Christopher Nolan snuck into hollywood’s esteem with his own trojan horse promise to keep celluloid film alive, and deliver blockbuster event movies for the studios. Maintaining a strategic alliance with camera and theater licensor IMAX that began with his Batman trilogy, he’s anticipated an explosion in nostalgia for physical film and the big-scale exhibitions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and he (and IMAX) have scored big by emphasizing the novelty of the format.

It’s hard to believe Nolan could win bigger than taking home Best Picture with Oppenheimer, but the gods have truly favored his adaptation of a western literature pillar, Homer’s Odyssey. We gather to discuss how Nolan ultimately spent his blank check, and what the film’s success suggests about audiences and the industry.

Some Like It Unauthorized is going on break! We'll be back to talk film again later this year.

Link to the mentioned episode of the Film Formally podcast on Large Format Myths

Link to the mentioned episode of Shelved by Genre about the history of epic literature

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Join us for a discussion of the life and work of one of Italy’s most well known and most controversial filmmakers, whether you’ve seen all his films or never even heard his name.

We touch on the history of italian cinema post-WWII, the nature of celebrity and scandal, and some of Pasolini’s films about pimps (Accattone), prophets (The Gospel According to Matthew), and the depraved (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom).

The mentioned review of Salò by Kyle Faulkner

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The ‘70s saw a new explosion of horror in the US, where the kinds of excessively violent and grotesque films previously restricted to small regional releases were seeing greater national success. The gulf was closing between a studio release like The Exorcist, and independent releases like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Dario Argento’s Deep Red, his first crossover success in the US in ‘76. His follow up, Suspiria, would be released in the US through an imprint by 20th Century Fox, and its reputation as an incomparable occult fantasia would place it in the company of oddities like The Holy Mountain and Eraserhead.

On this episode, we discuss our relationships to horror, giallo, and other strains of underground films. Afterwards 48:14 Zach shares his 5 albums from ‘77 to check out.

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and Obsession (2025) from Curry Barker

Two horror films from first-time filmmakers are topping the box office, and we convened to compare them and discuss where contemporary horror succeeds and fails. Do we think Kane Parsons is poised to take over hollywood, or be a flash in the uncanny pan?

Spoilers for Backrooms throughout, spoilers for Obsession after 42:10

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When Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky were serving in WWII, television had yet to become the ubiquitous sight in every living room. Back home, folks were still going to the newsreel theaters to follow the war effort abroad, and in the UK, Chayefsky was putting on plays to entertain the fellow troops (Lumet had acted all through childhood but found himself stationed in SE Asia repairing radios instead of strutting the stage). In the years following the war, both men would find their showbiz breaks in the burgeoning TV broadcast industry, and both would translate that experience into filmmaking careers.

We find them in ‘76 joining forces to reflect on the medium they helped to legitimize, and on this episode, Zach and J Brooks are teaming up to interrogate the film’s reputation 50 years later. In the spirit of the movie, we also hash out our conflicted feelings about the podcast medium and internet media in general.

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Despite being a director phenom that won awards straight out of film school with her first film Heat (1963), Larisa Shepitko would soon learn that her conviction for telling grounded stories about ambivalent characters would not make her popular with state production committees and censorship boards in those soviet times. She was only in her early 30’s when she suffered a severe spinal injury and, while bedridden, read Vasil Bykaŭ’s WWII novel Sotnikov and felt a connection between the characters’ existential plight to survive the war physically and her own newfound spirituality when faced with her own mortality. Her final film, The Ascent, would be a harrowing reminder of what was lost in that war, and a universally applicable story of the search for solace in life and in death. Before she could begin shooting another film, Shepitko died in a car accident at 41 years old.

We discuss the ways the film upends expectation and we tackle its big questions about meaning, randomness, and moral judgement.

49:48 - And then we discuss Zach’s recommended albums to listen to from 1976!

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It’s time to talk about Travis Bickle. Paul Schrader, fresh out of film school and freshly divorced, wrote a script about what can happen to the isolated american man, and when paired with the maestro Martin Scorsese, this strange film about our assassination nation became a box office hit and a Best Picture nominee. We talk about the film’s cultural legacy, why it became canonized in the decades afterwards, and what it’s like to revisit such a ubiquitous film. Other topics include: porn theaters, composer Bernard Herrmann’s career, and why Quentin Tarantino takes issue with the film.

