006 Crush: Kate Beckinsale.

• 2026 Crush: Kate Beckinsale.• What I Thought in 2006: Adam Sandler comedies are usually either hilarious or bad with few in between. I remember being disappointed by Click back in 2006. It was surprisingly serious and not all that funny.

• What I Think in 2026: I was right. This movie’s ambitious so I’ll give it that, but it’s also boring and surprisingly depressing despite the happy It’s a Wonderful Life ending. I’m a fan of some 2000s Sony Adam Sandler comedies, but Click is not one of them.

 by Rob DiCristino

Because oligarchs are people, too.

Does anyone else remember the VH1 original movie, Two of Us? Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Let It Be) and broadcast in February of the year 2000, it dramatizes a supposedly-real-life reunion between John Lennon (Jared Harris) and Paul McCartney (Aidan Quinn) in New York City over the course of an autumn day in 1976, six years after the break-up of The Beatles. Intimate and understated, Two of Us is built around a series of conversations between the estranged friends — on everything from Wings to Yoko, from spiritualism to Saturday Night Live — and concludes on a note of optimism, a suggestion that these two blokes from Liverpool might someday rekindle the magic that defined a generation. Despite never being much of a Beatles fan (then or now), I always found Two of Us captivating: There’s just something comforting about an imagined world where Paul and John settled their differences before John’s untimely death, a world where towering figures feel more like sensitive and vulnerable human beings than unknowable icons.Based on the 2022 Giuliano da Empoli novel of the same name, Oliver Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin tries to bring a similar degree of texture to some of the most consequential figures in modern Russian history, specifically Vladislav Surkov, former chief advisor and deputy prime minister to Vladimir Putin. Fictionalized as “Vadim Baranov” (Paul Dano), the shadowy kingmaker helps orchestrate a cultural revolution in post-Soviet Russia that sees the Federation move away from the rigid ideology of communism and toward the capitalist free-for-all that was born in the new millennium. Told in flashbacks over an interview with a Western journalist (Jeffrey Wright as Lawrence Rowland), the film recounts Baranov’s early days as a thespian-turned-theater director, his transition to state-controlled media production — working for TV mogul Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) — and eventually his doctrine of "sovereign democracy,” which would coax FSB director Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) out of the espionage sector and into the international spotlight.

Co-written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrére, The Wizard of the Kremlin parallels two key shifts in post-Cold War Russian culture: the structural collapse that took the country out of the hands of its ineffectual president (George Sogis as Boris Yeltsin) and gave it to the oligarchs, and the philosophical revolution that created an avenue for Baranov to build Putin’s strength through propaganda. Though he was born into a Soviet political family that granted him early access to the party elite, it was Baranov’s misspent youth in the ‘90s bohemian artistic scene that taught him the power of media messaging, a power that he’d wield from the shadows while Putin reasserted Russia’s influence on the world stage. Along for the ride are Baranov’s college frenemy Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) and his lover, Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose transition from performance artist to mobster arm candy symbolizes Russia’s spiritual decay and eventually inspires Baranov to retire before Putin — now firmly entrenched as de facto dictator — no longer has any use for him.Though he’s mostly known to American audiences for enigmatic thrillers like Personal Shopper and psychological dramas like Clouds of Sils Maria, Oliver Assayas aims to inject The Wizard of the Kremlin with a cold, uncompromising realism, styling his actors as closely to their real-life equivalents as possible — Jude Law’s signature pout is given a threatening new context under his Putin makeup — and interspersing archival footage of events like the Second Chechen War and the Orange Revolution. Dano narrates his character’s rise to power with a tone of grim finality, the kind of self-effacing wisdom that comes with age and experience. His Baranov never seems entirely penitent for his role in the corruption of the Russian state, but he does seem to understand how his vision of politics as avant garde theater helped power-hungry figures like Putin and Sidorov — not to mention infamous deputies like Igor Sechine (Andrei Zayats) — shed any idealistic democratic fantasies and embrace the totalitarianism that characterizes Russia to this day.But while Assayas’ film deserves credit for illuminating figures and events that have been largely shrouded in mystery until now, it ultimately fails to muster any lasting insight into its titular character or the system of "vertical power” he spearheaded. Paul Dano is a talented actor — despite comments to the contrary from a certain blowhard director — but his Baranov is aloof and one-note, and it’s almost impossible to believe him as a master manipulator of the human psyche. In fact, most of the film’s performances are problematic in one way or another, chiefly because each actor seems to be pulling from a grab-bag of vaguely Anglo-European accents — none of them Russian — that shift from scene to scene. This gives the already overwrought Wizard of the Kremlin a real “community theater” energy that makes it feel less like Two of Us and more like Nuremberg, another unfortunate bit of speculative fiction that asks us to sympathize with ghouls whose refusal to recognize our humanity led to the hellscape we’re all enduring today.

