The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release, and just in time for Halloween, we sit down with the inimitable film critic and essayist Bilge Ebiri to celebrate Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko.

Related reads:

Bilge's Vulture profile of Jake Gyllenhaal (March 2024)

Stupid Man Suit - Lindsey Romain on Donnie Darko (Issue #111, September 2022)

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Producer/Editor/Music: Chad Perman

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Support the show on Patreon!

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HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

This month, Chad and Elizabeth sit down with author Karina Wolf to discuss midlife crisis and Thomas Vinterberg's 2020 film, Another Round.

This month Chad and Elizabeth are joined by writer, producer, director, and showrunner Chris Cantwell (Halt and Catch Fire, The Terror: Devil in Silver)—an original BWDR contributor who also happens to be Elizabeth's husband—to take a deep dive into the 1990 Sean Connery classic, The Hunt for Red October.

You can read all 147 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room—including our current issue on Summer Blockbusters—here. We’re also on Bluesky⁠ @brightwalldarkroom⁠ and @bwdrpod, and welcome listener feedback or movie ideas for upcoming episodes!

To kick off our upcoming Summer Blockbusters issue, we invited longtime BW/DR contributor—and podcast five-timer!—Frank Falisi to help us work our way through Disclosure Day, the latest summer blockbuster from Steven Spielberg, the director who all but created the genre more than 40 years ago.

We get into: the ending (first, of course), empathy, aliens, camera movements, CGI animals, post-Fabelmans Spielberg viewing, are we alone in the universe, and more!

We're back, and just in time for summer blockbuster season! Join Chad Perman and new co-host Elizabeth Cantwell as they talk their way through one of the biggest/best summer blockbusters of all time, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, on the occasion of its 35th anniversary next month.

Not only is this Veronica and Eli’s last episode, it’s our fourth annual Cruisemas. With the release of One Battle After Another, we revisit Paul Thomas Anderson’s blank check big swing Magnolia (1999), and get into: young PTA and the New New Hollywood, sincerity and good listening, Phil Parma made Chad become a therapist, Fiona Apple as PTA’s Polly Platt, we desperately want a Tom Cruise coconut cake, life imitating art with Cruise’s Oprah interview, Melora Walters’ enigmatic smile, Magnolia trying to understand the same things as the Bible, the bleak prescience of ‘Seduce and Destroy,’ how to pace a 3+ hour runtime, and more.

Further reading: Roger Ebert’s “ecstatic” review, Lynn Hirschberg’s profile “His Way,” Steven Hyden on PTA and Fiona Apple for Grantland, and books from friends of the pod Adam Nayman (Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks) and Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson).

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast has been co-hosted since 2021 byVeronica Fitzpatrick andChad Perman, and produced byEli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad. Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room athttps://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/http://brightwalldarkroom.com, and thanks for listening.

Note: This episode was recorded days before the December 13 shooting at Brown University. Our thoughts remain with Veronica’s students and the entire community at Brown and beyond.

It’s officially fall when the NYFF finally ends. In this episode, Veronica sits down with Fran Hoepfner, Frank Falisi, and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 63rd New York Film Festival. This is a spoiler-free conversation.

We get into: Miroirs No. 3, The Mastermind, Late Fame, No Other Choice, With Hasan in Gaza, The Secret Agent, Peter Hujar’s Day, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, A House of Dynamite, Sirāt, Cover-Up, Duse, How to Bake a Cherry Pie

Plus: One Battle After Another, Alana Haim sighing, bringing Tupperware to critics screenings, the push to explicit politics in this year’s slate, film critics turned filmmakers, “actual jeers,” settler colonialist ravers, Magellan wasn’t long enough, the corona of fascism, Veronica hasn’t seen anything yet, and more.

Further reading & listening: Look out for more NYFF coverage on Eli’s podcast, Deep Cut. Find Frank at BWDR and Reverse Shot. Find Fran online at Vulture and ⁠Fran Mag.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted byVeronica Fitzpatrick andChad Perman and produced and edited byEli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can read every single issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room ⁠here⁠, including our most recent issue: ⁠Teachers⁠. We’re also on Bluesky⁠ @BWDR⁠ and welcome listener feedback & sponsorship inquiries at ⁠podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com⁠.

Happy 30th birthday to David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Joining us to celebrate is special guest Adam Nayman, Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of, among other books, David Fincher: Mind Games (2021).

We get into: boy movies, the intersections of art and trash, Fincher as mad designer and marketing guru, Veronica can’t do math, canceling Det. Mills, how a spark of ambiguity can incite a book-length study, the undersung editing of Richard Francis-Bruce, the undersung producing prowess of Michael De Luca, what is and is not in the box, and more.

References: Tony Zhou on David Fincher (“And the Other Way is Wrong”), Richard Dyer’s BFI book for Seven, and of course, Adam’s terrific book on Fincher, Mind Games, from Little White Lies/Abrams Books.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted byVeronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, and produced byEli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

Find all 142 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room atbrightwalldarkroom.com, and please consider subscribing to the site, which directly helps support this show!