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Heeeere’s Barry!

We last left Kubrick after his nuclear comedy blew critics and audiences away, and in the ‘70s we find him continuing to tackle hefty subjects with a devilish glee and a love of irony. His adaptation of a canonical English novel is garnering him critical focus and oscar nominations once again, but for decades after, Barry Lyndon will be one of his less acknowledged films.

On this episode, we take the opportunity to discuss the Barry legacy, both its influence and its reappreciation as of late, and find ourselves questioning how letterboxd (and a wider accessibility to films in general) changes our perspective on boys like Barry.

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A veteran of WWII and a veteran of film and television by the time the hays code was lifted, Robert Altman only became a director of note in 1970 when he took full advantage of the changing attitudes at the studios, the burgeoning ‘new hollywood’ era, and made the most cynical and degenerate comedy about the US military anyone had yet seen, a surprising s-M*A*S*H hit. Overnight, he had a calling card and a newfound lease on life creatively, and what followed was an industrious career of riskier and riskier swings. The most critically well-remembered today is his country music tableau Nashville, and on this episode we journey down south to discuss the many tricks of the trade that Altman employed to make this sui generis epic hangout film, and how it sums up the cultural hegemony (and violence) of twentieth century America.

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The big question since the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound Top 250 List was published, that no one has answered satisfyingly, is simply: why Jeanne Dielman? We watched Chantal Akerman’s film for the first time, and now, we’re talking about whether it lives up to expectations, and trying to answer the big question by examining how the gender politics of the ‘70s recontexualized film history and laid the groundwork for a young woman from Brussels to make her mark on the medium.

Afterwards (1:15:51), Zach shares his 5 albums from 1975 to check out.

We’re on substack now! Read Zach’s piece about the ubiquity of vampyres in 2025 movies

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Though he was present in the heyday of Cahiers du Cinema, that contrarian film review mag where the biggest names in french new wave would ferment and develop their eclectic taste, Jacques Rivette had a lot more false starts on his way to directing films full time. Rather than endearing himself to wide audiences, he endeared himself to actors, and fostered an improvisational style almost akin to Cassavetes, but frencher. Next to the behemoth Out 1, Céline et Julie vont en bateau stands as his most celebrated work today, a low-budget madcap farce with few analogs in film history. 

Zach and J Brooks Go Podcasting with a pair of opposite reactions to this french meta fantasy. We discuss the french new wave in its late stages, what sets Rivette’s style apart, and why his films have risen in esteem over the decades. Questions arise of whether art is political or whether it must be approached politically, and if the joke’s on us.

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Filmmaking genius or fraud provocateur? The work of John Cassavetes has been the subject of unending adoration and extensive dissection ever since the actor picked up a camera in NYC in the late ‘50s and joined the likes of Jonas Mekas and Shirley Clarke in the burgeoning independent film scene. Almost instantly, he became a cult figure to cinephiles in the know, and while he would go on to make some films for the major studios, his housewife-on-the-edge vehicle for his wife Gena Rowlands could garner no interest from a single studio or distributor. After eventually self-funding, the film would instead go on to be Cassavetes’s biggest hit, an oscar nominee, and a film forever in the critical pantheon.

On this episode, we discuss the film’s loudest naysayer, Pauline Kael, and why the Cassavetes style remains divisive. We also discuss what his imitators get right and get wrong, second-wave feminism, and what the film itself says about the experience of women in the nuclear family.

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30-some feature films. 24 plays. 3 tv miniseries. Many drugs, many relationships. Dead at 37. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a chaser (in more ways than one), and remains among that rare class of film artists that turned cinema into a verb, into an ongoing process and processing of the world around him. What’s astounding is that his films, while so specific to postwar german society, have a universal resonance that makes them just as worthwhile today.

