Magellans at the Movies

Is season five of Stranger Things good? Well, stranger things have happened! Now that you’re done keeling over with hysterical laughter at that hilarious joke, please join Magellans at the Movies as they review the inexplicably long series finale of Netflix’s golden goose.

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What an utterly terrible year 2025 has been. People are angry, depressed, and hopelessly ensnared in economic woes, and Europe is doing an alarmingly accurate throwback cosplay of the continent’s 1913 political situation. For all desiring an escape from the bleak headlines and bleaker forecasts, however, there were still movies in this the two thousand and twenty fifth year of our Lord, some of them quite good. There were sleeper hits like Sinners and very much wakeful flops like Thunderbolts, Snow White, Mickey 17, Captain America, and . . . just so many more. Still, we all know (I hope) that money hardly equates wi...

Stand by me. If that's something I ever say to you, be aware that I have likely been replaced by an alien clone. Of course, I’m the odd one here. Proximity, and the intimacy implied therein are highly valued among many people, especially watchers of Stand By Me, the 1986 coming of age classic directed by Rob Reiner and based on The Body by Stephen King. This sweet, simple movie about friendship and boyhood along a morbid quest has been a favorite with critics and audiences since release, but what will become of all the walking, talking, and gawking wh...

Ah, to be alive in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. When the global power of communism reached its absolute zenith, just about everyone in the world had to team up to forcibly administer Germany two successive chill pills, and the war to end all wars failed its stated purpose. Lots of important stuff happened during the first half of the twentieth century, but here at Magellans at the Movies, we don't talk about important stuff, we talk about movies. Cinema was a very young art form during this time, and some of the most influential movies...

There’s nothing quite like a night at the theater. Taking in Shakespeare from within a few hundred to a few dozen feet of the actual, living actors is just a different experience to seeing them from behind the editing and pausability of a film. Haven’t you ever wondered, though, what happens behind the curtain? In high school, it was mostly fart jokes and giggling about who was kissing who in the play, but in the more mature world of professional theater, it’s mostly snappy dialogue and fuming about who is kissing who outside the play. And, I assu...

RAAAAWR!!! Oh, apologies, I didn’t mean to terrify you with my mighty roar. You see, I was just pretending to be a dinosaur. What silly, brutish creatures they were. How unintelligent, how undeveloped, how incompatible with polite society is the crude dinosaur. Wait, what’s that? Dinosaurs weren’t low beasts, but in fact loved, dreamed, feared, and laughed? Of course! You’re right, how could I have forgotten the sentient dinos of The Land Before Time, a 1988 animated adventure directed by Don Bluth? As any good paleontologist will tell you, this film of legendary scientific accuracy depicts dinosaur...

Travel. Doesn’t the very concept just send a shiver down your spine? Sure, it’s nice to be at the Brickworks Museum in beautiful Southampton, England, but getting there is a nightmare of lines, layovers, fares, and odors. Honestly it’s enough to put one off of learning about bricks at the premier institute for global brick study in the first place, but is it enough to put you off getting home for a nice Thanksgiving meal? Certainly not for the heroes of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, a 1987 holiday themed comedy about two mismatched travelers struggling to travel across...

You low down dirty rotten scoundrel, I’ll kill you for replacing my cornflakes with a colony of cockroaches! How many times have you heard those words? It’s only natural that when someone is wronged, they desire restitution, sometimes in the form of violent revenge. The next time you play a hilarious prank on someone and they come gunning for you, however, you may wish to show them a film to educate them on the dangers of vengeance. You’ll have quite a lot to choose from, but may we recommend Blue Ruin, a 2013 crime drama directed by Jeremy...

Wait! Did you hear that? It was the sound of demonic mischief made as the witching hour unfolds. It was the sound of infernal whispers in the darkness. It was the sound of someone, or something . . . putting mayonnaise in my yogurt?!? Aw come on, that’s just childish! This series of ghostly pranks tells me that I am at the mercy of a very particular breed of hell-sent spirit, a monstrous devil who hates open doors, loves standing, and is extremely camera shy, that’s right, folks, I’ve landed myself on the bad side of the demon from Parano...

“Hey, Steve, how’s work going on that calendar?”

“Oh, hey, Barry. It's going all right, but aren’t you worried this is a little vague?”

“Whatever do you mean, Steve?”

“Well, what if we haven’t been clear enough about the meaning of the Long Count calendar, and in the future people misunderstand our dating system as prophesying the end of the world?”

“Oh, Steve, don't be silly. You’d have to be into some pretty weird New Age beliefs to think that.”

“I suppose you’re right, Barry. Say, isn’t it weird how w...

Wizards have a long history, not just in movies, but in fiction generally. Whether they’re running a class action lawsuit just waiting to happen in the form of a deathtrap boarding school, going on road trips to return some seriously defective jewelry, or burning things at random to punctuate each sentence, audiences everywhere delight in sorcerers of screen, page, and stage. Fictional wizards (as opposed to real wizards, of course) could also come in the form of a de facto monarch lording over an enclave of green structures erected in his own selfish image, exchanging favors for the as...

Stand back, coppers, I've got a brainwashed child and I'm not afraid to use it! How many times have you heard that phrase barked from the mouths of bank robbers and rum runners? In the past few months, I know there's not a day that goes by in Kansas City without the sight of gangs aiming military-grade elementary schoolers at each other in tense standoffs. This sudden arsenal of adolescents is, in my opinion, attributable mainly to people misunderstanding the point of Weapons, a 2025 horror movie directed by Zach Cregger. After all, this spine-tingling story of the kids being...