The Wizard of the Kremlin hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 15th.

 by Adam Riske

Nominated for “Best Thriller” at the Empire Awards UK. It lost to The Departed.

• Best Scene/Moment: Tom Cruise running during the climactic action sequence. It’s a special effect all on its own.

• Best Song: “Best of My Love” by The Emotions. I could have been the Kanye West end credits song if that guy wasn’t such an asshole.• Best Merch: A “Movie Mission Impossible 3 Bag…Rare Special Gift for the Crew” for $200.00. The price is ridiculous, but the bag is cool looking. I used to have a messenger bag like this. I was in college, so I believed I needed something more sophisticated looking than just a backpack. It worked and I was accepted into high society. All I’m saying is, if you buy this the IMF might recruit you, that’s all.

• Director Grade: Mission: Impossible III was directed by J.J. Abrams.
Great Movies: Star Trek (2009), Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
Good Movies: Mission: Impossible III, Super 8
OK Movies: Star Trek into Darkness
Bad Movies: Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
Unseen By Me: N/A
Overall Grade: B

• Double It with This 2006 Movie: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

• Year 2006 Movies to Trailer Before Them: Final Destination 3, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, X-Men: The Last Stand

• Ella McCay or Mission: Impossible III? Mission: Impossible III• Mall Movie? No. A Paramount Pictures release starring Tom Cruise is fancy theater all the way.

• Only in 2006: Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q were part of the IMF team.

• Scene Stealer (tie): Laurence Fishburne and Michelle Monaghan.

• I Miss: Philip Seymour Hoffman. I can’t tell if he’s good in this or phoning it in. Maybe a little bit of both.

• I Don’t Miss: The rabbit’s foot. I know it’s just a MacGuffin, but it sounds stupid and beneath a movie with a budget of $150M. Try harder.

• 2006 Crush (tie): Michelle Monaghan and Keri Russell.

• 2026 Crush (tie): Michelle Monaghan and Maggie Q.• What I Thought in 2006: I really liked it and didn’t understand why people thought it was disappointing, especially coming off the sluggish previous entry. I appreciated that they humanized the Ethan Hunt character, which I think was crucial for audiences giving a damn about him in later films.

• What I Think in 2026: I still like Mission: Impossible III, just not as much as I did twenty years ago. It’s still probably the most underrated in the series in my humble opinion. The action and story are good (root for two people madly in love!) and it feels refreshingly small compared to the lengthier, more set piece-driven later entries. The rabbit’s foot sucks but I’m glad the movie treats it as a nothingburger unlike “the entity” which became WAY too important to the last two Mission: Impossible movies.

Patrick is going to copy Sonia's haircut.



Download this episode here.
Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts.
Also discussed this episode: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), Super Mario Bros. Galaxy (2026), Night of the Juggler (1980), The Drama (2026), We Bury the Dead (2026), Where the Day Takes You (1992)

 by JB

Today, let’s travel back in time to 1916... and a little place I call... Malibu, California.

After becoming the biggest movie star in the world with his pioneering work at the Keystone Studios in 1914, Charlie Chaplin next moved to Essanay Studios, where he made 14 short comedies in two years. In 1916, Chaplin became the highest paid performer in the world, signing a contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for $670,000 for 12 short films. (That’s more than $20 million in 2026 dollars.) The Adventurer was the last of these. You can watch it here.THE PLOT IN BRIEF: An escaped convict (Charlie Chaplin) evades prison guards and policemen and jumps into the ocean to escape. He ends up swimming to a seaside pier, where a rich family is cavorting. After saving one of them from drowning, he is invited back to their mansion. He poses as “Commodore Slick” and enjoys their hospitality. Unfortunately, another guest is suspicious and calls the cops, who proceed to chase the resourceful Chaplin all over the house.

So distinctive is the scenery along the Pacific Coast Highway, that while watching the film again this morning, I instantly recognized where these first scenes were filmed. Remember that ALL HOLLYWOOD FILMS TAKE PLACE IN THE SAME META-VERSE. As you watch the film on the YouTube machine, imagine the camera panning slightly to the right as the coppers chase Charlie on the beach. The camera picks up a man on horseback far in the distance. He follows the shoreline until something in his line of sight makes him pause and dismount.The man is Charlton Heston. He walks along the sand, shouting, “"Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it. YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!” As Heston squats in the sand, the camera continues to pan right and we see teenagers driving various funny cars down the Pacific Coast Highway; they are singing “Beach Party.” The happy couple in the lead car is Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The camera finally pans left, and we see two new teenagers cavorting in the surf. These teenagers look older, like the boy might be 24 and the girl could be 30. They are saying goodbye to each other after an eventful summer. Their names are Danny and Sandy. These disparate movies were all filmed in Malibu within a few miles of each other. Thus, the singularity is achieved.ASTOUNDING FACT: Chaplin’s The Adventurer was filmed twelve years before the Pacific Coast Highway was ever built. How did the film crew get to the location? Mules?
I have been watching Chaplin’s Mutual comedies since I was a teenager, and it’s always very comforting to see him interacting with his stock company. Edna Purviance plays the female lead; Chaplin would later write and direct A Woman of Paris in 1923, a film designed to make her a star. Eric Campbell was Chaplin’s reliable heavy, a mountain of a man who made Chaplin look tiny and sympathetic in comparison. Albert Austin plays both one of the prison guards at the beginning of the film and Purviance’s butler at the end; he was a multi-talented utility player. Purviance’s father is Henry Bergman, another all-purpose actor who prided himself on being able to play any part. He would be a member of Chaplin’s stock company for more than twenty years.Most critics opine that The Adventurer, the last of Chaplin’s 12 Mutual comedies, harkens back to Chaplin’s earlier Keystone days, as if the strain of producing 11 of the greatest short comedies was too much for the comedy genius, and so Chaplin “rested on his laurels” for the last one in the series.

I disagree. While Mutual comedies like The Vagabond, The Pawnbroker, and Easy Street may feature more sophisticated themes and narratives, it’s not as if the intricate slapstick of The Adventurer were somehow easier to pull off than more complex story elements. The chase at the end of The Adventurer is so elaborate and so dependent on perfect timing that it hides its own artistry. It must have been incredibly tricky to pull it off at all! As for matters of theme, Chaplin was pretty consistent in championing the little guy in all his films, whether said little guy is a waiter, a firefighter, a police officer... or a prison inmate.

It’s worth noting that many of the Mutual films have job descriptions as titles: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Count, The Immigrant... but does Chaplin title this one The Convict? The Escaped Crook? Tramp on the Lam?

No, he is... The Adventurer!

by Patrick BromleyIt's a Hidalgo-less list.

Joe Johnston is such a specific filmmaker. He comes from an effects background, meaning his early work is characterized by visual effects and genre elements. When he has veered from that course to make more personal projects, he hasn't enjoyed the same kind of success. Here are some of the essential films of his (admittedly limited) filmography.

1. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)Joe Johnston's debut as a director showcases a lot of what he does so well, combining impressive visual effects with an emphasis on story and heart. Rick Moranis plays an absent-minded inventor who accidentally shrinks his kids (and the neighbor kids) down to miniature size; they then have to traverse an adventure in the backyard to be restored to their original size. This is a pretty good family adventure film, one that doesn't insult the intelligence of either kids or adults, but the effects are the big sell here, which Johnston (a former effects artist himself) executes pretty brilliantly using a combination of techniques. It's interesting that he wasn't the first choice to direct this one, as the movie began its life as a Stuart Gordon project. This would be a recurring theme in Joe Johnston's filmography.
2. The Rocketeer (1991)Still my favorite of all Joe Johnston's films and the one I suspect for which he'll be best remembered because it's his most special. His sophomore outing behind the camera is an adaptation of the Dave Stevens comic book about a 1930s stunt pilot (Billy Campbell) who finds a jet pack and uses it to become a superhero. Alan Arkin and Jennifer Connelly also star, while Timothy Dalton steals the entire movie as a Hollywood star and secret Nazi back when you had to keep that kind of thing secret. This is the kind of thrilling pulp adventure for which Joe Johnston seems perfectly suited, a movie we only got because Batman was a hit and everyone wanted the next Batman. This was probably never going to be that (it was famously a disappointment at the box office) but I wish it would have been because maybe Joe Johnston could have made another Rocketeer movie.
3. Jumanji (1995)Joe Johnston's bounced back after the box office disappointments of both The Rocketeer and The Pagemaster (for which he directed the live action segments) with this massive family hit about a jungle adventure board game that comes to life and spills out into the real world. Because Johnston is relying on a lot of digital effects for the first time, I don't think they work nearly as well as his past and later efforts (dem monkeys) The story is fun enough, though, and it's better family entertainment than the later legasequels if only because it's not afraid to be dark and a little scary (Kiki Dunst almost dies!), qualities that were quite common in these kinds of movies in the 1980s when Johnston was coming up but which have been completely sanded out of family movies these days.
 4. October Sky (1999)This one feels like Johnston trying to break out -- the one I would swear was a longtime pet project if I didn't also know that the book on which its based came out only a year before the movie. Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this adaptation of Homer Hickam's 1998 memoir Rocket Boys as a kid who stars a rocketry club with his friends. I suspect Johnston's career might have taken a different direction had this one been a bigger hit. It's mostly beloved now but only did ok at the box office in 1999.
5. Jurassic Park III (2001)When your nostalgic coming of age period piece doesn't totally connect with audiences, you go back to working for the Big Guy and become the first non-Spielberg filmmaker to make a Jurassic Park sequel. That would be noteworthy in and of itself, but what makes JPIII stand out is that it's just about the only sequel in the entire misbegotten franchise that bothers to be its own thing and have its own personality. Johnston isn't trying to do a massive scale summer blockbuster, but instead a throwback to the kind of stripped-down B-movies that would have been made with stop-motion in the '30s and '40s. On that level, he succeeds. The characters (save for a returning Alan Grant) aren't great and the movie fails to be about anything more than just OMG RUN but it achieves its modest goals and Johnston once again proves to be workmanlike, dependable, and good with effects-driven entertainment. 
6. The Wolfman (2010)I swear I want to like this movie. It's a period monster movie in love with being a monster movie and a totally straightforward attempt to make the wolfman horrifying after years of more comic approaches. The cast is solid, the scenery is gorgeous, the wolfman makeup is awesome. I'm just not sure it ever stood a chance of succeeding once original director Mark Romanek quit prior to production and Joe Johnston inherited a mess, plus a great deal of studio interference that included reshoots, new endings, and shitcanning the work of Oscar-winning makeup effects designer (and basically the inventor of the practical werewolf transformation) Rick Baker in favor of some CG bullshit. There are great elements here that don't quite add up to a great movie, but it's not for lack of trying. It wouldn't be the last time that Joe Johnston was brought on to "fix" the work of another filmmaker.
7. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)There was a real lack of imagination on Marvel's part back in 2011 to hire a guy who had made one retro period superhero movie to make a retro period superhero movie, but it turns out that Joe Johnston was exactly the right person to bring Captain America to the screen for the first time. I'm guessing The Rocketeer helped him get this gig, because it does a lot of things that The First Avenger is trying to do only on a larger scale. Yes, it does the period setting, but the two films also share an optimism and a sincerity that feels pure and genuine. Fifteen years later, this remains one of the best of all the Marvel movies.

 by Rob DiCristino

More like Two Horny Women.

