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A confession: When I first saw Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in 2011, I didn’t really get it. I liked it — was wowed by the imagery, moved by the music, and appreciative of the film’s long-range lens on human existence. I got into a squabble outside the movie theater with a quartet of retirees who thought “Tree” was the dumbest thing they’d ever seen — and certainly not the escapist Brad Pitt movie they’d paid their money for — because I felt they didn’t respect the art and enormity of what Malick was attempting. But I guess on some level the movie still seemed an attempt, rather than an achievement.

I don’t think so now. Great works meet you where you live and only when you’re ready. I was in a different place in 2011 than I am twelve years later, both emotionally and along the long string of a life. My kids were teenagers back then, were in peak rebellion, and maybe I came down on the crabbed Pitt/Nature side of the film’s equation, as opposed to the forgiving Chastain/Grace side. Or maybe my spiritual self was simply undernourished at the time; faithful readers know (and perhaps share) the exhalation and exploration that can happen once children are out of the house and there’s time to remember who you once were.

Or maybe it’s even simpler than that: That global and national events of the past decade have all of us thinking in more epic and/or apocalyptic terms than we’re used to. In any event, “The Tree of Life” now seems to me one of a handful of movies that could be called holy in the largest and most non-denominational sense, in that it forcefully, artfully, gracefully reminds us of the big picture and our essential/infinitesimal place in it; of the value of mercy (in dinosaurs as well as humans) and of the radical nature of love. And to those who have said, then and now, that the movie is “pretentious” — well, that word means either that an artist is trying too hard or that you’re just not looking hard enough.

My guest for this episode is Alex Winter, an actor and filmmaker who is best known in the popular culture as Bill of the “Bill and Ted” movies but who also has an acclaimed resume as a documentary filmmaker, with his well-received and -awarded Frank Zappa bio-doc “Zappa” (2020) and a series of docs on the perils of Internet technology, of which “The YouTube Effect” (available for streaming) is the latest. Alex is a NYU film school grad who can drop a Mizoguchi reference with the best of them; he brings a cineaste’s appreciation and a director’s insights to the discussion of this uniquely transcendent movie. “The Tree of Life” can be rented on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube and elsewhere — do yourself a favor and watch it on the biggest, most hi-def screen you can manage. This podcast is also streaming on YouTube with additional film clips.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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This was a delight: A deep-dish discussion of one of my favorite films of all time with one of my favorite young critics. Hunter Harris has written for GQ, New York magazine’s Vulture, and the New York Times, but it’s her pop culture newsletter “Hung Up” and its associated social media tendrils that had Forbes recently name Harris to its “30 Under 30” list of media up-and-comers. “Hung Up” has the energy and smarts of heyday-era Entertainment Weekly, a laugh-out-loud wit, and one of the best b*t meters in the business, and for a sixty-something critic who fell off the back of the zeitgeist truck ages ago, it’s a bulletin from the front lines of entertainment culture that doubles as a cheat sheet for alter kockers*.

Up to now, Hunter and I have mostly waved at each other in passing from across the Internet, but it turns out we both stan for the same Paul Thomas Anderson movie, the elegantly subversive, almost unbearably beautiful “Phantom Thread.” Because the film was billed as Daniel Day-Lewis’s final screen performance — as Reynolds Woodcock, a couturier in 1950s London who has a power-play love affair with his muse and model Alma, played by Vicky Krieps — it attracted a larger and perhaps more mainstream audience than is usual for PTA. That audience seemed baffled by a romantic melodrama that’s actually a dark comedy in disguise — a love story about two people who seemingly want to kill each other. That “Phantom Thread” plays these games under a veneer of the most luxuriant cinematic craft imaginable (the dresses! the camerawork! that score!) is part of its pleasure and definitely part of the joke.

As I wrote in my 2017 Boston Globe review, “At the heart of ‘Phantom Thread’ is a dance between two difficult people, embodied by a pair of actors at the absolute top of their game. Day-Lewis is an acknowledged alchemist, and Reynolds — foppish, temperamental, gifted, insecure — is a dazzlingly complete creation. That said, the generosity with which he allows Krieps to serve as the film’s center is remarkable and rewarded. The Luxembourg-born actress, a 10-year veteran of European film and TV, charts every subtle step of Alma’s transformation, from meekness to a godlike serenity that’s only a little terrifying.”

Factor in Lesley Manville’s Oscar-nominated performance as Reynolds’ officious sister Cyril — gatekeeper of both the House of Woodcock and her brother’s island of breakfast calm — and the echoes of such classics as Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” and “Phantom Thread” is an experience so lush that it teeters on the edge of the absurd. It’s rare and great fun when you get to talk about something you love with someone who knows and loves it as much as you do, and this week’s “Classics of the New Millennium” episode finds my guest and me wandering all over the force field of this remarkable piece of cinema. Is Barbara Rose (Harriet Sansom Harris), the drunken heiress deemed unworthy of a Woodcock gown, a figure of mockery or the film’s most tragic character? Are the (Oscar-winning) dresses high art or the high bourgeoisie’s idea of same? Is Alma a strong-minded heroine or a delusional psychotic? Do she and Reynolds deserve each other? Would anyone else have them? Come listen in as Harris and I untangle the warp and weft of “Phantom Thread.”

