Peter Weir's follow up to Picnic at Hanging Rock - 1978's The Last Wave - deals with similar themes, with colonialism butting against the wild mysticism of Australia's land and people. However, this time...it's WET AS HELL. BenDavid Grabinski - the filmmaker behind the upcoming Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice - joins us to talk about this beguiling film, apocalyptic thinking, Richard Chamberlain's status as the king of TV miniseries, and Tom Shadyac's Dragonfly , weirdly enough. Watch Ben...
Mar 22, 2026•2 hr 36 min
It’s Critical Darlings’ biggest morning! After a marathon season, we react to this year’s Academy Awards: the winners, losers, presenters, performances, and awkward play-offs. One Battle After Another and Sinners nearly split the ballot with One Battle and Paul Thomas Anderson taking the biggest prizes in Best Director and Best Picture, while Sinners took home Best Actor, Score, Adapted Screenplay, and Cinematography. But for as many questions as the ceremony answered, it raised more: Do Sinners...
Mar 17, 2026•1 hr 53 min
On St. Valentine's Day in 1900, a group of podcasters set out to record an episode about Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock. Some were never to return...because they got addicted to the calming sounds of pan flute! Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun joins us to chat about this 1975 classic of Australian cinema, and we're getting into the eerie qualities that make this film such an enduring mystery. From Rachel Roberts' wig drama to frame rate manipulation...from the Aboriginal concept of "dream time" to...
Mar 15, 2026•2 hr 33 min
What time is it? It’s time to study the revolutionary texts with David “Rocketman” Sims! On our last episode before The Oscars, we’re talking about One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic about parental legacy, revolutionary identity, and a dad trying to charge his Goddamn phone. But first we reflect on the influx of last-minute Oscar narratives, before getting into One Battle After Another’s plot and politics, sidebar on Leonardo DiCaprio’s legacy at the Oscars, and finally give o...
Mar 12, 2026•1 hr 30 min
Bonjour! Erm...we mean...G'day mates! Our Peter Weir series PODNIC AT HANGING CAST kicks off with Weir's 1974 feature debut The Cars That Ate Paris , a film about the guy who plays Napoleon in the Bill & Ted movies getting stranded in a quirky and murderous Australian town. We're getting into the origins of the Australian New Wave, the various "calling card" projects that Weir made in the beginning of his career, and this film's spiky car which Ben has a lot of affection for, obviously. Chec...
Mar 08, 2026•1 hr 55 min
This week we’re joined by Sam Sanders of The Sam Sanders Show to discuss Sinners, the most nominated film in Academy Awards history. With sixteen nominations across directing, writing, music, and acting categories, Sinners is a somewhat surprising record breaker, as genre films, especially films with horror elements, are rarely awarded by The Academy. On this episode we discuss the film, why it was able to break through, if Sinners counts as a genre film; and if so, what genre it represents. We ...
Mar 05, 2026•1 hr 29 min
Live from our windowless studio in Downtown Brooklyn, it's the 11th Annual Blankies! Joe Reid joins us once again to give out golden Wattos to our favorite films, performances, and craftspeople of the year. Some of our picks are certainly part of the greater award season conversation. Others are Materialists. Join us as we honor the best Putters and Murmurs, the Wettest flicks of the year, and as Griffin debuts his latest Billy Crystal opening showtune. Listen to This Had Oscar Buzz Watch Igby G...
Mar 01, 2026•3 hr 4 min
This week we’re in hygge mode, uncovering traumas in our generational home with the host of This Had Oscar Buzz , Joe Reid! One of the breakout Oscar films of the year is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value , a warm, realist Norwegian film about a difficult but brilliant director (Stellan Skarsgard), his two daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), and an American actress cast in the auteur’s new film (Elle Fanning). All four performances earned Oscar nominations, along with nominat...
Feb 26, 2026•1 hr 19 min
Our Lynne Ramsay series comes to a close with last year's Die My Love , which brings us to the realization - damn, have we really never talked about Jennifer Lawrence before? Join us and Vulture's Alison Willmore as we do a full career deep-dive on J.Law, and grapple with this film and Mubi's decision to purchase it out of Cannes for a buttload of money. Read the NY Mag profile of Darren Aronofsky from 2017 Read Alison's work at Vulture Sign up for Check Book , the Blank Check newsletter featuri...
Feb 22, 2026•3 hr
Viva Brazil! Today we discuss Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent , the simmering, colorful Brazilian thriller about a man on the run, starring the dreamy Wagner Moura and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. The story, about retaining personal and political memory under authoritarianism, has proven resonant with an international audience and awards bodies, garnering three additional Oscar nominations for Best International Feature, Best Casting, and Best Actor for Moura. On this episode, we dis...
Feb 19, 2026•1 hr 33 min
In 2018, Lynne Ramsay released You Were Never Really Here , a film about a completely implausible scenario...a townhouse on the East side of Manhattan houses a sex trafficking operation that implicates high-level government officials in its web of depravity???? Could you even imagine?!! Hollywood Handbook's Sean Clements joins us to chat about this eerily relevant film, the literary career of Jonathan Ames, Joaquin Phoenix's screen persona, and Joseph Gordon Levitt's recently announced follow-up...
Feb 15, 2026•2 hr 44 min
This week we’re brooding, Victorian style, with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri! Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a Best Picture nominee and is well represented in the craft categories, but it has only one acting nomination, for Jacob Elordi’s hulking monster. It’s of a piece with past craft-heavy Oscar contenders like Dune or The Lord of the Rings , but does Frankenstein actually stand a chance? We discuss the film itself, its lavish sets and costumes, del Toro’s choice to center the monster as the h...
Feb 12, 2026•1 hr 28 min
The time has come for us to talk about Kevin. The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino joins us to talk about Lynne Ramsay's depiction of every parent's worst nightmare - 2011's We Need To Talk About Kevin . We need to talk about how Griffin grew up with Ezra Miller, and even auditioned against them to play Kevin. We need to talk about Lionel Shriver's awful politics. We need to talk about Tilda Swinton comparing her performance here to Buster Keaton. And we need to again explain the whole Fantastic Beast...
Feb 08, 2026•2 hr 49 min
Honey, we’re buzzing about Bugonia with Marie Bardi-Salinas! The movie surprised us with its appeal to Oscar voters, but maybe it shouldn’t have: Director Yorgos Lanthimos and star, frequent collaborator Emma Stone, have proven themselves Oscar favorites with strong showings from their past films, especially The Favourite and Poor Things. We discuss the film, but first, a Sundance report from Richard before digging into Lanthimos and Stone’s history with the Oscars, and why this somewhat prickly...
Feb 05, 2026•1 hr 28 min
Almost four years ago, Producer Ben Hosley watched Sam Raimi's "A Simple Plan" and proclaimed that if he'd been in that scenario, everything would have worked out perfectly. With the gleefully satisfying "Send Help," Raimi gives Ben the ending he's always wanted. Join Ben, Griffin, David, and Marie as they chat about the endless likability of Rachel McAdams, the heel turn of Dylan O'Brien, and how the various employees of Blank Check Productions would fare on a deserted island. Read "Dylan O’Bri...
Feb 01, 2026•2 hr 27 min
On today’s show, Richard and Alison hop on a boxcar and stare wistfully as the 20th century passes them by with Best Picture nominee Train Dreams . They discuss director Clint Bentley’s lush, if somewhat sanded-down take on Denis Johnson’s novella about a lumberman haunted by his past, starring a very quiet Joel Edgerton. Train Dreams is one of Netflix’s Best Picture nominees this year, but the film was not an original production. It was acquired by the streamer at last year’s Sundance Film Fest...
Jan 29, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Mommy's back! Emily Yoshida joins the gang to talk about 2002's Morvern Callar, a surprisingly tender film about grief, starting over, and taking a Jet2 Holiday. We're chatting about Samantha Morton's unconventional star quality, our personal history with mixtapes, and the Fantastic Beasts franchise for some reason. Plus, Ben reveals his love of seaside snow, Griffin adds some context from the source material (or whatever he could translate from the Scottish dialect), and everyone agrees that Mo...
Jan 25, 2026•2 hr 37 min
It’s Hollywood’s biggest morning! Join Richard and Alison (plus a vacationing Producer Benjamin Frisch) as they pick apart the biggest snubs and surprises of the year: Sinners breaking the all-time nominations record! The Secret Agent surging out of Neon’s international power lineup! The complete collapse of would-be frontrunner Wicked: For Good! Plus we take a conversation detour with Apple’s F1, the surprise blockbuster pulling up the rear amongst the Best Picture lineup finds alongside Train ...
Jan 22, 2026•1 hr 8 min
We need to pod about Glasgow. We need to pod about the arresting inner lives of these complicated protagonists. We need to pod about every incredible project Lynne Ramsay has been attached to over the past 25 years that never actually happened. So yeah, WE NEED TO POD ABOUT CASTVIN! Join us as we discuss Ramsay’s debut film Ratcatcher, a striking study of a young boy on the precipice of adolescence in the slums of 1970s Glasgow. Ben discovers that he adores this movie. Griffin discovers that he ...
Jan 18, 2026•2 hr 5 min
This week, we’re joined by David Sims as we orbit the Golden Globes and their Best Drama winner, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet . In the vibes-based reality of awards season predictions, Hamnet has emerged as a potential spoiler to the season’s other favorites, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners . But what, exactly, makes something an Oscar villain? We also get into the film itself, the historical Shakespeare, why people are weird about Chloé Zhao, and our ...