Summer movie season is here! Meryl Streep’s autocratic Miranda Priestly returns in The Devil Wears Prada 2! Star Wars’ newest pint-sized star makes his big-screen debut in The Mandalorian and Grogu! Christopher Nolan brings civilization’s most enduring heroic narrative to life in The Odyssey! And, of course, Canadian writer/director Chloé Robichaud remakes the ‘70s sex farce, Two Women in Gold! Adapted by Catherine Léger from her stage play — itself adapted from the original film; try to keep up — Two Women follows Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf), a pair of restless housewives who embark on a shared journey of sexual rejuvenation. As they bone their way through every plumber and handyman in Quebec, they’ll rekindle the joie de vivre that domesticity once stripped away. And while it may lack the intellectual heft of cousins like Jean-Luc Goddard’s Masculine Féminin or Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Robichaud’s film is witty and charming enough to break up the coming onslaught of blockbuster tentpoles.We begin with Violette, home on maternity leave and desperate to convince her husband (Félix Moati as Benoit) that the mysterious cawing sound she’s hearing — which evolves into one of the film’s better running gags — is the couple next door having performatively loud intercourse. The truth is way less sexy, unfortunately, as Florence reveals that she and her partner (Mani Soleymanlou as David) haven’t been at it in over a year. Florence’s libido has been dulled by anti-depressants, and David has been happy to trade less action in the bedroom for a more stable and emotionally balanced partner. It turns out Violette can relate: She and Benoit haven’t made inroads in that department since the birth of their daughter, most likely because Benoit’s been having an affair with his colleague, Eli (Juliette Gariépy). As David busies himself with their co-op’s greenhouse — the source of some jokes about carbon neutrality trends that would have been funnier around 2014 — Florence sets about getting her groove back. Vivian follows her lead, and middle-aged sex hijinks ensure.

Anchored by performances endearing enough to make us sympathize with a pair of serial philanderers and their dim-witted husbands, Two Women explores everything from double standards in gender dynamics to the “unnatural” arrangement that is sexual monogamy. Léger’s screenplay — presumably borrowed in part from Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond’s original — is brisk and upbeat, loaded with clever and disarming observations about modern marriage. There’s a blunt pragmatism to each character’s sensibilities that helps the film avoid many of the melodramatic confrontations typical of the genre, which becomes a more impressive — and infinitely funnier — accomplishment as each of their perversions is ultimately dismissed as an acceptable human weakness. Even the strumpet Eli resists easy stereotyping: One of the film’s best moments comes when she scoffs at Benoit’s insistence that he’d leave his wife for her if she asked, reassuring him that she has no real feelings for him and is simply using him for his pleasantly-shaped manhood.It’s that kind of unsentimental comedy that keeps Two Women delightfully light and airy, but it’s hard not to feel like a film that hums as vibrantly as this one couldn’t do with a bit more hard-nosed dissection of the human nature it clearly understands so well. There’s a flippancy to its handling of heavier topics like suicide and sexual assault where a more socially-contentious approach might have helped elevate things just a tad. To wit: Florence and Vivian’s karaoke night out is interrupted when one of them slashes her wrist with a broken beer bottle, and a later sequence finds Daniel mixing anti-depressants with alcohol in what his emergency room doctor describes as a “cry for help.” Both incidents are dismissed without too much interrogation. That said, perhaps Two Women deserves some credit for not overextending itself for the sake of lofty ambitions. If you’re wondering whether or not I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth on this one, you’d be right! Perhaps I’m just as fickle and contradictory as the hot messes that make up the cast of this film. Go figure.Yeah, I’ve rethought it, and I’m actually okay with where Two Women lands: There are no self-righteous proclamations about right and wrong, no short-sighted dismissals of any one way of life or another, and no second act misunderstandings that reduce the whole thing to a half-hearted genre exercise. See? You just watched me self-correct in real time. Okay. Let’s reset: While there’s very little about Two Women that will stick with you the next day — we need a term for a movie that holds a spot in your Letterboxd diary that you’ve completely memory-holed by the time you’re making your year-end lists — it’s perfectly acceptable for an evening’s diversion. In a summer movie season sure to be defined by high-stakes franchise IP like Toy Story 5 and Supergirl, Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction in Disclosure Day, and, I don’t know, whatever the hell Insidious: Out of the Further is (I’ll admit I lost track of that series a few movies ago; is “the Further” like the Upside-Down? I lost track of Stranger Things, too), there’s nothing wrong with an evening’s diversion.

Two Women hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 8th.

by Patrick BromleyLet's spend the day watching movies that take place in a day.