N.B. The movie is currently streaming on Netflix and for VOD rental on all the usual platforms. This podcast is also available on video on YouTube, with film clips. Audio-only listeners won’t be able to see the well-known photo of author Vladimir Nabokov with his wife Vera that I compare in the podcast to a shot in “Phantom Thread,” so I offer it to you here as a hint to the movie’s possible antecedents and gamesmanship.

Enjoy.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

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If you have never seen Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film “Paterson” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), now would be a very good time to watch it, with the world falling to pieces on a daily basis and your frazzled soul in need of a balm. If you’ve already seen “Paterson,” now would be a good time to watch it again. In fact, it would be entirely within the philosophy of this movie to watch it every day, as part of the cycle of quotidian events that turns like a bus driver’s steering wheel from morning to night. When I reviewed “Paterson” for the Boston Globe in January 2017 — two days before the Presidential inauguration of a certain orange-hued megalomaniac — I wrote:

“Paterson” is set in Paterson, N.J., and concerns a bus driver, played by Adam Driver, who is also named Paterson. Already you may be getting a sense of the resonant circular prayer wheel that is Jim Jarmusch’s new film.

Paterson the man is a poet — although most people don’t know it — and he takes his inspiration from the late, great William Carlos Williams, who did not live in Paterson the city (rather in nearby Rutherford) but who dedicated 12 years and five volumes to an epic poem called “Paterson.” If you pick up a copy of “Paterson” the poem, you may come across the repeated line: “Say it! No ideas but in things,” and that may be the best guide to what Jarmusch has achieved here. “Paterson” the movie is about the ordinary slipstream of our days — about all the stuff we touch but never notice — and also about life’s piercing, inexhaustible beauty when we do notice. Coming out at a time when the world seems both upside down and backward, watching this film feels like drinking from a cool, clear lake.

So maybe there’s never a time when the movie is not necessary. To talk about “Paterson,” I enlisted my old friend Glenn Kenny, who currently reviews films for the New York Times and RogerEbert.com, was one of the tent-poles of the sorely missed movie magazine “Premiere,” has written an excellent book on “Goodfellas,” and pens one of the more erudite movie blogs out there, “Some Came Running.” Glenn brings a wealth of knowledge about Paterson the city — he went to college there — and I bring an obsessive interest in Jarmusch the semi-intentional Zen filmmaker, which this particular movie (and “Broken Flowers”) (and “Dead Man”) (and “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai”) go a long way to making a case for.

You can stream “Paterson” on Amazon Prime or, with ads, on Amazon’s Freevee service. This podcast is also available in video form, with film clips, at the Watch List YouTube channel. I do hope you enjoy the discussion.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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One of the great pleasures of putting together the “Classics of the New Millennium” podcast series — I suspect it may have been the impetus all along — is that it gives me an excuse to revisit movies I may have liked or loved well enough when they came out but am now curious as to whether they’ll last. Many do, some don’t, and some deepen their grip with each passing year. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) felt like a film out of time in 2007 — hewing to no known cliches of Hollywood screenwriting or story structure, it seemed to have dropped in from a century earlier in look and feel and sound. Sixteen years on, it plays more than ever like a foundational American masterpiece, a movie that gets into the guts of what makes this country so terrible and great. It is about our twin engines of capital and religion — personified, respectively and unforgettably, by Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano — and about the families we idealize while leaving them behind in the dust of our ambitions. It’s a work of magisterial craft, from Robert Elswit’s uncannily period-appropriate cinematography to Johnny Greenwood’s yawing, vertiginous score — music from the bowels of the earth. And it’s proof, if you’re still looking for it, that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our true originals — a storyteller whose vision and rhythms are daringly his own. In a cowardly film industry addicted to imitating the last big thing, whatever that may be, this marks him as a radical, a revolutionary, a bomb-thrower, except that the bombs he throws are tales of empathetic monsters who bear more than a slight resemblance, if we’re honest enough to admit it, to the faces we see when we look in the mirror. Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” is my personal favorite of his works, and a movie I hope to get to in this series, but “There Will Be Blood” remains the one that convinced me and a lot of other people that here was a filmmaker to stand with the greatest narrators of the American drama and the human comedy.

