The Next Picture Show

With the 98th Academy Awards around the corner, we are breaking format this week to register the Next Picture Show's recommendations to the Academy of who should take home Oscar gold. Join us as three critics with competing tastes attempt to find consensus for this podcast's official endorsement for a single winner in all the major categories.

Please share your thoughts about this year's Oscar nominees, winners, ceremony, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.

Next Pairing: Maggie Gyllenhaal's THE BRIDE! and Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE

This episode is presented by⁠ Regal Unlimited⁠⁠, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. Use code NEXTPIC26 for 15% off.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights is full of stylistic provocations — skin walls, bed eggs, and light BDSM among them — but whether they are in service of, or distractions from, a bigger idea about the source material is up for debate this week. The divided reactions to Fennell’s contemporized take on an oft-adapted classic are reminiscent of the love-it-or-hate it response that greeted Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet back in 1996, which we bring back in for Connections to examine the core romantic notions driving these two tales of doomed (and frequently soaking wet) love and/or lust. And in Your Next Picture Show we continue the Wuthering Heights adaptation discussion with a couple of recommendations that illustrate some of the different tonal directions this material can take.

Please share your thoughts about Romeo + Juliet, Wuthering Heights, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With its bold stylization, pop soundtrack, and provocative sensibility, Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights appeals to a contemporary audience so openly it can’t help but call to mind Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of another literary classic about doomed lovers, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Fennell citing it as a reference point for her film prompted us to revisit what made Lurhmann’s approach so enticing and/or annoying at the time, and consider how its maximalist mix of reverence and irreverence toward the source material — not to mention an ascendant Leonardo DiCaprio in peak heartthrob mode — has turned it into a generation’s formative Romeo and Juliet. 

Please share your thoughts about William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Wuthering Heights, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Raimi's new survival thriller Send Help is more overtly comedic and cartoonishly violent than the other film in this week's pairing of dueling castaway duos, but those qualities are both rooted in complimentary ideas about class, gender, and power. They're also both rooted in a baseline cynicism toward humanity that informs a lot of Raimi's work, as well as our discussion of Send Help, for which we are once again joined by cultural critic and friend of the show Charles Bramesco. Then in Connections we bring 1974's Swept Away back into the discussion to see how its sexual fantasy aligns with Send Help's revenge fantasy, and how both are shaped by these films' desert (or is it deserted?) island setting.

Please share your thoughts about Swept Away, Send Help, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.

Next Pairing: Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when two people on opposite sides of a power imbalance end up stranded together on a deserted island? Before that was the premise of Sam Raimi’s new comedic thriller Send Help, it was the setup for Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 romantic farce Swept Away, only with the genders reversed and the sexual and political provocation turned way up. So this week we’re joined by critic, friend of the show, and Wertmüller aficionado Charles Bramesco to sort through Swept Away’s overlapping layers of satire, metaphor, and titillation, in an attempt to pinpoint what the film is actually trying to say about gender and class relations.

Please share your thoughts about Swept Away, Send Help, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email or voice memo to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices