Spencer Parsons and Chris Stachiw join Mike to dig into the ideological undercurrents of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s contentious capstone to his Batman trilogy. Released in 2012, the film finds a broken Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) pulled back into action as Gotham—now pointedly resembling New York—falls under siege by Bane (Tom Hardy) and the League of Shadows. The conversation moves past spectacle to examine the film’s deeply anxious view of revolution, class conflict, and popul...
Jan 14, 2026•2 hr 9 min
Adam Long and Josh Hadley join Mike to explore Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004), the sweeping documentary from Xan Cassavetes about the rise and fall of Los Angeles’s most influential pay-TV channel. More than a cable station, Z Channel was a film school beamed into living rooms, programming uncut movies, international cinema, director’s cuts, and repertory favorites long before that was standard practice. The conversation digs into the channel’s daring programming philosophy, its outsi...
Jan 07, 2026•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 781
Mike talks with Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, the filmmakers behind Dead Man’s Line, a chilling dive into one of America’s most disturbing true-crime stories. The conversation traces how the directors reconstructed the life and legend of Tony Kiritsis, whose 1977 hostage standoff transfixed the nation and blurred the line between media spectacle and lived horror. Berry and Enochs unpack their research, ethical choices, and the challenge of shaping archival chaos into a tense, humane documentary. T...
Jan 05, 2026•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 683
Mike talks with the creative team behind Luger, a provocative Spanish thriller that blurs the line between obsession, power, and violence. Joining the conversation are filmmaker Bruno Martín, director Santiago Taboada, and producer Mario Mayo. Together, they dig into the film’s origins, its unsettling themes, and the choices that shaped its stark tone and moral unease. The discussion explores the challenges of mounting an independent Spanish production, navigating international audiences, and cr...
Jan 02, 2026•39 min•Season 1Ep. 684
Writer, director, and star Joanna Arnow delivers one of the sharpest, most quietly uncomfortable comedies of recent years with The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023), a film that weaponizes awkwardness, deadpan humor, and emotional stasis. Arnow plays Ann, a thirty-three-year-old woman drifting through New York City, desperate for connection but seemingly incapable of advocating for herself. She works a job that barely registers as meaningful, endures social interactions...
Dec 31, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 780
Mike Thompson and Rob St. Mary join Mike to step into the rubble, rhetoric, and Roman cosplay of Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed, forty-years-in-the-making cinematic fever dream. A film obsessed with power, legacy, architecture, and Great Men Thinking Great Thoughts, Megalopolis feels less like a movie than a manifesto—one that demands to be taken seriously while daring you to laugh at it. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), the troubled genius nobody appreciates (write what you know...
Dec 26, 2025•1 hr 56 min•Season 1Ep. 779
If you're not listening to the Chasing Chevy Chase podcast, here's an episode to whet your appetite... Chevy Chase takes an unexpected turn into sci-fi thriller territory with Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992). Directed by John Carpenter and adapted from H.F. Saint’s novel, the film follows Nick Halloway (Chase), who becomes invisible after a freak laboratory accident. As he grapples with the perks and pitfalls of invisibility, he also tries to evade ruthless CIA operative David Jenkins (Sam Ne...
Dec 24, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 592
Spencer Parsons and Rob St. Mary join Mike to unpack Ana Kokkinos’s unflinching 2006 adaptation of Rupert Thomson’s novel. The Book of Revelation, a film that refuses easy provocation, using intimacy, trauma, and performance as tools for something far more unsettling. The story follows Daniel (Tom Long), a dancer who vanishes during a mundane errand for his girlfriend Bridget (Anna Torv). What initially plays as a mystery gradually reveals itself as a confrontation with sexual violence, shame, a...
Dec 24, 2025•2 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 778
Mike talks with director Claudio Fäh about Turbulence (2025), a tightly constructed thriller set almost entirely in the air. Fäh discusses the film’s development, the practical challenges of staging action in a confined space, and the decisions behind its restrained visual style and controlled pacing. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support . Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionb...
Dec 22, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 682
Radley Metzger pushes the boundaries of erotic cinema with The Image (1975), a film that treats desire as ritual, performance, and provocation. Adapted from the infamous novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet—writing under the name Jean de Berg—the film unfolds as a stylized confession. Carl Parker plays Jean, the author surrogate recounting a charged encounter with his estranged friend Claire (Marilyn Roberts) and the young woman who becomes the focus of his controlled cruelties, Anne (Mary Mendum). ...