The film is based, very loosely, on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” and can be easily found online: It’s streaming on Paramount+ and Hoopla and a $4 rental on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. My guest for discussing the film is the estimable New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, one of the smartest and most trenchant reviewing voices out there, and a friend and film festival colleague of many years standing. I hope you enjoy the conversation — we certainly had fun talking about the film. And thanks, Manohla, for prompting me to revisit a work that only improves with age.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

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You can give a paid Watch List gift subscription to your movie-mad friends —

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So, first off, I have to apologize: It’s Friday and I don’t have the usual What to Watch line-up telling subscribers about good movies in theaters or on VOD. What can I say? I had a busy week in dinosaur media: An appearance on NPR’s “Here and Now” to talk with host Robin Young about gifted child actors who grow up into good, not-insane adult actors, and two pieces for the Washington Post: An appreciation of the late, great Robbie Robertson that runs today (free link is here) and a 45th-anniversary celebration (sort of) of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” that will go up next week.

Anyway, it’s August and new-release pickings are traditionally slim during the dog days. Of movies opening in theaters and on demand today, I look forward to catching up with “Jules,” featuring Ben Kingsley and an alien, the cheeky British hair-salon horror movie “Medusa Deluxe” (in theaters and streaming), and “Red, White, and Royal Blue,” an Amazon Prime rom-com about a feud-turned-love affair between the President’s son and Britain’s (fictional) Prince Henry that sounds and apparently is so ridiculous as to be reasonably good fun.

If you’re still thinking deep thoughts about “Oppenheimer,” allow me to recommend Justin Chang’s excellent think-piece in the L.A. Times peeling apart the movie’s moral layers of representation and non-representation (free link is here).

Until next week, though, you’ll just have to make do with the latest podcast in the Watch List’s Classics of the New Millennium series, this one reuniting me with my good friend and Boston Globe work-BFF from 2002 to 2013, New York Times critic-at-large (and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner) Wesley Morris. When asked which movie he’d like to discuss, Wesley went straight to Spike Lee’s 2006 heist movie “Inside Man,” which stars Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Willem Dafoe, among others, and which prompted a lively discussion on genre, casting, and all things Spike. Have a listen up top or watch the video version below; the movie itself can be had as a cheap rental on all the usual streaming suspects should you want to watch or re-watch it ahead of time, which I recommend you do, because there are spoilers galore when Wesley and I get going. Man, I miss this guy.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

If you’re not a paying subscriber and would like to sign up for additional postings and to join the discussions, here’s how.

You can give a paid Watch List gift subscription to your movie-mad friends —

Or refer friends to the Watch List and get credit for new subscribers. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll:

• Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals

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• Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tyburrswatchlist.substack.com

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When was the last time you watched “No Country for Old Men” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐)? I saw it twice in 2007, the year it came out, and then two weeks ago while preparing for this podcast, and the intervening 15 years had cast a pall of dust on the experience of the movie that a revisit dispelled in a blast of bleak Texas wind. Is this the Coen brothers’ greatest two hours of film? I might argue that “A Serious Man” (2009 and a future candidate for this series) beats it by a nose, but we’re edging into personal preference here — both films show the merrie pranksters of indie film (or, as I like to think of them, the Sundance equivalent of Steely Dan’s Becker and Fagen) acquiring a cruel majesty and seriousness of purpose that had heretofore only been hinted at in “Fargo.” The Coens were known and beloved for their ironic, deadpan comedies, but the jokes in “A Serious Man” ascend to the level of Kafka, and “No Country” is as steady and unyielding as a myth. The movie’s basically three men in a desert landscape — three and a half if you count Woody Harrelson’s relatively brief appearance — but it plays like an epic on the death of the American soul, with a final cut to black that’s the equivalent of a coffin lid slamming shut.

Fittingly, my friend and critical colleague Isaac Feldberg and I talked about “No Country for Old Men” in the aftermath of Cormac McCarthy’s death on June 13. Of the author’s novels adapted to the screen, it’s hard to argue that this one isn’t the best, so true is it to the pared-down detail of the writing, its empathy and its juddering violence. The Coens are on record as saying they were drawn to the project because they felt McCarthy was a genre subversive like them — “No Country” is a western that short-circuits every cliche of the form — but the novel also served the brothers as a template for filmmaking techniques that by 2007 had been honed to a level of unparalleled invention and efficiency. You can watch this movie with the sound off and still be held in a fugue state of awe. But don’t do that: You’d miss the sociopathic purr of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, the hiss of his bolt pistol, and the mournful monologues of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who knows that the classic shootouts on Main Street have given way to random death out on the Miracle Mile.

“No Country for Old Men” is streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount+, and it’s available for VOD rental in all the usual places — give it a watch if it’s been too long and then listen to Isaac and me go down a rabbit hole of appreciation and analysis. (Or watch us on YouTube, if you’d prefer.) It’s a movie whose pitiless message of chance and fate in modern America whispers louder than ever.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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I’m so glad my friend and critical colleague Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s “Fresh Air” chose South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” as his pick for a great film of the 21st century. Justin brings to the discussion a deep knowledge of Lee’s filmography — I regret to say I’ve only seen 2010’s “Poetry,” which is remarkable — and a festival interview with the filmmaker under his belt. More to the point, he’s able to get under the skin of a movie that resists easy synopsis and interpretation.