10am - His Girl Friday (1940, dir. Howard Hawks)We'll kick things off with what might be the greatest (certainly the fastest) screwball comedy of all time, in which Cary Grant attempts to win back ex-wife Rosalind Russell over the course of a day while both use the Power of the Press to stop a convicted man from being unfairly executed. This was one of the movies that first made me fall in love with classic comedies and it's never lost its power no matter how many times I see it. It's always still just as fast-paced and funny as it always was, only now I get to pick out a new favorite line or delivery each time I see it. When Erika threw me a real-deal 24-hour movie festival for my 40th birthday, I made the mistake of programming this one in the morning when I was already too tired to keep up with it. Better to let it start us out.
11:45am - Quick Change (1990, dir. Bill Murray & Howard Franklin)One of the great unsung comedies of the early '90s, this poison love letter to New York stars Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Randy Quaid as a group of bank robbers who can't seem to get out of the city no matter how hard they try. Like Martin Scorsese's After Hours (the best One Crazy Night movie), this one has our characters encountering a bunch of colorful characters, most memorably Tony Shaloub's cab driver. Quick Change is such a masterpiece of deadpan absurdity that I know it's going to keep the energy and laughs of His Girl Friday rolling along.
1:30pm - Training Day (2001, dir. Antoine FuquaAntoine Fuqua's best movie follows a day in the life of corrupt cop Denzel Washington (who won the Oscar for his work here) and new trainee Ethan Hawke as they do all kinds of potentially shady shit together. This is screenwriter David Ayer mining familiar territory about Los Angeles and bad cops but it's sold more effectively than usual thanks to good location photography, Fuqua's direction, and especially Washington and Hawke (who was also nominated for an Oscar) at the center. For whatever reason I'm still rocking my standard def snapcase DVD for this one; I should probably upgrade to the 4K at some point.
3:30pm - Clerks (1994, dir. Kevin Smith)In the interest of lightening things up after Training Day, let's watch Kevin Smith's first (and still best?) movie, following the day in the life and work of a put-upon convenience store worker and his best friend. Smith tries his hardest to be edgy and there's obviously some button-pushing stuff that hasn't aged great -- this is a 30-year old movie, after all -- but at its center is an ultimately sweet movie about male friendship. It's also helped by the fact that this is the movie in which Smith leans hardest into his lack of visual sense, meaning the form actually suits the material. The kid in me who first fell in love with Smith and his work via this movie will never not love it.
5:30pm - Barbershop (2002, dir. Tim Story)One of the great hangout movies of the early 2000s, Tim Story's original Barbershop puts together a fantastic ensemble cast for a day in the life and business of a Chicago barbershop as its owner (Ice Cube) debates selling it. There's a really fun group of characters and a real hangout vibe that makes this one easy to revisit, as evidenced by the multiple sequels that return to the barbershop without ever working as well as the original. I actually think Barbershop will be a good lead-in for our next movie.
7:30pm - Do the Right Thing (1989, dir. Spike Lee)The true Best Picture of 1989 is maybe the greatest 24-hour movie of all time. Sure, it gets pretty heavy for a Primetime Pizza slot but just because there is tragedy at the end of the film shouldn't discount how entertaining it is. That's a big part of what makes Do the Right Thing such a masterpiece: it's more alive than almost any other movie. That there's any debate as to whether or not this is Spike Lee's greatest movie -- it's between this and Malcolm X -- is proof that he's one of the all-time greats.
9:30pm - Crank (2006, dir. Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor)We're not going to do a traditional overnight  full of weird stuff and Italian horror, but that doesn't mean we can't program some mindless trash as we head into that section of our marathon. That brings us to Crank, the Neveldine/Taylor joint that would probably be my favorite Jason Statham action movie if not for Crank 2 and Wrath of Man. He plays a hit man who's been poisoned and has to keep his heart rate up so he doesn't die; somehow the movie is four times stupider than it sounds, but in a sublime and often offensive way. That there aren't more movies like Crank is both a shame and proof that there absolutely should not be more movies like Crank.