We welcome feedback, inquiries, and sponsorship opportunities at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.

Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back to the podcast Michael Koresky (listen here to his first visit, discussing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence). Michael is MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, out now from Bloomsbury.

Michael joins us to talk about a film from that book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the ‘perfect murder’ cocktail thriller best known for its deceptive formal gambit (shot continuously with “no” cuts) and spectral queerness.

We get into: ways around the Production Code, that Technicolor sunset, Farley Granger’s offscreen persona, Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust doc, the film version of trompe l’oeil, teaching classical Hollywood in a contemporary classroom, the lesser-seen These Three (1936) and Crossfire(1947), and more.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted byVeronica Fitzpatrick andChad Perman, produced byEli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can read all 141 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room—including our current Jonathan Demme issue!—athttps://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/.

Feedback and/or sponsorship inquiries: podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.

For a taste of summertime sadness, we look at a pick from curator Christos Nikou (Apples [2020] and Fingernails [2023]): Mike Mills’s semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010).

We get into the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as metaphor for life.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ and⁠ Chad Perman⁠, and produced by⁠ Eli Sands⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Discover more at ⁠Galerie.com⁠.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Bilge Ebiri—the man, the myth, the legend—joins us to bookend our discussion of all things Mission: Impossible from a couple of summers ago, on the occasion of the final (?) film of a nearly 30 year franchise.

We get into: the perils of Cruise-dom, building an extension on a plane you've already built, Luther!, missing Rebecca Ferguson, decompression chambers & gel manicures, Benji Impossible, no closure, loving these movies, and more.

Relevant reading:

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess. - Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine

How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star - Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly

Where Does Tom Cruise Go From Here? - Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

The Entity: On the Technologies of Late Cruisedom - Jadie Stillwell, Bright Wall/Dark Room

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by⁠⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠⁠ and⁠⁠ Chad Perman⁠⁠, and produced by⁠⁠ Eli Sands⁠⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad (and remixed for this episode by Eli).

You can find every single issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at⁠⁠⁠ brightwalldarkroom.com⁠⁠⁠. We welcome comments and inquiries at ⁠⁠⁠podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com⁠⁠⁠.

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This episode is sponsored by ⁠Galerie⁠, a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for one month of free access to curated film lists, essays, live discussions, and more at ⁠galerie.com⁠, code: BWDR

This message will self-destruct in—

On this month’s bite-sized episode we're zooming in on a snappy/passionate moment from Ernst Lubitsch’s effervescent 1932 screwball comedy, Trouble in Paradise.

We get into: sex & pre-code cinema, eye-widening lines, wikipedia marriage math, Betty and Veronica vibes, the Lubitsch Touch, what does classy even mean?, how a perfect escapist film from 1932 works just as well in 2025, and more.

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Hosts: ⁠Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠⁠⁠ &⁠⁠ Chad Perman⁠⁠⁠

Producer: ⁠Eli Sands⁠⁠⁠

Music: Chad Perman

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Read the current issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room:

Community (Issue #140)

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This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Galerie⁠⁠, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.

To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit ⁠⁠Galerie.com⁠⁠ and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.

Pop quiz, hotshot: join us as we welcome back BWDR veteran and De Palma completist ⁠Travis Woods⁠ for a special conversation on one of our all-time favorites, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). We get into: repetition compulsion and classical Hollywood storytelling, Keanu’s peak hotness, Speed’s existential lessons, does Jeff Daniels close his eyes?, Mark Mancina’s love theme, what it means to “become bomb,” and more.

Further reading/viewing: Veronica’s ⁠BWDR essay on Speed⁠, the comprehensive ⁠50 MPH podcast⁠ on the making of Speed, and Keanu Reeves’s ⁠vision of a perfect day⁠. Find Travis at BWDR, and here’s another ⁠recent piece of his on David Lynch's Wild at Heart⁠ over at Southwest Review.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ and⁠ Chad Perman⁠, and produced by⁠ Eli Sands⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at⁠⁠ brightwalldarkroom.com⁠⁠. We welcome comments and inquiries at ⁠⁠podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com⁠⁠.

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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for one month of free access to curated film lists, essays, live discussions, and more at http://galerie.com, code: BWDR.

This month’s micro-episode takes us inside the mysterious, sensual brilliance of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, a curated pick from director Ezra Edelman:

"The idea of wanting to live with purpose, even if it’s someone else’s purpose—there’s just something so human about it."

We get into: the comfort of slow cinema that doesn't feel slow, the aesthetics of existential malaise, the virility of 70s'-era Nicholson, the intensity of traveling relationships, and more.

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Bonus Feature: We'll be hosting a special live discussion on The Passenger over at Galerie on May 20th at 3pm EST/12pm PST. We'd love to have you join the conversation!