Five years after its release in 2018, “Burning” is already edging toward the timeless: A powerfully ambiguous tale of love, eros, innocence, and simmering violence that has the bones of a thriller but the air of a cautionary existential fable. Based on a Haruki Murakami short story called “Barn Burning,” the movie departs from its source in critical ways, notably in more clearly hinting at what one of its three main characters — the sophisticated and possibly psychopathic Ben, as played (brilliantly) by Steven Yuen (“Minari,” “Nope”) — is actually up to. (Whatever it is, it ain’t burning greenhouses.)

In my 2018 Boston Globe review of the film, I wrote “‘Burning’ … is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It plays like one of Patricia Highsmith’s unsettling power-play suspense tales, but with the talented Mr. Ripley off to one side while his victim (or one of them) assumes center stage. … There are moments that defy categorization but that land with a mysterious, expanding hush. They can be as small as the smile and barely perceptible wink Ben gives Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) in a party scene, inviting him in on a joke the younger man doesn’t quite get. They can be as luxuriant and lengthy as a sequence at sunset at Jong-su’s farm, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) impulsively singing and dancing in the nude and then Ben confessing to awful doings as the light almost unnoticably fades away. The awful doings may in fact be a metaphor for something even more unspeakable. … “Burning” could be about metaphor, actually — about the way people make things stand in for other things, ideas for ideas, emotions for emotions, until the only way to cut through the abstraction is with obsession, or violence.

The film, if you haven’t seen it or would like to revisit it before or after listening to the podcast, is streaming on the Peacock Network and Kanopy and available for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. Justin’s and my conversation is also available to watch on YouTube, with a few “Burning” scene clips added. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

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It’s strange to realize that David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) came out in 2010 — it seems like it was just yesterday and it also seems like two centuries ago. Thirteen years on, and after a decade-plus of social and political upheavals that can in part be traced directly to Facebook, this first warning about where our social media was taking us and the nature of the people at the helm looks more depressingly on the money than ever. And yet it remains a crackling piece of entertainment — a movie that’s all talk yet never stops moving (not unlike social media) and a film about computer geeks that spends most of its time in the real world. Above all, it’s an early look at the toxic bro-men who have become our captains of industry while leading us by the nose into the dark. (Hello, Elon.)

“The Social Network” made major stars of Jesse Eisenberg (above right) and Andrew Garfield, and it provided career breakthroughs for Rooney Mara (above left) and, as the Winklevi, Armie Hammer. It’s most critically a story of how America’s traditional ruling class is helpless in the face of the new robber barons of Silicon Valley, and it’s probably the best, least annoying match-up of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and subject matter. (The characters are, for once, as smart and as glib as he is.) I’m delighted to discuss the movie with Odie Henderson, a longtime movie reviewer for rogerebert.com and, as of last October, my replacement as film critic at The Boston Globe. Odie is known for shooting from the hip, to say the least, but in addition to his wit and forthrightness, he also brings to this discussion decades of day-job work as a computer programmer and a working knowledge of the tech world depicted in the movie. In Odie’s words, “This is exactly what IT people are like. Except I think it made the Jesse Eisenberg character too nice.”

It’s one of the most illuminating and provocative Watchcasts yet, and I hope you give it a listen. If you’ve never seen “The Social Network” or want to revisit the movie before or after the talk, it’s streaming on Paramount+ and available for a $4 rental fee at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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It’s interesting when movies try to predict the near future, especially when you come back ten years later to see what they got right and what they got wrong. Spike Jonze’s “Her” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) came out in 2013 and painted a picture of a spooky brave new world right around the corner, where pant waists were higher, people dated their operating systems, and we all were lonelier than ever. The film was eerily prescient in some ways — it predicted Siri and our current debate over AI — and now seems dated in others. The hero’s job at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com? In 2023, that would be outsourced to ChatGPT. Still, there’s a lot to talk about with the movie I put atop my Ten Best list in 2013 — like, a lot — so I was glad my friend and critical colleague Amy Nicholson picked “Her” as her choice for a 21st century film classic. Amy’s good smart fun, and the conversation went in all sorts of directions: How to production-design a believable day after tomorrow, why “Her” is a great L.A. movie (and an even better future-L.A. movie), the diplomatic art of interviewing Joaquin Phoenix, “Garfield Minus Garfield,” and the near-perfect 1968 Kinks single, “Days.”

If you’d like to watch (or re-watch) “Her” before or after listening to the podcast, the movie’s a three-dollar rental at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. If you’d like to watch Amy’s and my conversation as well as listen to it, the YouTube version is below. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

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Armando Iannucci’s 2017 political comedy “The Death of Stalin” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, streaming and for VOD rental on various platforms) is not only a bona fide 21st century masterpiece but one of the few genuine satires to be put on film — satire in the Swiftian sense; satire that leaves a viewer as bloodied as the characters. Iannucci, best known in the US as the creator of “Veep” but beloved in his native UK for the government sitcom “The Thick Of It” and for the 2009 film “In The Loop,” has said he wanted to make himself and audiences extremely uncomfortable when he was turning the 1953 post-Stalin battle for succession into a farce, not so much of the slamming-door variety but the blithering-idiot kind. So we have gifted soft-shoe practitioners like Steve Buscemi as Nikita Krushchev, Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, and Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, but we also get Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police and a corpulent black hole of evil so unrepentant he can take your breath away. And while the wordplay and bustling character comedy may be worthy of Palin’s Pythons or a Preston Sturges classic, we are never allowed to forget the real deaths and depredations, the Kafkaesque perversion of language, and the paranoia and sycophancy that are daily life in an authoritarian state. Watching “Death of Stalin,” we laugh uproariously at the manipulations of these homicidal little bureaucrats, and then we choke on our laughter, in part because they’re closer than we’d like to think.

Needless to say, it’s not much of a date movie, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my original Boston Globe review occasioned a handful of huffy letters from readers who went to see “The Death of Stalin” and did not find it funny At All. And, in a very real sense, they’re correct. But, as my colleague and friend the film critic Sam Adams points out in this week’s WatchCast, the success of a true satire may actually be gauged by the number of people who don’t get the joke.

Have a look at the movie if you haven’t seen it already, and then listen to our discussion (or watch it on YouTube with extra visual aids!), in which we try to define the line between comedy and horror and marvel at how easily, how pitilessly Armando Iannucci is able to set up camp there. I wish he’d come back to America and make a satire about our current political state, but we may be well past satire by now. (And if you think I’m exaggerating, allow me to share this brief and relevant sound clip, shared with me by my podcast editor, of a recent comment from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in conversation with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie.)

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

If you enjoyed this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.

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Up to now, this podcast series has featured my fellow movie critics — colleagues in the trenches of the good, the bad, and “Cats” — but I’ve been wanting to get a filmmaker in here, and with Mason Daring, I have my chance. (There will be others, I promise.) Mason is a subscriber to the Watch List and an active participant in the comments sections, and over the past year and a half we’ve grown friendly. More to the point, the man is extremely accomplished in his field: As a composer, Daring has provided the scores for every one of John Sayles’ films — except, he says, for 1983’s “Baby, It’s You,” which was mostly Springsteen songs because the movie basically is a Springsteen song — as well as indie film classics like “Dogfight” (1991) and “The Opposite of Sex” (1998), big-budget Hollywood dramas like “Music of the Heart” (1999), and my wife’s favorite movie, “A Walk on the Moon” (1999). Lots of TV work, too. The theme for PBS’s “Frontline”? That’s Mason.

When I asked Daring which great film of the 21st century had a great score, or at least one he wanted to discuss and dissect, he chose “Michael Clayton,” Tony Gilroy’s 2007 dramatic thriller of corporate corruption and personal redemption that’s a high point in George Clooney’s filmography and the movie that won Tilda Swinton a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. (Tom Wilkinson, above left, got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role as a white-shoe attorney who goes spectacularly off the rails — a great performance that didn’t stand a chance in the year of “No Country for Old Men” and Javier Bardem’s fearsome Anton Chigurh.)

I’m delighted to spotlight “Michael Clayton,” which has held up beautifully as a no-frills, high-wire throwback to the 1970s moral thrillers of Sidney Lumet and Sydney Pollack (the latter of whom has a juicy part here as Clooney’s boss). Yet on revisiting the film for the first time in 16 years — it’s streaming on HBO Max and a three-buck rental from the usual suspects — I was struck by how minimal James Newton Howard’s music actually is. A civilian like you or I might pick as an exemplary score one that had lots of strings and brass, that announced itself at every plot turn — that John Williams-ed the hell out of everything — but that’s exactly why I was glad to have a composer on board to talk about the niceties of sound-design scoring and when traditional melody might get in the way. The following discussion is one of the most illuminating WatchCasts yet: A peek under the hood of a craft that may be at its best when we don’t notice it at all.

The original soundtrack album for “Michael Clayton” is available on Spotify and other music services if you’d like to have a listen before, during, or after the discussion. And, yes, the movie’s well worth a revisit, if only to smell the desperation wafting off Swinton’s general counsel and admire Clooney’s exhausted cool. This WatchCast is available as well on YouTube, where you get a couple of film clips as a visual aid. Enjoy the conversation — I certainly did.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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When Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” won the Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival — the first Romanian film to ever win the festival’s top prize — it was, among other things, a frightening look back to the 1980s, when abortion under the Ceausescu dictatorship was severely criminalized and women were forced into a predatory black market of back-alley abortionists. In 2023, of course, the film looks like nothing so much as the day after tomorrow in nearly half the states in our own country. So, yes, “4 Months” should be seen by every young woman (and man) (and politician) as a cautionary tale hovering ever closer to home, but as Dana Stevens and I discuss in this podcast, it’s also one of the great movies about friendship — about how far a woman might go to help a girlfriend in trouble, even if that girlfriend might be an unreliable pill — and about when simple human kindness starts to acquire a nobility all the more moving for going unrecognized. In the role of that friend, Otilia, the unforgettable Anamaria Marinca has the face of a shopworn Modigliani, and if you’ve seen the film, it’s likely the dinner party scene that sticks in your mind, Otilia surrounded by banal chatter as she gazes into the void where a society’s decency should be.