You sleep through your alarm on the day of your big presentation, you leave your wallet at home the one day you decide to push the speed limit, your dad’s human illegal exotic pet empire gets dismantled and the proceeds reclaimed at the very moment you need money for bond, the bomb you intended for the alarm clock company as vengeance for their substandard products explodes in your hand leaving you with quite a bit of egg, and your own arm, on your face; my friends, it truly is one battle after another. Thankfully, while you wait for yo...

Moving on can be hard for many reasons, but for those of us leaving behind disinterested parents, monthslong torture, and the deaths of most everyone we care about, consigning most of our lives to memory lane is more than welcome. I, for example, yearn to relocate to a remote village in the Alps and thereby escape the many obligations I've accumulated to the wealthy investors in my "dog to human translation" company, but that's a silly example. For a more serious case, look no further than Jesse Pinkman's mission to get the heck out of Dodge/Albuquerque as seen...

A star is born. Not because a mommy star and a daddy star loved each other very much, or even because a clump of matter and gas collapsed under its own gravity (I think), but because a person has a talent for singing which they perform for a wide listening audience. What transpires across the lifespan of our newborn star has historically varied, but common themes include substance abuse, fraught relationships, and, if they're very lucky, Oscars. I'm talking, of course, about the 2018 musical romance A Star is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper. This melodic melodrama was favored by...

Oh no! There’s been a glitch in the matrix, forcing the Wachowskis to reload their save! Thankfully they’ve backed up their data and can proceed with the first of two planned sequels wrapping up the original Matrix trilogy. The Matrix Reloaded, like so many sequels, tries to follow up a groundbreaking first installment by embodying a single word: more. More elaborate kung fu fisticuffs, more Agent Smiths, more convoluted philosophizing, more whisper-talk, and of course, much more latex. The result is a dense, action-packed, confusing, and slightly kinky middle act that, while hardly an object of derision, is g...

Ah, to be alive in the 60s. When reds hid under beds for reasons unknown, protestors in the street inquired as to the precise uses of war, and men arrived on the moon, decided it was a bit nothing, and moved back to Earth. Yes, the period of time between January 1st, 1960 and December 31st, 1969 sure was a barrel of laughs, some of which could be enjoyed at the movies for the low low price of some shoelaces, probably. Indeed, they made a whole heap of movies during the 60s, which makes it hard for the man or woman...

Pitiless cruelty. Vicious misanthropy. Terror in every eye, rumor in every mouth, escape on every mind. No, I’m not talking about my extremely hardcore bookclub, I’m talking about high school! No one likes high school, that’s why making jokes about its abundant unpleasantness is so creative and funny, but the fact that high school is an almost universally shared experience makes it prime fodder for movies. One of the most enduring examples of this curious genre is undoubtedly Mean Girls, a 2008 teen comedy directed by Mark Waters. This sarcasm-heavy female-centric kneeslapper aimed to speak into the lives...

I don't know about you, but the best part of my day is always coming home. Now, sure, the state of my residence is not always pristine, the neighbor plays dreadful anime music at a deafening volume, and the pallets of weapons grade LSD are prime for toe-stubbing, but whatever the condition of your castle, I think for many of us it's often a relief to get back to it after a long journey. If, however, your journey included things like war, suffering, and a cyclops or two, then your homecoming may be slightly more fraught. That, at least...

I'm going to write this whole description without referencing the "inconceivable" joke, you watch. What on Earth are you talking about, I hear you ask, embarrassingly revealing yourself to be under the age of forty. Why, my young, Tik-Toking friend, I'm talking about every dad's favorite movie The Princess Bride, of course! This 1987 fantasy/adventure/comedy/romance mashup based on The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the "Good Parts" Version by William Goldman may not have set the world on fire on release, but it's since become a beloved pop culture mainstay...

All right, gotta write a new jokey, sarcastic description for the podcast. Let’s see what’s on the schedule. Prisoners, eh? Sounds like you’ll be doing hard time with that movie, hyuck hyuck hyuck. Anyways, released in 2013, directed by Denis Villeneuve, about a kidnapping, huh, that’s a tricky one. Family man driven to utter depravity by the loss of his daughter . . . ouch, um . . . I guess there’s a joke in there about overbearing dads losing it at little league games? Men and women making terrible choices out of sheer desperation . . . uh . . . sounds like your typical Friday night at t...

Faster than a speeding bullet! Stronger than a locomotive! Able to leap buildings in a single bound! Struggling with depression and guilt over thousands of lives lost in the crossfire! Duh-duh-daaaa, it's Superman! Behold the last son of Krypton as he . . . just plows through a building full of innocent people and sends the entire thing crashing to the ground in an apocalyptic display of death and destruction, dang. Cheer as the guardian of Metropolis . . . kinda stares moodily into the middle distance as if he were an office worker who just remembered they left their packed lunch at home . . . huh...

Action! Adventure! Red lines gliding across maps! These are the three essential hallmarks of an Indiana Jones flick, yet if there’s one thing the franchise has taught us, it’s that everyone’s favorite Bond alternative is more than the sum of his parts, or at least that just tossing the aforementioned ingredients into a mixing bowl and stirring vigorously won’t always yield cinematic magic. That was the lesson learned by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the 1984 Spielberg-directed sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark that was (until 2008) widely held to be the low point of the a...

This is all Nathan’s fault.

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Where would we be without scientists? Why, without those brave men and women in labcoats, we’d still be in the center of the solar system, treating low spirits with leeches, and knocking back shots of radium to improve the sheen of our hair or whatever. Clearly, then, your worst high school subject has done plenty of good for humankind, but what about when science goes too far? What about when chemistry is put to (gasp) evil ends? That’s how you end up disinterring and chopping up corpses to mix and match parts for a new body like you...

Ah, to be alive in the 70s. The age that saw the countercultural movement reach the height of its powers, the first bombardment of Star Wars’ conquest of human culture, and a series of shiny new leaders with shiny new ideas rise to the top in the east and west. Yes, the 70s was a tumultuous time, but if Vietnam had you down or Brezhnev was on your back, at least you could always unwind with a cigarette and a film, and there was no shortage of films (or cigarettes, for that matter), to choose from. As the politics an...

Dads. I sure wish I had one. I’ve heard that they can be good for quite a lot, such as mowing the lawn, bringing home bacon, and ensuring televisions don’t go to waste. Of course, not everyone has the kind of relationship with their father that any of the above uses can make up for the strain their old man puts on their lives. Take, for example, the troubled father-son dynamic at the heart of Big Fish, a 2003 Tim Burton directed dramedy based on the book by Daniel Wallace. William Bloom struggles to relate to Edward, his fath...

When aliens show up in movies, it’s usually either en masse, as part of a hostile invasion force, or, if they’re alone, as essentially a lost puppy that can teach some young child an important and heartwarming lesson. Not so for the Yautja, a solo hunter who’s as much like a puppy as a shark is like a goldfish. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably more familiar with the Yautja’s more common sobriquet: predators! That’s right, today Magellans at the Movies is reviewing the 1987 science fiction horror action classic P...

Gadgets: improbable. Villain’s plans: impractical. Mission: impossible. For the past two decades the Mission: Impossible franchise has been a frequent installment in the summer movie schedule, bringing action, humor, and increasingly ambitious stunts to the screen and delighting audiences worldwide. As the stakes got higher and the odds of Tom Cruise dying in bed got lower, the popularity of the franchise only accelerated, culminating in the series finale(?) of the Final Reckoning, released just a few weeks ago. Now that the brave men and women of the IMF are retiring, or at least on sabbatical, the equally brave te...

Marriage. You can tell it’s a critical foundation of Western Civilization because of all the endearing names we use to refer to our spouses: the ball and chain, the old trouble and strife, and babe. I hate the word “babe”. Everyone knows that marriage can be difficult, how much more so when you’re a pair of high level officers in the vast intelligence apparatus of the United Kingdom? That is the question answered by Black Bag, a 2025 spy drama directed by Steven Soderbergh, and if you’re not a spy, uh, I don’t know, maybe watch Scenes from...

Who among us has never heard of a man or woman who wanted to be in the movies? Movie stardom is a siren call for dreamers and doofuses the world over, for who wouldn’t want to live the dream of bitter divorces, loss of privacy, and opening a door fifty times to get the perfect shot for a pretentious director? Perhaps that’s why Buster Keaton double dipped in his 1924 comedy Sherlock Jr., home of one of the most memorable screen-jumping moments in cinematic history. Like so much of Keaton’s early filmography, Sherlock Jr. is considered a timele...

When people are killed, when children go missing, when affairs are had, the detectives of the world step in and smoke, deduce, analyze, smoke, gather clues, smoke, fight, smoke, and light up a cigarette in search of justice. What happens, however, when the detective swaps out a fondness for recreational cancer in favor of fine cuisine and even finer facial hair? Why, then you’d have the mighty moustached sleuth Hercule Poirot, ace investigator and star of numerous movies such as Murder on the Orient Express, a 2017 who-dun-it directed by Kenneth Branagh and based on the 1934 book by Agatha Ch...

How much do you really know about your next door neighbor? I know that Greg might seem like an affable old man who putters around the garden and gives out carrot sticks on Halloween, but haven’t you ever considered that he might be a shape shifting alien with sinister designs not just on you, but the world entire? Enough about my contentious relationship with my local HOA, however, let’s talk movies, specifically The Thing, a 2011 science fiction horror movie directed by Matthis van Heijningen. This prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic of the same name tells the tale o...

It’s-a-me, Mario! How many times have you heard those words, be they in the innumerable games that feature Nintendo’s most famous cash cow, or in the shrill falsetto of you and your stupid friends as you play Smash Bros.? Like Star Wars, Mario as a franchise and as a character has transcended the boundaries of medium, language, and culture to become a fixture of global civilization. Practically the figurehead of video games themselves, you would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t recognize his loud red hat; white gloves; and immaculate blue overalls. From such a mark...

Music is nice, isn’t it? It’s one of the oldest art forms in human history, it crosses cultural boundaries, and it contains more sub-genres and niche interests than there are cruddy “soulslikes” on Steam. As with all other forms of artistic expression, plenty can go wrong when you’re making music, especially if you’re so good at it a group of vampires rock up to your joint looking to recruit you into their band. Such is the burden borne by the heroes of Sinners, a 2025 horror movie directed by Ryan Coogler. For audiences and critics alike, Sinners has...

Cartoons. It may be hard to believe, but before they were a stable full of dead horses being optimistically flogged by the Fox network, cartoons were once the masters of a vast entertainment empire linking the theater with the ever-important Saturday morning slot. Clearly animation has changed since the rule of Bugs Bunny and/or Mickey Mouse, but, thankfully, the past is beyond recovery, not review. That’s why today Magellans at the Movies will be reviewing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a 1988 comedic mashup of animation and live action directed by Robert Zemeckis and based (sort of) on Who Ce...

Computers. They’re honestly just the bane of my existence. When they’re not perishing to water, the most common element on the planet, they’re malfunctioning for reasons beyond the reach of human cognition, they’re spitting out esoteric verse only those initiated into the elect circle of digital interpreters are capable of translating. It makes me wonder, what’s really happening behind the screen and beneath the keys? What kinds of wondrous worlds are unfolding just beneath our fingertips? That is the question Tron: Legacy, a 2010 sci fi action adventure movie directed by Joseph Kosinski, seeks to answer. Tr...

Ah, to be alive in the 80s. An era of increasing digitization, designer drugs, and flagging dictatorships warming themselves on the dying embers of the Cold War. Like most decades in human history, the 80s had its ups and downs and crises, but unlike most decades in human history, it also had movies! This fateful decade was the age of the big, burly action hero and the soaring fantasy adventure, and the Magellans at the Movies have been hard at work over their unannounced hiatus filling out the gaps in their 80s movie knowledge, the product of which you...

Submarines. They’re like whales, but not as majestic and far more likely to destroy innocent boats, at least this century. Submarines are nice because when you’ve run out of terrestrial and aerial space to put explosives they offer a convenient new arena in which to store devices of unimaginable destruction. I’m referring to nuclear-armed submarines, and it’s not hard to imagine that, in times of crisis, different people crewing these vessels will have different ideas on how to run things. I’m not just talking about the human fallibility that we’re supposed to assume somehow does...

It’s hard to be a teenager. Your body betrays you, society doesn’t trust you, your parents don’t understand you, and in the midst of all of this you’re asked to stake out an identity for yourself that may well last for the rest of your life. This can, of course, go quite wrong, and what may have been a fully functioning, contributing member of society can end up the kind of person who goes to Magic the Gathering tournaments and/or moderates a subreddit. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, however, and some...

Australia, the land of the blue ringed octopus, the funnel web spider, the vicious drop bear, and the accent you're convinced you can nail, but in fact commit a hate crime every time you try it. The land down under can be a dangerous place, which is probably why nine out of ten viewers of Mad Max: Fury Road, a 2015 action film directed by George Miller, can't tell if it's a documentary or not. I'm exaggerating, of course, Australia is a vibrant place with plenty of lovely people, and a thriving film industry to boot, of which you will...

Vroom, vroom! Neeeeeooooowww, eeeeeeeeeeaaaa, KA-BOOM! Oh, excuse me, I didn’t see you there. I was just playing with my toy cars. It’s childish, I know, and I’ve been looking for a more mature, adult hobby to satisfy my love of speed and loud noises. I know what can help me: racing real cars! Faster speeds, louder noises, tackier sponsorships! I’m being harsh, of course, there’s more to racing than base level sensory pleasures and obnoxious McDonald’s stickers, and if you don’t believe me, just look at Ford V. Ferrari, a 2019 racing movie directed by Ja...

Consider the bicycle. Two wheels in a thin, metal frame, an uncomfortable seat, and a rusting bell to you, but to children, there once was a time when it represented freedom limited only by your lung capacity, and sometimes not even that could put a stop to a young boy or girl’s afternoon rides. Bikes aren’t just good for reminding you how much you’ve grown (in every direction, for some of us), they’re practically infused with nostalgia for those of us who grew up putting rubber to asphalt (or gravel, as the case was with the Mage...

Hollywood has had a starring role in many of the productions it nursed to life. Be it the romantic ideal featured in The Fabelmans, the more wistfully realistic stylings of La La Land, or the caustic satire of Hail, Caesar!, tinsel town has come in for its fair share of knocks as well as odes over the years, but few quite like the 2001 film Mulholland Drive, a baffling slice of the bizarre by the sultan of surrealism and favorite director of insufferable hipsters everywhere David Lynch. Mulholland Drive has a reputation for being hard to parse out, but that...

If I may be the seventeenth person on the internet today to tell you: the MCU is on the ropes right now. Box office returns, critical scores, and audience affections are all trending south and something tells me burly CGI Han Solo isn’t going to turn things around. So what’s a concerned moviegoer to do? Attempt to find something else to watch by exploring deeper into the past and present cinematic catalogue and supporting new ideas? Heck no! The answer, of course, is to write mean YouTube comments and just kind of, wait for things to change. If...

Oil. Whether it’s powering war machines, spilling into the oceans, or drowning you in a dream, black gold doesn’t exactly have the best public image. But how can that be, I hear you ask, when oil is extracted by such upstanding gentlemen? Why, not two weeks ago I was told by a charming magnate and titan of industry that oil brings wealth to everyone around it, and that our community was sure to benefit from his new drilling project! Ah, my dear, innocent reader, it sounds to me as if you’ve been taken in by the charis...

Who knows what lurks out in the near infinite darkness of space? Giant glowing babies? People with funny eyebrows and no emotions? A large, angry, purple dude with a love of handwear? These are just some of the options proposed by the long, rich history of science fiction films, some more pessimistic than others, but few more likely to put the brakes on a young child’s dreams of becoming an astronaut than the terror of Alien, a 1979 science fiction horror movie directed by Ridley Scott. Alien memorably incorporates an industrialism-fused vision of the future alongside the uncanny stylings of...

Ah, to be alive in the 90s. A time when you could bathe in the glory of early Simpsons episodes, salute the progress being made in equality and democracy across the globe, and violate the structural integrity of your hair and still be accepted in polite society. To be honest, the 90s wasn’t too shabby of a decade for the human race, especially when it comes to movies. For those of us born into the chaos and uncertainty of the twenty-first century, it may be difficult to parse through all the films released in the last decade of th...