Jan 15, 2026•1 hr 15 min
Join Pulp Men (and Woman) of the Year Griffin, David, Ben, and Marie as they discuss Park Chan Wook’s latest offering, the silly and sublime No Other Choice. We’re talking about paper, AI-proof jobs, the handsomeness of Lee Byung-hun, the possibility that Director Park is the Michael Jordan of dissolves, and the fact that this is likely Griffin’s favorite film of 2025. Plus, David breaks down over the finale of Stranger Things, and we all apologize for a bunch of stuff. Read the Chevy Chase New ...
Jan 11, 2026•2 hr 41 min
This week, we’re only slightly hung over from last night’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards! Griffin Newman joins the pod to discuss the event, where, among dry-run Oscar speeches from Amy Madigan, Rose Byrne, and Wagner Moura, we saw Ethan Hawke fall into a fountain beneath a towering Buddhist deity. Then we turn to the precursor circuit, where Marty Supreme ’s momentum has cemented Timothée Chalamet as a frontrunner for Best Actor. We get into how he’s played the campaign circuit so far, an...
Jan 08, 2026•1 hr 45 min
Testing, testing…does anybody know? Is this thing on? It depends on who you ask, frankly. The Blank Check team are divided on Bradley Cooper’s latest offering, the divorce dramedy Is This Thing On? Can you just walk in off the street to do an open mic at the Comedy Cellar? No. Is Peyton Manning one of our finest athlete actors? Yes. Is Griffin’s opinion of this film possibly strained by his anxiety over the New York City mayoral election? Probably. Join us for an episode that we hope is funnier ...
Jan 04, 2026•2 hr 29 min
Welcome to Critical Darlings, a new podcast miniseries from Blank Check: A conversation about the awards season conversation, one contender at a time. On Critical Darlings, critics and Blank Check alumni Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore guide you through the state of the Oscars race, from the precursors, to the campaigns, to the nominees themselves. To get things started, we begin with a discussion of the festival circuit and the curious state of this year's race; where many promising films ha...
Jan 01, 2026•1 hr 26 min
We went back to Pandora and we all fell in love with a very special lady. She’s a bit prickly. A bit unconventional. But boy, is she something! Join us as we chat Avatar: Fire and Ash, aka VARANG: THE AWAKENING, the third installment in Big Jim’s Sully family saga. Yes, this movie’s a bit messier than the previous ones. Yes, it repeats many of the same beats as The Way of Water. No, we do not care. We are too distracted by our new Na’vi queen. Listen to Big Jim drop Big Lore on The Town with Mat...
Dec 21, 2025•2 hr 45 min
It’s pretty hard being the governor of an unnamed state when you’re a 34-year-old woman with a husband who’s the heir to a local pizza empire and you’ve got a brother who has agoraphobia and your sleazy dad keeps leaving you weird voicemails and Julie Kavner is narrating your entire life story! Wooo, that was a lot. James L. Brooks’ Ella McCay is A LOT. Richard Lawson joins us to chat about this very strange movie that feels like a real outlier at contemporary multiplexes. If anything, Ella McCa...
Dec 14, 2025•2 hr 6 min
Honey Don’t? Honey probably shouldn’t have. But that’s okay, because Honey, we’re gonna talk about it anyway! Writer and illustrator Mattie Lubchansky joins us to close out our Coens series with Ethan and Tricia’s latest offering from earlier this year. How do we feel about Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza as performers? How do we feel about Chris Evans’ “year of trying stuff”? How do we feel about the threatened third film in this Lesbian B-Movie trilogy, “Go Beavers!”? Well, honey, you’ll jus...
Dec 07, 2025•2 hr 36 min
Two gals and a briefcase full of dicks. What more could an 84 minute caper need? mxmtoon joins us to chat about Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s lesbian road trip movie Drive Away Dolls, and brings with her the fascinating perspective of someone whose first Coen movie was…Drive Away Dolls! We’re chatting about Ethan and Tricia’s unconventional relationship, the legacy of Cynthia PlasterCaster, and the unlikely leading man trajectory of Pedro Pascal. Plus, we’re mourning the dearth of lesbian bars a...
Nov 30, 2025•2 hr 31 min
You can’t say “Macbeth” in a theater, but you can certainly say it on a podcast! Dana Schwartz joins us (in her third Blank Check appearance on a witch-centered film) to talk about Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, the first solo-directorial effort from a Coen Brother after their amicable split. We’re debating the success of Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington’s performances, learning about the history of Scottish kings, and discovering Ben Hosley’s family crest in the first Blank Check ep...
Nov 23, 2025•2 hr 44 min
Six segments. Four legendary movie podcasters. Three and a half hours of keeping David Sims away from his family. Welcome to our Ballad of Buster Scruggs episode! How Did This Get Made’s Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas join the Two Friends to talk about the Coens’ final film together (as of this recording), a grab bag of western vignettes that could have been titled “A Million Ways to Die in the West” if Seth MacFarlane hadn’t already claimed it. We’re picking our favorite segments, chatting ab...
Nov 16, 2025•3 hr 30 min