If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a $4 rental on AppleTV and Amazon and streaming at AMC+ and Kanopy. You may want to give it a watch before listening to this discussion between me and Dana Stevens, who has been a witty and erudite film critic for Slate since 2006 and who last year published the acclaimed biography/cultural history “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.” Asked to pick her favorite film from the new century, Dana chose “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days,” and she brings a sharp and empathetic eye to a movie that, sadly, is never not relevant .

Our conversation is available on YouTube as well with the addition of a few short clips.

Note: The Watch List will take a brief hiatus while I recover from a medical procedure. Nothing too serious, thanks, but I’ll be out of commission for a week or so.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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In January, when I was bunking with The Playlist’s Jason Bailey and another film critic at the Sundance Film Festival, I mentioned I was putting together a podcast series on the great movies of the 21st century — a topic sure to generate bitter and illuminating debate — and I asked what films they might choose were they to join me as guests. Without blinking an eye, Jason shot back “Ocean’s 11,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack Vegas heist flick and a hugely enjoyable movie that improves on its predecessor in every imaginable way, from script (there is one) to performances (ditto) to the exquisite but never flashy direction. Indeed (we agreed), here is a masterpiece of unobtrusive filmmaking craft that is also one of the great channel-surfing stoplights — if “Ocean’s 11” is on and you click upon it, you will almost certainly end up staying for the duration. Again.

Luckily for me and for you, Jason wanted to talk about the film at length. Here’s the conversation, and it’s great good fun, with many topics touched upon: The ground rules of the heist film (and when to break them), the hierarchies of Hollywood stardom (as expressed most wittily in the film), why Soderbergh is his generation’s Howard Hawks, and much, much more.

This is the audio version, but if you want to look at our ugly mugs as well as a few choice films clips, a video of the Zoom chat is on YouTube. Haven’t seen “Ocean’s 11” or want to see it again? It’s available as a $4 rental just about everywhere: Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Microsoft, YouTube. Here’s the trailer:

And here’s an interesting breakdown of the movie’s approach to cinematography that I came across while preparing this post. Enjoy.

Earlier episodes in this series can be found here. For the next installment of Classics of the New Millennium, Dana Stevens of Slate (and author of last year’s terrific Buster Keaton biography) and I will be discussing Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” (2007), a peak of the New Romanian Cinema and a drama about illegal abortion and female friendship that is, sadly and infuriatingly, more relevant today than the year it came out.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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To my readers: I’m finally making good on my promise to deliver more podcasts, and with this one I’m inaugurating a new series: “Classics of the New Millennium,” a series of chats about the great films of the 21st century (to date) with a rotating gallery of guest critics and filmmakers. I pick the guest, the guest picks the film, and we get into the nuts and bolts of how it was made and why it’s so good. The plan is to upload a new episode every two weeks, and for the inaugural installment, I’ve invited my good friend David Fear, film critic and senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine, to talk about “Under The Skin” (2013), the eerily cryptic Jonathan Glazer movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien trolling the streets of Glasgow for men to … well, that would be spoiling. If you’d like to watch the film before listening to the conversation, it can be streamed on HBO Max and Kanopy and rented at various VOD platforms. For more movie recommendations, subscribe to Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.substack.com.

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For the sixth edition of Ty Burr’s [occasional] Watchcast, I’m delighted to sit down with Ana Sortun, award-winning chef, owner and executive director of three of the best restaurants in the Boston area (Oleana, Sofra, and Sarma), and the author of “Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean,” among other books. In preparing for the conversation over the past few weeks, we talked about a lot of food movies, but the one we kept circling back to was 1987’s “Babette’s Feast,” which is at the top of many people’s short list of classic films on the subject (matched only, perhaps, by “The Big Night”).

And as Ana and I were exchanging thoughts, a new show on FX/Hulu was building buzz: “The Bear,” an eight-episode series about a stressed-out fine-dining chef (played with sweet exhaustion by Jeremy Allen White) trying to turn around the Chicago sandwich joint left to him by his brother. Where do the dishes in “Babette’s Feast” come from? Is the average restaurant kitchen as much of an ongoing panic attack as in “The Bear”? Listen as Ana spills tea about what really goes on beyond the serving window. And if you have your own favorite example of great gastro-cinema, feel free to plate and serve it in the comments.