2024 hasn’t been a red letter year for the human race. War, polarization, and despair are all on the rise, and 2025 isn’t exactly set up for success. Fortunately, entertainment continues to be the number one doctor recommended band aid for your all consuming existential dread, and the past year has been generous with the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of distraction. 2024 saw the rise of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney into stardom, the passing of a few Hollywood legends like James Earl Jones and Donald Sutherland, the explosion of AI, and the comic book movie remains in a cr...

As 2024 breathes its last, wintry breaths and minds turn towards all the resolutions that need prompt breaking, let us take a moment to draw near to loved ones, be they romantic or platonic, and reflect on the rock upon which the Hallmark church has been built. What is it to love? What virtue is there in affection? What does it demand of us? Think on these questions and deepen your understanding of what the Greeks referred to as agápē, érōs, philía, philautía, storgē, and xenía. If that all sounds too hard, however, just pop Love Act...

Everyone knows that zombies aren’t what they used to be. If anything, a decaying, shambolic corpse is probably the perfect metaphor for the genre as it exists right now: decrepit, feeble, and limping slowly towards nowhere in particular. There was a time, however, when zombie fiction was almost as popular as movie westerns were in their day, and that time, of course, was the early 2000s, inarguably the worst period of culture since the 1510s (your poetry sucks, Henry VIII). That’s not necessarily to say that zombie media was a reason for that decade’s irritating obsession with f...

TBD

Power, oh man don’t you wish you just had some? Power, in whatever form be it political, cultural, or laser eyes, gives you access to neat stuff like respect, authority, and cheat codes to the legal system. Even in lower stakes arenas like the professional music scene power can unlock lots of doors for you, many of them leading to places of murky ethics. I’m not just talking about forcing your orchestra to play the alphabet song for laughs, though, I’m referring to far more serious misdeeds like forming inappropriate relationships and handing out favors to your a...

Everyone needs friends to get through life, that’s why I’m so miserable all the time. Friends lift us up when we’re low and congratulate us when we’re high (or give us a ride home). Fickle friends, best friends, old friends, new friends, the varieties of companions are endless, but what happens when one of those friends decides to dissolve their partnership and go their separate ways to the great confusion and dismay of the other party? Why, then you would have most of the plot of The Banshees of Inisherin, a 2022 darkly comedic drama directed by Marti...

If you like dysentery, the old west is for you. If you like filth, the old west is for you. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live utterly at the mercy of the elements and corrupt lawmen while you work your tenant field of sorghum for two cents a day that you can spend on bathtub whiskey at the local saloon, then your only option is to somehow travel back in time to live in the old west. Or move to Texas. For the rest of us, however, we’re generally content to see all...

There truly is nothing like crime to bring a family together. Why are criminal organizations organized by families? Why do family businesses that get big also commit massive fraud? The answer is obvious: taking stuff that doesn’t belong to you is just the spit shine that your fraying familial ties are in need of. After all, it’s by embezzling listener donations that Elliot and Nathan fund their wild weekends in Vegas, and thereby foster the close sibling bond that makes this program what it is. Don’t just take my word for it, though, take it from the tr...

As the month of wraiths draws to a close and we all look forward to the far calmer, gentler event of the American election day, stay just a little bit longer in the spooky season with Magellans at the Movies. And what better way to commemorate the holiday of Halloween than reviewing the 1978 John Carpenter directed slasher film for which it was named? This is the movie that popularized the masked, reticent killer stalking teenagers and offing them one by one, so if that structure appeals to you, you’ve almost certainly seen it before. Even those of us wh...

To be a spy is to live in the terrible knowledge that some day, somehow, someone is going to get a bizarre and destructive notion in their head to blow up the sun so that their coal stocks increase in worth or something. Thankfully, the brave men and women of the world’s intelligence agencies train every day for just such occasions, but have you ever wondered how it all gets started? Have you ever wanted to see the making of a classically British gentleman spy? Your answers to those questions may go some way towards predicting how you wi...

Ah, to be alive in the 2000s. A time when you could enjoy . . . uh . . . roller blading? Look, I won’t lie to you: humanity has had better decades. The 2000s saw the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, followed by the forever wars in the Middle East that made Vietnam look like a brief spat between friendly neighbors. Still, they continued to make movies during this period of uncertainty and unrest, and at least ten of them were quite good. “Which ten?” I hear you ask. Well that, my dear reader, is the subject of today’s episode of Magellans at the Movies...

Jokes, we all love ‘em! They make us laugh, they make us think, on certain days they can be exchanged for candy, but as every self important comedian will tell you if you're trapped in a conversation with them, jokes can be a vehicle for scathing social criticism in deft hands. In, uh, slightly less deft hands, however, sometimes the best you can hope for is comedy that boils down to an unironic iteration of “We live in a society.” Now despite having the word joke in the title, Todd Philips’ 2019 comic book drama Joker isn't supposed to be funny, b...

Ghosts. Surely the most logistically puzzling of supernatural fiends, the mechanics of ghosts, their creation and destruction, and their predilection for mostly just knocking stuff off tables or opening and closing doors in grainy camcorder footage are all questions people have asked about our phantasmic friends, but answers remain sparse. Fortunately, when you’re making a movie you can just make stuff up and authenticate it through the fact that you’re telling a fictional story and therefore what you say goes. That’s certainly how M. Night Shyamalan likes to do things, to, uh, let’s say uneven success...

Avatar was made in 2009 by perennially smug not-eur James Cameron and we’re reviewing it. Yay.

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Family. Probably best known for sponsoring the Fast and the Furious movies, family is an important part of many global cultures, so it’s no surprise that it’s an important part of many movies. From the Sawyers to the Parrs, movies are constantly centering groups of people related by blood and bound to each other by love to the delight of audiences everywhere. Of course, family isn’t always chainsaws and superpowers, sometimes it can be a touchy subject for people. That’s why we have movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, a 2001 comedy drama directed by Wes Anderson. The titu...

