Have you ever thought of watching movies as a spiritual practice? Abby Olcese’s book Film for All Seasons: Experiencing the Church Year at the Movies explores this idea by taking the stories that inspired the church calendar and connecting those occasions with films that explore similar themes. In this interview,…
With The Terminal, Tom Hanks rejoins Steven Spielberg for their third collaboration and certainly their most lighthearted to date. This film represents some of the worst and best of Spielberg. It is charming and fun at times with its fun cast and remarkable set. But it is also weighed down…
The 2025 Oscars are here! With the ceremony coming up this Wednesday, I went through all the categories from production to design to cinematography to the big categories of acting, directing, and best picture. Some categories like lead actress, editing, and animated feature are pretty tough to choose this year.…
What do you get when you combine the star studded power of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks with the blockbuster filmmaking genius of Steven Spielberg with a globe-trotting, fast paced crime drama? Turns out you get a really good and entertaining movie in Catch Me if You Can! During our…
The stardom of Tom Cruise might have been at its peak in the 80s and 90s, but his steady work throughout his career shows that he has that timeless star quality that people go to the movies to see. He has moved from fatherless son to protective father personas; he…
Minority Report feels like the deepest dive into hard sci-fi that Steven Spielberg has ever attempted, and it is also his first collaboration with fellow Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise. That combination makes for an interesting conversation in this episode as we discuss everything from working with a star to inventive…
While artificial intelligence has burst on the scene as a huge cultural topic in recent years, there is a long history of AI stories in film. This week, we do a movie draft of films dealing with artificial intelligence. We talk about the ways the films we choose explore the…
With A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg dove headfirst into sci-fi storytelling more than he ever had before. With incredible production design, another great child performance for Spielberg in Haley Joel Osment, a pinocchio infused, existential sci-fi story, and especially the Stanley Kubrick collaboration, this was an incredible feat even for…
It is a new year, and we could all use a bit of inspiration. So, this week I share my Top 5 Inspirational Movies list along with Melvin from Cinematic Doctrine. This is obviously not the definitive list of inspirational movies, but it is a collection of films that have…
Largely considered the best (or one of the best) WWII movies ever made, Saving Private Ryan showed that Spielberg could make just about any kind of movie and do it masterfully. We talk about how he pulled it off, his collaboration with Tom Hanks, the themes of war movies, that…
If you are like me, you likely grew up watching Disney Animated Classics! There are a ton of great ones from early films like Snow White and Pinocchio to more recent additions like Moana and Encanto. In this movie draft, we battle it out for our favorite Disney classics to…
This is a rerun of a movie draft we did of films in the Top 100 of all-time worldwide box office earnings back in Episode 3. It makes for an interesting draft because the list is surprisingly bereft of really incredible movies with a few exceptions. You are mostly choosing…
When December rolls around, it is time to start watching Christmas movies! It has been a joy to grow my little family with our own little Christmas traditions, and movies are a big part of that. So, this week, continuing my family Chritsmas movie favorites series, I bring on my…
Growing up, watching Christmas movies was always a part of our family tradition. This week, I am joined by my mom and sister to hear to hear about their favorite Christmas movies. They also share the favorites of my dad and brother-in-law who were not able to come on. I…
What is better at Christmas time than cozying up with your family for a great Christmas movie?! While we can’t really do that on a podcast, I thought I would spend the next few weeks with my family hearing about their favorite Christmas movies. This week, I am joined by…
Happy Thanksgiving! This week, we are playing a rerun of the movie draft we held all the way back on episode 2 of the show with Jacob Phillips: the Movie Sequels Draft. This was a really fun draft! I hope you enjoy revisiting it or hearing it for the first…
A new era of Spielberg’s career was launched when he partnered with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to start a brand new studio from scratch: DreamWorks SKG. I talk through the history of this endeavor and what it means for Spielberg’s career. I also do a bonus review of the…
Spielberg’s Amistad, the telling of a true historical event in which enslaved Africans took over their slave ship and were then captured and put on trial to determine their freedom, has some things going for it. It looks great, the acting is really good (phenomenal, in fact, for Djimon Hounsou…
Sometimes critics or the general public get a movie wrong! This week, we let you know which movies deserve reconsideration or a revisit with our Top 5 Underrated Movies. These are movies that were critical flops or just considered not very good by the general public but that we thought…
A few years after the most successful year of his entire career, Spielberg released what he called his first true sequel in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Our discussion revolves around the fun elements of this film and it’s development as well as some of the major problems with its…
Joe George is a writer for several publications including Den of Geek and Think Christian, but he also wrote a book exploring superhero movies through a theological lens: The Superpowers and the Glory. This week we discuss his process for writing about pop-culture, his interest in superheroes and what he…
Schindler’s List is almost undeniably Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, the pinnacle of his career, and releasing just 6 months after the record breaking Jurassic Park. However, it didn’t come without its struggles on an emotionally charged set or its controversy over its depiction of the Holocaust. We talk about all of…
Sometimes science goes all wrong, and sometimes that happens in movies! This week we do a draft of our favorite movies where some sort of scientific endeavor goes all wrong, whether technological, biological, or sometimes both like in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park which inspired this draft. We had a great time…
In 1993, Steven Spielberg once again awed audiences by giving them something they had never seen so real before on the big screen: dinosaurs. With Jurassic Park, he started what would turn out to be one of the greatest movie years for a director ever, started a technological revolution in…