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One of the things I miss about working at the Boston Globe is shooting the movie breeze with Janice Page, one-time Living Arts editor at the paper, current arts editor at the Washington Post, and herself a long-established film critic. But we stay in touch, and a while back she called me to vent about the new production of “Funny Girl” on Broadway, the one starring Beanie Feldstein and a truckload of chutzpah. Janice was disappointed, to put it mildly, and the conversation turned to a consideration of the 1968 film version and its delivering of Barbra Streisand (above) on the half-shell to a dazzled Middle America. How often (Janice asked) does a film come along that represents a perfect fusing of a star’s persona and the role they’re playing? Could anyone else play Fanny Brice? Should anyone else play Fanny Brice?

It was around this point that I gently cleared my throat and admitted that I had never actually seen “Funny Girl,” aside from the “Don’t Rain on My Parade” sequence, which I regularly show my students. A shocked silence ensued, until I explained that there’s a whole range of mid-60s musicals that no one thought to take young boys to see, including “Funny Girl,” “The Sound of Music,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” and others. (Although I do remember seeing “Oliver!” in theaters, because I guess a toe-tapping show about starving orphans and w****s getting beaten to death was thought sufficiently brutal.) My wife long ago made sure I had “Birdie” and “Sound of Music” under my belt, but “Funny Girl” had somehow eluded me. So I recently watched it in the only appropriate setting: With my wife and her parents in their Florida home, my father-in-law being a retired Long Island gastroenterologist and a major Streisand fanatic.

And it was good.

In this podcast, Janice and I discuss the background and enduring appeal of “Funny Girl,” how Streisand revolutionized accepted standards and narratives of female stardom, why the real Nicky Arnstein was no prize, and the Footie Pajama Theory™, or why you will never, ever have critical distance on any movie you loved as a child. Have a listen, and tell us what that movie is for you.

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(A final reminder for readers in the Boston area: Tonight — Wednesday, April 13 — I’ll be appearing on the stage of Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre to lead a Q&A with Dana Stevens, author of “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century,” about which I had some nice things to say a few months back. Dana will be signing copies of her book, and a screening of the Keaton classic “The General,” with piano accompaniment by the indefatigable Jeff Rapsis, will start things off at 7 p.m. We’d love to see you there.)

We’ve done Hollywood Cinderella stories, magic-love movies, and classic British romcoms, but for the last of our four podcasts on the subject of film romance, I and my friend and former Boston Globe colleague Meredith Goldstein — editor of the paper’s “Love Letters” column — are traveling around the world to 1960s Hong Kong as seen through the eyes of a director just stepping into the 21st century. “In the Mood for Love” (2000) is one of the most erotic movies ever made and also one of the most repressed — the two go manicured hand in elegant glove. The story of two neighbors, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung, above right) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung, above left) who learn that their spouses are having an affair and whose commiseration turns slowly into an attachment all the more passionate for their resisting it, “Mood” is a thing of gorgeous surfaces and a longing so intense it threatens to buckle the frame. The stars are heartbreaking, Leung a timid HK Cary Grant with his perfectly combed hair and Cheung keeping her smolder wrapped tightly in a succession of stunning, high-necked cheongsams.

Everything contributes to the tone of this cinematic fever dream: the costumes, the sets, the supporting performances, Christopher Doyle’s bruised cinematography, the obsessive musical motif (written by Japan’s Shigeru Umebayashi for a different film altogether, Seijun Suzuki’s 1991 “Yumeji,” but Wong makes it his own). It’s telling that we never see the adulterous spouses, just the backs of their heads — they’re unimportant anyway, other than providing Mo-wan and Li-Zhen with a fantasy of cheating that they act out in a wishful game of role playing.

Meredith had never seen “In the Mood for Love” before prepping for this conversation, and you’ll hear in her voice the awe of fresh discovery. We talk about why we expect Hollywood romances to end happily (and are shocked when they don’t) while expecting foreign language love stories to not end happily (and are shocked when they do); David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” (1945) and the lure of the forbidden; and the film’s position as the middle chapter in a loose trilogy of Wong works, the insanely good “Days of Being Wild” (1990) and the mostly insane (but also pretty good) “2046” (2004).

If you’d like to watch “In the Mood for Love” before or after listening to the podcast, it’s available for streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel, and it can probably be found at your library. The Criterion DVD and streaming package offer a number of extras, including deleted scenes that make clear that this could have been a far steamier film than the one it ended up as. What we’ve got is merely one of the most rapturous 98 minutes in the history of the movies.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these four podcasts — there will be more on the way with new guests in the near future. Watch this space, and thanks for listening.

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For the third of our podcast chats on romcoms, rom-drams, and the verities of watching other people fall in love onscreen, Meredith Goldstein and I address the weird, addictive nature of “magic romance” movies — those heart-tuggers that rely on a supernatural twist often having to do with time. As in: The lovers in “Benjamin Button”/”The Lake House”/”Serendipity”/”About Time”[Insert your favorite example of cinematic headcheese here] would be happy forever if they could just somehow be together in the same place at the same time.