11pm - Take Me Home Tonight (2011, dir. Michael Dowse)A good excuse to program a Brian Saur favorite. Really just Can't Hardly Wait for a slightly older set, the movie focuses on a college graduate (Topher Grace) who gets invited to what is a party doubling as a high school reunion in the 1988, I'm assuming so there can be a bunch of '80s music on the soundtrack and jokes about the fashion. This is almost one of those CastMaker movies, with early roles for Theresa Palmer, Chris Pratt, Demetri Martin, and Seth Gabel, plus more recognizable faces like Grace, Anna Faris, Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP), Dan Fogler, and Lucy Punch. The movie didn't make enough of a dent to launch anyone to stardom, but it's the perfect sort of breezy comedy that will go down easy as exhaustion sets in.
12:45am - Night of the Living Dead (1990, dir. Tom Savini)We should still watch some horror during our overnight, and while I could probably program George A. Romero's original zombie classic into this spot I'd kind of like to rewatch Tom Savini's 1990 remake, which I checked out back in October when Sony released the uncut 4K (it's not very different) and liked way more than I remembered. Tony Todd (RIP) is a particular standout as he so often was. The added gore doesn't amount to much, but there's a cool fade from black and white into color at the opening that has been restored and I'm happy to have a version closer to what Savini intended.
2:30am - Judgment Night (1993, dir. Stephen Hopkins)During the overnight section of our marathon, we should watch a movie about one of the worst overnights imaginable: being hunted down by Denis Leary in the scariest parts of Chicago and being friends with Jeremy Piven. This movie, once famous only for its soundtrack, has been rediscovered by the right kinds of audiences over the last 10 years and gained appreciated for what a effective thriller it is. It would probably be Stephen Hopkins' best movie if not for Predator 2. Hopkins bump!
4:30am - The Warriors (1979, dir. Walter Hill)One of the best One Night Only movies ever made, Walter Hill's dystopian street gang epic focuses on The Warriors, a gang framed for murder who have to get back to their turf in NYC as every other gang in the city hunts them down. It's literally one of the best premises for a movie ever, probably because it's based on a classical Greek text. The scene with Michael Beck and Deborah Van Valkenburgh on the train is one of my absolute favorites.
6am - Wet Hot American Summer (2001, dir. David Wain)This one doesn't need to take place over the span of a single day -- there's enough here to fill an entire summer -- but one of the jokes is that it does. Made mostly with members of the MTV sketch comedy group The State but adding heavy hitters like Janeane Garofalo, Amy Poehler, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Rudd (this was the movie that taught us all how funny he is), Wet Hot is, joke for joke, performance for performance, still the funniest comedy of the 2000s. We'll be laughing even harder than usual because we should, by now, be delirious.
7:30am - The Paper (1994, dir. Ron Howard)Ron Howard's most underrated movie, The Paper focus on a manic 24 hours in the life of an editor at the New York Sun (Michael Keaton) and the various people with whom he works (Glenn Close, Robert Duvall) and lives (Marisa Tomei). The 24-hour ticking clock isn't just a gimmick here but actually part of the plot, which involves Keaton desperately trying not just to get a story, but to get it right for the morning edition. While not one of the great journalism movies, Ron Howard does manage to conjure up a kind of electric energy and maintain it for the length of the film. It will be like starting our morning by chugging three Monster energy drinks, which doesn't sound half bad.
9:30am - Dazed and Confused (1993, dir. Richard Linklater)Showing this to one of my film classes recently is what inspired this list. Richard Linklater's ode to growing up in the late 1970s might possibly be the greatest hangout movie of all time. I resisted it for years because I thought it was little more than a stoner comedy, and while there is a lot of weed smoking in the film (a fact of which I became acutely aware while showing it to a class), that's more a period detail than a source of humor in the movie. The cast of future stars and familiar faces is insane, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall bangers (at least in the context of the movie; I wouldn't listen to a lot of these songs on their own), the details perfectly observed. The ending of this movie captures exactly the feeling I want to evoke at the end of our 24-hour marathon. Let's go get Aerosmith tickets.

Patrick and Adam Riske rose from nothing to rule everything.



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Also discussed this episode: The Drama (2026), Firewall (2006), Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006), Big Night (1996), As Good As It Gets (1997), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Fly Away Home (1996), Happily Ever After (1993), The Bride! (2026), The Face With Two Left Feet (1979), Dolly (2026)