In talking about his most well-regarded film about the unlikely romance between a moroccan immigrant and an older german woman, Angst essen Seele auf, we untangle the association with Douglas Sirk’s hollywood films, how Fassbinder broke new ground with subjects under-seen in movies, and how immigration and xenophobia remain so fraught in the age of nation-states.

Afterwards (56:00), Zach shares 5 albums from 1974 worth listening to.

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If Godard and Truffaut busted down the door for a new generation of french filmmakers, Jean Eustache followed them in and stood in the corner and received little attention. After making a few docs and shorts, he finally made a bid for cinematic immortality with this first-person-epic (longer than Jeanne Dielman!), La Maman et la Putain. It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, the avatar-du-jour for many autobiographical directors, and in this episode we compare Eustache’s film with another experimental french film featuring Léaud’s antics, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. Why do these films now reside on the Sight and Sound Top 250? We sort out our very different reactions to the Eustache film, talk about his life and philosophy, and grapple with how alien this caustic ‘70s behavior feels today.

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George Lucas’s breakout Best Picture nominated film reanimated a time barely a decade past, 1962, before a generation of boys went to Vietnam, before rock and roll went psychedelic, and before baby boomer nostalgia was an entire industrial complex. Less melodramatic and more laid back than the teen films of his youth, American Graffiti was exactly realistic enough, misogynist warts and all, to catch fire at the box office and set the template for the teen hangout genre.

On this episode, we discuss the film’s strengths and weaknesses with the hindsight of today, the consequences of american car culture post-WWII, and the new hollywood savviness of guys like Lucas and Coppola, and what it means to consciously chase mainstream success.

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It’s time to talk Víctor Erice. It’s time to talk bees. On this episode, we examine this legendary spanish film’s reputation and the filmmakers that influenced ‘70s dream cinema, and we consider what the Frankenstein and beehive metaphors have to say about social rigidity and childhood fluidity. In addition, we dive into some albums coming out in 1973, from funk to krautrock to reggae, and everywhere in between.

2:20 - Spirit of the Beehive discussion

57:10 - Zach’s 5 albums to check out from ‘73

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Early 1971, young upstart director Francis Ford Coppola, who had already founded his own independent production company to sidestep studio meddling and had recently produced George Lucas’s debut feature THX 1138, was weighing the offer to direct the adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel, a project that was ostensibly Paramount’s, and particularly the vainglorious Robert Evans’s, baby. It was exactly the for-hire scenario Coppola didn’t want to be in, but good friend Lucas, after his film financially flopped, encouraged Coppola to cash them checks and ensure their future projects. Coppola took the job, and the rest is history.

In this discussion, we share perspectives on toxic masculinity and the fandom of the franchise, the origins of the modern mob/crime drama and why this film took the world by storm in ‘72, and what the story says about capitalism and american assimilation.

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We react LIVE to the 2026 Oscar Nominations, giving you our honest, unauthorized opinions on all the nominated films and the shameful snubs.

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EndadaYear! Hosts Zach Domes and J Brooks Young reveal each of their Top Ten Films of 2025, and the 1st ever cumulative Some Like It Unauthorized Top Ten Official Official Best Films of the Year. In a year of aliens and monsters, political radicals and ping pong players, which film will be crowned the totally not arbitrary best of the best? Listen to find out! Or watch on youtube!

Additionally, we revise our chronological watchlist of 485 films from cinema’s history by selecting the final 15 films to round off the list at 500. Our project, which has been ongoing for over two years, is for both of us to watch every single film on this list, and upon completion, become Experts in Film History. Listen in to hear what we decide must be watched to better understand the medium of film, whether it’s an unsung cult masterpiece or Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot, and hear what each of us, movie draft style, is gonna force the other sibling to watch.

1:37 — Top Ten Countdown

44:00 — Honorable Mentions

55:55 — Movie Draft of the final additions to our History of Film list

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The year ended not with a bang, but with the ping and the pong of that little ball of energy Timmy Chalamet bouncing across the silver screen in Josh Safdie’s new film. Topics include: the rise of the Safdie/Bronstein anxiety wave of films, the adoption of these films by the awards voters, and a segue into the 60s avant-garde and what radical filmmaking looks like today.

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