The particular example we’re using for the purposes of discussion/dissection is “The Time Traveler’s Wife” (2009), in which Rachel McAdams (of course) has to make do with a love interest (Eric Bana) who keeps popping in and out of her life from different periods in his. (And he always arrives naked. Why? Because.) No, it doesn’t make sense, that’s what’s fun about it, although, as Meredith and I discuss, the scenes where the time traveling hunk appears to the child version of his eventual bride are dissonant in ways the movie isn’t remotely equipped to handle. Even the film’s trailer is cringe-y in this regard.

Still, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” serves as a metaphor — as all magic romances do — for emotional realities that have fueled movie melodramas since the heyday of the classic Hollywood “woman’s picture.” To wit, in this case: What do you do with a man who’s handsome and charming and sweet but just can’t be relied on to be there? Said melodramas never come up with an answer but instead just act out the feelings; that’s why they can be critically indefensible on one hand and oddly affecting on the other. (It’s also why “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is getting remade as an HBO/HBO Max series, starring Theo James and Rose Leslie, due later this spring.)

Lots to chew over here, so give a listen — and come back in a few weeks when Meredith and I talk about foreign-language romance movies, specifically Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 masterpiece “In the Mood for Love",” for our fourth and final podcast on the subject.

“The Time Traveler’s Wife” can be streamed on HBO Max and rented just about everywhere.

Our first Watchcast was about the 2002 Jennifer Lopez/Ralph Fiennes romcom “Maid in Manhattan” and can be found here.

Our second was on the Powell-Pressburger classic “I Know Where I’m Going!” (1945), one of the greatest examples of the “I Can’t Fall in Love With You, I Just Can’t, Oh Hell” romances, and can be found here.

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I’m always a little surprised when someone says they haven’t heard of “I Know Where I’m Going!,” the 1945 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger romance set in the rugged, mystical Scottish Hebrides. It was my mother’s all-time favorite movie, so, for me, it’s always been around — she would have been 22 when it came out, and for her generation I think it held some of the same eldritch appeal as a show like “Outlander” does today (albeit with rather less bodice-ripping). More to the point, “I Know Where I’m Going!” has within it the genetic material of so many romantic comedies and dramas that have followed, then and now and the day after tomorrow: The Proud Heroine, all set to marry the wrong man; the Right Man right there by her side, annoying her while she annoys him until they just say the hell with it and kiss; a Forest of Arden setting whose magic bends the laws of attraction; a wry best friend or two and a gallery of eccentrics to remind the Proud Heroine she’s part of the human race. Plenty of movies before “I Know Where I’m Going!” had some or all of those ingredients, but few filmmakers have been able to suggest the wildness of life bursting through repressed British decorum like Powell, here and in films like ”The Red Shoes,” “Black Narcissus,” and many others.

If you haven’t seen the movie, you might want to do so before listening to the podcast: It’s streaming on the Criterion Channel and available for rent on Amazon. Meredith Goldstein, my former colleague at the Boston Globe and author of the paper’s popular “Love Letters” advice column, watched “I Know Where I’m Going!” for the first time just before we sat down to talk about it, so what you hear is someone in the happy glow of having found a new classic. (And then comparing it, somehow, to the Robert Pattinson-Willem Dafoe movie “The Lighthouse.”) This is the second of our four conversations about movie romances; the first was about the JLo-Ralph Fiennes Cinderella story “Maid in Manhattan,” and the next will be on “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and others in the sub-genre of “magic romances.” The last will be about a foreign language romance, and we’re still dickering about which one. (Suggestions welcome.) We hope you enjoy the discussion.

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I’ve been wanting to try a podcast since starting the Watch List last summer, as a way to converse with knowledgeable friends and colleagues about films, TV, and other matters pop cultural. Meredith Goldstein was an obvious choice to kick things off: For two decades now, the Boston Globe “Love Letters” columnist and I have been sharing a fondness for schlocky/irresistible movie romances over lunch, in e-mails, and in the editorial hallways. Why do these movies work? Why are they sometimes more fun when they don’t work? Premiering just in time for Valentine’s Day, the first installment of Ty Burr’s Watchcast features the two of us hunkering down for a chat about that classic rom-com convention, the Cinderella transformation, with a focus on the ditzily enjoyable 2002 release “Maid in Manhattan,” a movie (available on demand here) that asks us to believe Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes could belong on the same planet, let alone together.

This is the first of four Watchcasts in which Meredith and I will be coming at the genre from a variety of angles: The classic movie romance (Michael Powell’s wonderful 1945 film “I Know Where I’m Going!”), the “magic” (or, as I like to call it, “insane”) romantic drama (“The Time Traveler’s Wife,” from 2009), and a foreign language candidate to be named later. We’re still working the bugs out of the format, and the edges might be a little rough: Your feedback is welcome. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we had fun chatting. Happy Valentine’s Day! May your heart get hammered in only the best ways.

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