There’s a reason so many of our most reviled and infamous villains are clowns. The Joker, that one Final Fantasy antagonist, Krusty the Klown, and many other dastardly jesters that plot world mass murder, world domination, or subpar jokes have terrified audiences for years thanks to the simple fact that a man in chalk white makeup embellished by garish reds and greens and a hideous grin is far more likely to give you nightmares than make you laugh. This enduring truth of Villain Design 101 is probably why we have Pennywise, a shapeshifting alien thing that most often takes th...

Teenagers. Normally, they're the last demographic you'd want to arm with deadly weapons and a thorough knowledge of martial arts, what with their unstable hormones and abysmal decision making. Now hold on a minute, Boomer, I hear you say. What if the teenagers in question weren't just young folks from the ages of thirteen to nineteen, but a group of mutant turtles age thirteen to nineteen? Why my dear hypothetical reader, in that case I would purchase their weapons myself because then we would have the titular heroes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a 1990 action comedy directed by Steve...

How come we don’t hear that much about serial killers these days? I like to think it’s because the global spirit of human brotherhood has just grown too powerful for even the most depraved of violent urges to be fulfilled. Either that or the advancement of forensic technology coupled with a host of societal and cultural factors has made serial murder both less appealing and the prospect of success less viable. Whatever the cause, serial killers have become increasingly rare, but there was a time when sequence murder was a genuine national terror, which explains the prevalence of m...

Aliens! They may have already visited our home in the solar system, but if so, then they seem to have mainly come here for tourist reasons and to appear in grainy footage shot by air force pilots and people who don’t have anything better to do than point active cameras at the sky in the middle of the night. Whatever the truth of the various historical and modern UAP sightings may be, the fact is that people have been fascinated by hypothetical encounters between man and E.T. for centuries, from H.G. Wells to Roland Emmerich, to Wi...

If war is hell, then I suppose it makes some ironic sense that filming a movie about war would be hellish, too. In case you hadn’t heard, wars are messy, noisy, dangerous things for all involved and recreating them can be tricky as well, especially if you’re a slightly eccentric perfectionist director deep in the jungles of Asia trying to make a movie about one of the most chaotic and unpopular wars in American history. Such was the mission of Francis Ford Coppola in his legendary Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now, released in 1979 and (very loosely) based on the...

Ah the halcyon days of the 2010s. The era when video games began emerging as the cultural powerhouse they have evolved into, the world was recovering from the Great Recovery, and Covid-19 was just a glint in virology’s eye. It was also a time of movies, and lots of them. Good movies, bad movies, and everything in between. Marvel movies got their start, and with their ascent came the great (and short lived) comic book movie war, followed by the meteoric rise of the cinematic universe as an often reached for but seldom reached golden goose of cinematic su...

Japan has given us many amazing things: body pillows of questionably aged characters, plumbers who seem to do stunningly small amounts of plumbing, and the best method to find out which of your friends sing best when they are drunk. But all those things have nothing to do with cinema, of which Japan's greatest contribution is arguably Akira Kurosawa. This legendary director influenced much of American cinema with his films from the 60s, including one certain franchise about prolonged conflicts between molten-hot interstellar bodies. And today the Magellans are tackling one of his many celebrated films, the 1963 police drama...

It’s hardly revolutionary to say that the superhero genre is on the decline these days. In terms of both review scores and box office returns, movies featuring men and women in brightly colored outfits throwing CGI monsters through CGI cityscapes with the aid of their CGI powers have become little more than fodder for less than favorable memes and a literally endless stream of articles with titles like “Is This the End of the Comic Book Movie?”, “Is This the end of the MCU?”, “Have Superheroes Gone the Way of the Westerns?”, and so on. Who, then, can save us from g...

Ah, snobbery. It’s so often a mask for the discouraged, the downtrodden, the defeated. To puff yourself up over some esoteric details only you and five other people know about is to appear large and confident when we are in fact small and meek. But enough about me, let’s talk about Sideways, a 2004 drama based on the book by Rex Pickett. Sideways centers on that rarest of snobs: wine snobs, but slowly unfolds into a deeply moving character study of a struggling middle-aged writer and wine-thusiast on a road trip with his engaged best friend who is . . . just...

When you get knocked down, you simply must get back up again. Surely one of the most worn of all the many self-help cliches, basically just keep on keeping on for the less earthy among us. Still, sometimes a classic is just what the doctor ordered, and for a dejected and apathetic Bruce Wayne who’s lost his kind of girlfriend and his kind of work friend to a nihilistic mass murdering clown, doctor’s orders are really the kind of things you want to be following. Thus, the stage is set for the return of Batman in The Dark...

Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be a super genius. While some synaptically blessed individuals carve their names into the face of history with their achievements in advanced particle physics and beating all of the Dark Souls games without getting hit, the best us dumb losers can hope for is third place at Dusty Steve’s general trivia night. Thankfully, movies allow us to live vicariously through onscreen characters who possess far greater acuity than ourselves. And if you’re feeling particularly slow, consider glimpsing true intellectual greatness in Good Will Hunting, a 1997 drama directed...

Do you miss your dead wife? Are you worried about your young son finding his own way in the apocalypse? Do you find the drudgery of the daily struggle for survival is just getting you down? Then you, my friend, are in need of a genuine, rejuvenating, individualized Cormac McCarthy road trip! On our world famous route through the blasted remains of North America you’ll be treated to only the most traumatizing of close encounters with filthy cannibals and dine on the finest of radioactive dust! You and your boy will be hunted, threatened, shot at, and quite po...

