Four Play

John McTiernan directed Die Hard and Predator, and MonteCristo has now made this show cover three of his films. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin close out the recently departed arc with The Hunt for Red October, and the episode opens with Thorin calling for an intervention on MonteCristo's film picks before Richard pulls out two physical pages of handwritten notes on the first fifteen minutes alone.

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Tim Curry said on the record, many times, that his favorite film to work on was not The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it was not Clue. It was Muppet Treasure Island. So in the Recently Departed arc, Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin sat down with a 1996 children's musical and found it was better than any of them remembered.

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Dolly Parton's film debut made $100 million in 1980 and almost nobody has watched it since. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin sit down with "9 to 5" as part of the Recently Departed Arc, and Thorin opens by calling it the worst film the show has ever covered, worse than The 13th Warrior.

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John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" is not based on a single H.P. Lovecraft story, and it may still be the best Lovecraft film ever made. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin argue that a 1994 horror movie nobody funded for years understood cosmic horror better than every official adaptation that came after it.

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Primer cost $7,000. Shane Carruth wrote it, directed it, produced it, starred in it, edited it and scored it, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and then more or less disappeared. Twenty years later it is still the most realistic time travel movie ever made, and nobody understands it on the first watch.

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Edge of Tomorrow cost $178 million, made $381 million, and stars two of the most famous actors alive. It arrived in 2014 alongside Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar and Gone Girl, and vanished. Everybody who has seen it loves it. Almost nobody has seen it.

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12 Monkeys made $170 million in 1995. It stars Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt got an Oscar nomination for it. Almost nobody talks about it anymore, and there is no good reason why.

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A beloved family film opens with a main character machine-gunned by Libyan terrorists in a mall car park, and spends its second act on a teenager talking his own mother out of being attracted to him. Back to the Future is much stranger than its reputation, and it is still close to a perfect movie.

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Thorin has been teasing The Prestige on Four Play for over a hundred episodes. It is his favorite film of all time. MonteCristo and Richard Lewis think it is Nolan's best. Twenty years after it came out and quietly underperformed, the critics ranking his catalog after The Odyssey are arriving at the same place.

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Richard Lewis turned Tenet off three times. On the fourth attempt he finally made it to the end, and he came out calling it an unfairly maligned film.

That is the story of this episode. Thorin picked Tenet expecting a bloodbath, hoping to be the lone defender of Christopher Nolan's most divisive movie. Instead Richard converted, MonteCristo landed somewhere in the middle, and the argument turned into something more interesting: is a film allowed to be incomplete after one viewing? Thorin's position is that Tenet is the only movie ever made that genuinely requires a second watch, because the first time through you are only seeing one side of a temporal pincer movement.

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Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey spent a year being called woke by people who never opened the poem. Then it opened to $264 million worldwide and a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin recorded this one last, after filming an entire Nolan arc worrying on camera about what he would do to Homer. All three landed between a seven and an eight, and all three reached the same verdict: the loudest critics exposed themselves. Calling the non-linear structure a betrayal means you never opened a poem that starts in the middle. Emily Wilson has publicly disowned Nolan's version. And Elliot Page is playing Sinon, not Achilles.

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Inception is a nearly perfect film. It reinvented the summer blockbuster, proved a two-and-a-half-hour original movie about dream architecture could nearly make a billion dollars, and it's the reason Christopher Nolan gets to do whatever he wants in Hollywood. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo kick off the Christopher Nolan arc with his best original film, the Hans Zimmer score that might be the best since Gladiator, and the one flaw that reveals a fundamental limitation in everything Nolan makes.

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Thorin thinks Paranoia Agent sucks. MonteCristo and Richard think it's an 8 out of 10 and one of the most prescient pieces of media ever made about the internet. This is not a polite disagreement. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo spend 90 minutes arguing over whether Satoshi Kon's only TV series is a masterpiece of social commentary or everything wrong with anime condensed into 13 episodes.

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Christopher Nolan has never mentioned Paprika. Not once. The dream heist machine, the corridor where people fall through shifting gravity, the entering of dreams to steal information, the characters who are shockingly similar. Inception came out in 2010, the same year Satoshi Kon died of pancreatic cancer at 46. He never got to respond. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why Paprika is the masterpiece Inception borrowed from, why Kon might have been the best director of the 21st century, and why almost nobody has seen the proof.

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Everyone's seen Spirited Away. Everyone's seen Princess Mononoke. Almost nobody has seen the 1984 Miyazaki film that's better than both of them. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the pre-Studio Ghibli masterpiece that handles environmentalism with more intelligence and nuance than anything Miyazaki made after it.

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The Wachowskis walked into a studio with a copy of Ghost in the Shell and said "we want to do that, but for real." Four years later, The Matrix made a billion dollars. Ghost in the Shell made nothing on release. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why the 80-minute anime the Wachowskis ripped off is deeper, smarter, and more relevant in the age of AI than the franchise it spawned.

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There is a sentiment going around that Akira is mid. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo are here to tell you that the internet is wrong, but also that the people who told you it was a flawless 10 out of 10 masterpiece were wrong too. The truth is more interesting than either side.

Akira's animation is a genuine 10 out of 10. Nothing from 1988 looks like this. Almost nothing from 2026 looks like this. The craftsmanship is immaculate, every frame hand-drawn with a fluidity and detail that makes anime produced a decade later look cheap by comparison. The soundtrack is spectacular. The world-building drops you into Neo-Tokyo without a single line of exposition. You don't even hear the word "Akira" for 50 minutes in a movie called Akira.

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Open Range (2003) proves Robert Duvall can carry a western on his back — even when Kevin Costner is standing right next to him.

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A Civil Action has the most stacked cast of any movie you've never seen. Robert Duvall, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Tony Shalhoub, John Lithgow, William H. Macy, and Stephen Fry. It's a 6.5 out of 10 film elevated to must-watch by performances alone. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why Duvall's Harvard defense attorney is the best thing in the movie and why the movie itself can't keep up with him.

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Robert Duvall wrote it, directed it, and delivered his career-best performance in it. The Apostle is a $5 million Southern Gothic character study about a charismatic Pentecostal preacher who murders a man with a baseball bat at his own children's Little League game, flees to small-town Louisiana, and builds an entirely new congregation from scratch. He is a wife-beater, a womanizer, a killer, and a true believer. There is no rug pull. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why this is the most honest film about faith Hollywood has ever made.

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