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Hosts: Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠⁠ &⁠ Chad Perman⁠⁠

Producer: Eli Sands⁠⁠

Editor: ⁠⁠Buczar⁠⁠

Music: Chad Perman

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This episode is sponsored by ⁠Galerie⁠, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.

To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit ⁠Galerie.com⁠ and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.

This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién, author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses, where she recently started writing about “Movies That Fuck.” In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance. We get into: Roman Coppola’s practical effects, Keanu’s accent work, crossing oceans of time to find you, Michael Ballhaus (and whether this is the dark b-side of The Age of Innocence), Eiko Ishioka with the muscle armor and tiny glasses, do young people want to be turned on by the movies (or at all), and more.

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Further reading/viewing:

The Costumes are the Sets (a 15-minute doc on the film’s Oscar-winning costumes), and James Hart on the transformation of Dracula’s script.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is hosted by⁠⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠⁠ &⁠ Chad Perman⁠⁠, produced by⁠⁠ Eli Sands⁠⁠, and edited by ⁠⁠Buczar⁠⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

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This episode is sponsored by ⁠Galerie⁠, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.

To enjoy one month of Galerie for free—and then receive 50% off the next three months—visit ⁠Galerie.com⁠ and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.

This month's bite-sized episode zooms in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg's debut film, The Celebration (1998), one of Palestinian director/writer/producer Annemarie Jacir's curated picks.

We get into: Dogme 95, family gatherings as horror movies, the generative energy of stylistic constraints, dynamic chaos, ghostly POVs, and finding something in a film that's a little bit in excess of what the film seems to think it's doing.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is hosted by⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ &Chad Perman⁠, produced by⁠ Eli Sands⁠, and edited by ⁠Buczar⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

--

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club where you can chat directly with filmmakers, watch groundbreaking movies, and discover stories that bring you closer than ever to the craft and culture of cinema.

To enjoy one month of Galerie for free, and then receive 50% off the next three months, visit https://www.galerie.com/ and enter the code “BWDR” when you sign up.

In honor of guest Michael Koresky's new book announcement, we're revisiting this conversation with him from last summer about Steven Spielberg's A.I.

Michael's new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, will be out from Bloomsbury in June.

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Reverse Shot⁠ co-founder and editor, and Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image Michael Koresky joins us to proselytize Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).

Michael takes us back to being an intern in 2001, watching A.I. six times in theaters, how both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick do “sentimentality with a point,” Jude Law’s dialogue, parables of loss, and how this “unexpected sledgehammer” of 00s’ filmmaking sticks with him today.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by⁠ Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ and⁠ Chad Perman⁠ and produced and edited by⁠ Eli Sands⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can find all 135+ issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room online at⁠ brightwalldarkroom.com⁠. We're on Bluesky at @bwdr and @bwdrpod, and welcome feedback and inquiries at ⁠podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com⁠.

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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now enjoy 3 months of free access to Galerie by signing up ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

We’re back with an episode analyzing writer-director Aaron Schimburg’s Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man.

Joining us is critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi, co-founder of Garden State Lantern. We get into Adam Pearson’s Oscar snub and Sebastian Stan’s win, The Substance for boys, shooting in NYC, if you want to dance the mask, the humanism of karaoke, doing your life wrong, self-image as self-esteem, and what it means to never change a bit.

Further reading: Le Cinema Club’s interview with Aaron Schimburg, RogerEbert.com’s interview with Schimburg, Adam Pearson, and Sebastian Stan, and Screen Slate Podcast’s episode with Schimburg (and a few cameos from the film).

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings, and more athttps://join.galerie.com.
Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at https://brightwalldarkroom.com. Holy trinity: please give us a follow, rate the pod, give a review. We welcome feedback and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com. Happy new year.

Our first mini-episode of 2025 looks to one of director Andrew Haigh’s curated picks: Billy Wilder’s subversive farce Some Like It Hot.

We get into the unlikely modernity of Hot’s sexual politics, Orry-Kelly’s naked dresses, Wilder’s collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond, is this the greatest comedy of all time, and more.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted byVeronica Fitzpatrick andChad Perman, produced byEli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

--

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for three months of free access to Galerie's streaming library, curated film lists, essays, live screenings and more at https://join.galerie.com.

Be thankful we did your Gladiator II homework, rewatching Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 1 (2000) with amateur Russell Crowe historian Blake Howard.

This is a Gladiator II-spoiler-free conversation: listen as we get into Crowe kissing disembodied feet, Scott’s world-building, the technology of acting, Oliver Reed’s digitized face (RIP), is anything better than practical effects, expressionism vs. historical accuracy, and more. Gladiator: a good movie.

Further reading: here’s Gladiator cinematographer John Mathieson on returning to the sequel after 24 years.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for 3 months of free access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings, and more athttps://join.galerie.com.

You can find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room here. Holy trinity: please give us a follow, rate the pod, give a review. We’re on Bluesky at @BWDR and @BWDRPod, and welcome feedback & inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.