When you’ve just lost a war, the last thing you need is a giant radioactive dinosaur with fire breath taking a self-guided tour of your remaining cities. Unfortunately, such is the plight of the people of Japan who, as we all know from high school history class, have been under siege from kaijus of all shapes and sizes since the end of World War II. The most famous of these immense invaders, of course, being Godzilla, one of the most recognizable monsters of movie history and one whose popularity has transcended national borders. His most successful recent outing, ho...

For as long as there has been television, there has been The Simpsons. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much, since The Simpsons aired a full two years before the Soviet Union was dissolved. This legend of prime-time TV took the world by storm when everyone was first introduced to its titular family of corn-colored stereotypes, and while the painful collapse in its quality since then is a saga of deterioration worthy of Edward Gibbon, for about ten years The Simpsons reigned supreme. By the time of The Simpsons Movie, a 2007 animated comedy directed by David Silverman, th...

Love. It, ah . . . it’s all warm and fuzzy? Look, we’ve done like four movies about love now, I’m fresh out of ways to say that love is a multi-faceted, complicated aspect of the human experience. Hollywood, however, is emphatically not out of things to say about love, or at least they think there’s still new ground to be broken on the subject. That’s why one hundred and thirty-four years after the first motion picture was made Park Chan-wook decided to make himself a romance in the form of Decision to Leave. To be fair to PCW, hi...

Well, folks, we’ve made it. Magellans at the Movies has hit the big one-oh-oh. Over the course of the last two years we’ve told you about our tastes in directors and TV shows, we’ve established hilarious jokes and classic catchphrases like “Would you listen to it casually?” and “Life is hard and full of disappointments”, but the bulk of our time spent in cyberspace has been dedicated to reviewing a full ninety movies for your listening pleasure. We hope you’ve enjoyed your time with us; maybe you’ve decided to check out a movie you may otherwise have...

Why can’t we all just get along? It’s a question that’s hounded human civilization since the moment a guy eating pizza crust-first, a guy eating pizza from the edge inwards, and a third guy starting at the point of the slice and working his way north all shared a meal with each other and realized that the term “civilization” is subject to audience interpretation. The obvious answer, of course, is that human beings are simply too tribal and their cultural differences too intractable for the global group-hug pacifists and diplomats have been trying to organize since the three...

I have no breezy, jokey description for this one. Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is a devastating film about overwhelming darkness and a single bruised, weary speck of light in the midst of the seemingly endless shadows. Please watch it if you haven’t.

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Ladies and gentlemen, there are moments in life when it comes time to face the music. Old wrongs that must eventually be answered for, debts that must be repaid, orangutans that must be returned to their home rain forests after a brief but disastrous stint as your exotic pet. What I’m saying is that we all make bad choices and eventually the bill for those errors comes due, but we can be thankful that, for most of us, the cost of our various indulgences in vices won’t be the loss of our heads. Not so for those fool...

Love is a choice. Love is a feeling. Love is an idea. These are just some of the theories on that most vexing of jazz topics and its effect on the men and women who experience it. Questions on love abound, but answers have remained elusive throughout the course of human history, and if you are one such bemused soul then I’m afraid you won’t find what you're looking for in In the Mood for Love, a 2000 romance directed by Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Love is famously vague in its narrative and experimental in its visu...

Say you’ve just woken up in the late 18th century. Lucky for you, you find yourself the rich scion of a notable family, which, in said time period, means you’ve got it made. The only thing you’ll be lacking is something to occupy your time with. The military being too scary, the theater being too derivative, and the video games being too nonexistent, there’s every chance you’ll find yourself quickly becoming a regular at your local opera house. But wait, what’s this? An upstart young musician named Mozart has just arrived in Vienna? Whatever cou...

Pandas. If you’re somehow not aware of them (which, like, how, they’re basically the poster-animal for endangered species), they’re not exactly what you’d call limber. While the great felines of the world regularly perform feats of stunning acrobatics and athleticism, those of the ursine persuasion, especially panda bears, are stuck lumbering around with all the speed and agility of a wheelchair made out of bricks. This is fine for Youtube compilations of pandas failing to exhibit a strong grasp of even basic motor skills, but if you’re an enterprising young film studio aiming to center a m...

Peace and quiet. The two go together so well they’re often mentioned in concert, as demonstrated by the preceding sentence. Quiet is often conflated with peace and vice versa, however the relationship between the two may not be as close as people are willing to admit. Few would characterize the bone chilling silence immediately following a bombed joke at a comedy club as “peaceful”, and sometimes even the personal reticence of a taciturn man wearing a placid expression can be little more than a mask hiding great sorrow and uncertainty. But that’s a matter for my therapist, for our...

Peace and quiet. The two go together so well they’re often mentioned in concert, as demonstrated by the preceding sentence. Quiet is often conflated with peace and vice versa, however the relationship between the two may not be as close as people are willing to admit. Few would characterize the bone chilling silence immediately following a bombed joke at a comedy club as “peaceful”, and sometimes even the personal reticence of a taciturn man wearing a placid expression can be little more than a mask hiding great sorrow and uncertainty. But that’s a matter for my therapist, for our...

The dream of time travel is an old one, with modern storytellers and ancient legend weavers alike casting their imaginations far into the future or deep into the past to see what might be happening or may have happened then. Wouldn’t you like to get burned for being a witch at Salem? Wouldn’t you like to be sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli in the Aztec Empire? Don’t you want to see what fun implements of warfare people come up with a hundred years from now? I sure don’t, but to each their own. I’m being facetious, of course...

