Bored by the Oscars? In this episode of Notes From the Back Row, Jenna, Veronica and Carlo make up their own awards show and categories in order to award the movies that mattered.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, it’s a double feature of Le Notti Bianche and The Science of Sleep–two films that can offer some therapeutic soul deflation to counteract the pressures of the day.

Carlo is here, in living color, with a brand new video essay on Shaw Brothers’ The Vengeful Beauty (1978), a proto-girls with guns movie.

In the latest episode of Notes From the Back Row, Dan and Carlo discuss some older, lesser-known hidden-gems they watched for the first time last year.

Contrary to the somewhat giddy title, this is not a happy double feature. Both Burning and The Vanishing center around male protagonists trying to find a woman who has mysteriously disappeared.

Dan Gorman lists his favorite new-to-him films of 2018, including a whole lot of Robert Wiseman documentaries and live-action cartoon C.H.O.M.P.S.

To simply rattle off the movies I enjoyed, and the reasons why, would be too safe and too shallow. What follows is not a list of my favorite movies this year but rather an examination of one obvious, omnipresent theme: desperation.

In 2018 I watched 326 films, with around 41 of those being 2018 releases. Unfortunately, while I enjoyed many 2018 movies, very few stood out as outstanding to me.

You watch 700+ movies, what do you get? Another year older and closer to death.
Whoa, that got dark. Anyway… Yay movies!

You can dress it up in stars and glamour but at some point you’ll realize the sunny dream of Los Angeles is really just made of plaster and plyboard like the rest of it. Play It As It Lays and Ingrid Goes West both feature protagonists who figure that out a little too late.

Since La Dolce Vita premiered, we've been treated to so many versions and variations of this story, all with varying degrees of glitz and sadness. While there have been no direct remakes, there has been a pretty impressively diverse group of films that have been inspired by it.

You may be surprised to find out that 8 1/2 and 9 1/2 Weeks have more in common than their sequential titles; they’re both approaches to art-making about approaching art-making.

This week on the podcast: Dan, Jenna and Veronica take a compare-and-contrast look at the original Suspiria, as well as the 2018 companion piece.

With the character of Dr Klemperer, Luca Guadagnino and David Kajganich make an assumption of guilt that should be unpacked. In weighing the insinuations of this storyline, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi comes to mind.

Movies spend a lot of time ruminating on how much of who we are is inherent and how much is learned. Yet the films Good Manners, The Woman, and Spring ask us: what if nothing about us is a choice?

“All day I face the barren waste / Without the taste of water, cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry / And souls that cry for water, cool, clear, water.”

“The worst animated feature film of all time.” Argle-bargle or foofooraw? We find out!

This week on Notes From the Back Row, we are talking about every Saturday Night Live feature-film ever! Strap in, it’s going to be bumpy!

There are scores of horror movies that follow formulas, rules, and tropes to the bitter end. Even with the 2018 glut of art house horror, plenty of familiar aspects linger. To really see beyond the rainbow on this one, we need to look to experimental horror.

It's the Halloween episode of Notes From the Back Row! We're discussing everything from horror franchises, teen horror, horror comedies and VHS horror.