As you settle in with your coffee and gummy worms to enjoy another episode of the smash hit podcast Magellans at the Movies, you’re probably thinking about how charismatic and trustworthy your favorite hosts are. You're probably thinking to yourself, "Gee willy those Magellans are cool, I'd do anything they asked me to!" Ah, my naive, innocent reader; although we're flattered, we must caution you against such sentiments. Hero worship rarely leads to heroism, and putting on blinders to the faults in our leaders is a recipe for disaster. For more on this, just look at Dune: Part Tw...

The Oscars represent the culmination of the film year, much like New Year’s celebrations mark the termination of a calendar year. It’s a time to cast our gaze back over the movies that were, the jokes that made us laugh, the spectacles that made us gasp, and the romances that made us swoon. Or at least the jokes, spectacles, and romances as seen in the movies blessed by the opaque selection processes of a mismatched circle of film personalities of dubious qualification and unreliable judgment. The Oscars certainly aren’t what they used to be in terms of the...

I won’t lie to you, folks, things are looking grim in our world these days. War, polarization, prejudice, and inequality seem to be the order of the day at Cafe de Earth, and just cracking open a newspaper can be a death sentence for that good day you thought you were having. Still, like a well-meaning friend attempting to console his companion after a botched performance of some kind, we can always fall back on that most durable of platitudes: it could be worse. The war could be nuclear, the prejudice could be genocidal, or we could be li...

The connotations of the word "bomb" are often dictated by the context in which it is set. If I were to inform you that a movie bombed, you would likely bow your head in mourning for a noble film cut down by poor box office returns. If I were to tell you that a movie is the bomb, you would probably smile and nod in approval for a film that has achieved some impressive feat of cinematic greatness. If, however, I were to mention a bomb outside of the context of film entirely and instead in a hot, dusty...

If you’re a child of the Brazilian slums in the 1960s, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’ve been dealt a pretty lousy hand. Growing up you can look forward to such unpleasantness as abject poverty, filth, social immobility, filth, endemic violence, police brutality, filth, and uncleanliness. If, however, you’re of a mind to transcend the lowly status into which you were thrust, your best bet is that great equalizer, that forge of infamy, that last refuge of the desperate and first port of call for the avaricious, I’m talking, of course...

Food is what makes the world go round. In a very literal sense it keeps you alive, but it also strengthens economies, buttresses cultures, and, if you have the stomach for it (tee hee), it can be a medium for artistic expression. I make this terrible joke because the world of fine dining can be a demanding one. Facing pressure from critics and customers to continuously push boundaries and innovate in fields that maybe don’t really need innovating, it’s no wonder that the great chefs of the world will sometimes resort to increasingly outlandish stunts to capture audi...

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done, each and every one of us humans live lives filled with “what if”s. What if I’d pursued that dream, what if I’d asked that girl to the prom, what if I’d listened to the old man in the Arabian bazaar and thrown that cursed onyx necklace into the sea? Peering down roads not traveled may bring comfort or doubt, and the older you get the more of those avenues you’ll have to peruse. Such is the heart of Past Lives, a 2023 drama directed by Celi...

The Pope, or, the Big Kahuna, if you’re speaking official church Latin. When it comes to the Catholic Church, the biggest single religious denomination on the planet, the buck stops at the man in the white zucchetto. Traditionally considered God’s chief deputy on Earth, the Pope is basically the king priest of the Catholics, and pontiffs throughout history have wielded immense power in both religious and secular arenas. Recently, however, the church seems to have decided that maybe elevating the Pope to the role of shadow emperor to every Catholic-practicing government on Earth might not be what you...

Crime doesn’t pay, according to people who have never successfully committed one, but those sanctimonious moralizers have clearly never enjoyed the splendor of a Corleone family wedding. There you will find nice cars, expensive clothes, fine dining, and a vibrant collage of personality disorders, and all bought and paid for by an illicit empire of robbery, extortion, gambling, and murder. Those of us unwilling to kowtow before the Corleone’s imperious patriarch will have to experience such luxury vicariously through the camera aimed at them in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 gangster flick to end all gangster flicks The Godfat...

Ah, to be young and in love. The butterflies, the sense of the future’s great possibilities, the need to traverse a city besieged by a towering monster in order to rescue your heart’s flame from her destroyed apartment building . . . wait, I’m mixing up Hallmark movies with the 2008 found-footage horror monster movie Cloverfield, directed by Matthew Reeves. Oh well, as long as we’re talking about it, we might as well mention that Cloverfield has had an outsized impact since its release. It’s spawned two uh, spinoffs? Sequels? Whatever, there’s more than one movie with the word Clo...

2023 was quite a year for movies, between strikes and Barbies there was nary a dull moment for those of us in the cinema reaction business. But now we have reached the end of this storied year, and the brothers in charge of Iowa's greatest film review podcast are turning their gaze backwards to bring you their full thoughts on the past 365 days. They will be recounting their favorite and least favorite movies they saw this year, along with their favorites from other art forms such as books and TV shows. So, grab a few friends and listen in to...

Life can be difficult for old people, what with their failing health, increasing estrangement from an evolving cultural zeitgeist, and now-obsolete wardrobe of bell bottom pants and lederhosen or whatever people used to wear. It’s no wonder that some of them can be a bit grouchy in the face of all this, and to embody this enduring spirit of prickly cantankerousness, who else can they turn to but their most favored son: Clint Eastwood? In the latter days of his career Clint Eastwood has more and more often cast himself in his movies to play his classic role, th...