Dec 17, 2025•2 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 777
Jessica Shires and Samm Deighan join Mike for a deep, unflinching look at Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O (1975), the adaptation of Pauline Réage’s notorious novel. Corinne Cléry embodies O with startling vulnerability as she’s led by her lover René (Udo Kier) into the secretive Chateau at Roissy—an isolated world of ritual, discipline, and erotic power exchange. The conversation opens up the film’s legacy, its aesthetics, and its complicated relationship to the source text’s authorship and mythol...
Dec 10, 2025•3 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 776
Stuart “Feedback” Andrews never whispered his opinions — he weaponized them. The longtime Rue Morgue Radio rabble-rouser and Cinephobia Radio agitator carved out a cult legacy with his mercurial personality, meticulous audio collages, and an manical belief that cinema deserved passion, noise, and occasionally a little chaos. Mike revisits one of Stuart’s deep dives: “Jungle Gate,” a two-part Cinephobia takedown of the marketing circus surrounding Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno and Knock Knock. The...
Dec 09, 2025•4 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 681
Mike talks with director Sam Firstenberg and Reelblack founder Michael J. Dennis about Riverbend (1989). The discussion examines the film’s production, its depiction of racism in the Jim Crow South, and its unusual release history. Firstenberg reflects on working with Steve James, Larry Dobkin, and Margaret Avery, while Dennis provides broader context on the film’s place within independent Black cinema. The conversation also touches on the politics surrounding Riverbend, its themes, and how the ...
Dec 08, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 678
Mike talks with Eli Kooris and Martin “Mac” McNally about American Skyjacker (2025). The conversation covers the film’s examination of McNally’s 1972 airplane hijacking, his motivations, and the events that followed. Kooris discusses the project’s development and the process of working with archival material, law-enforcement records, and McNally’s own accounts. McNally reflects on the choices he made, the consequences he faced, and how revisiting the story for the documentary differs from living...
Dec 05, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 680
Mike talks with author and filmmaker John Gaspard about Held Over (2025). They discuss the book’s focus on theatrical exhibition history, the practice of long-running engagements, and the logistics and economics that kept certain films in theaters for extended periods. Gaspard outlines the interviews and research that shaped the project and explains why Harold and Maude became a central case study, noting how its slow-building audience, regional rollouts, and unexpected longevity helped define t...
Dec 04, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 679
The Langoliers. Adapted from the Stephen King novella and directed by Tom Holland, the production follows a group of passengers on a redeye flight from Los Angeles to Boston who awaken to find most of the plane’s occupants gone and reality behaving in unfamiliar ways. The episode examines the story’s structure, the performances by David Morse, Bronson Pinchot, and the ensemble cast, and the miniseries’ place within 1990s television. The conversation also includes interviews with writer-director ...
Dec 03, 2025•2 hr 43 min•Season 1Ep. 775
Mike speaks with writer/director William Means and actress Rocky Shay and about their 2025 feature Junkie. The conversation covers the film’s development, its focus on addiction and recovery, and the production choices that shaped its grounded approach. Shay and Means discuss the project’s evolution, the performances at the center of the story, and the film’s path through the festival circuit. Follow Will at https://www.instagram.com/rill.means/ Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.sp...
Dec 02, 2025•34 min•Season 1Ep. 677
Carol Borden and Jackie Stargrove join Mike for a double-barreled deep dive into John Woo’s The Killer — both the 1989 Hong Kong classic and Woo’s own 2024 reimagining. They revisit the operatic gunfights, moral codes, and aching "bromance" that made The Killer a cornerstone of the “heroic bloodshed” genre, tracing its influence from Le Samouraï to Hard Boiled to the present day. Along the way, they take a detour through Hum Hain Bemisaal (1994), Bollywood’s gloriously unauthorized remake, and c...
Dec 01, 2025•1 hr 50 min•Season 1Ep. 771
The Projection Booth pulls back the curtain on Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus (2025), a tense, docu-style thriller that pushes real-world chaos right to the edge of the frame. Mike sits down with special effects coordinator Brandon K. McLaughlin, whose practical wizardry gives the film its authenticity. They dig into orchestrating high-stakes set pieces, blending practical work with digital augmentation, and engineering Greengrass’s signature controlled mayhem without ever losing sight of charac...
Nov 28, 2025•36 min•Season 1Ep. 675
Daniel Kremer returns to The Projection Booth with an irresistible double feature of cinephile obsession. Mike dives into Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano (2024), Kremer’s exhaustive and heartfelt documentary about the fiercely talented, too-often disregarded director behind Georgy Girl, Loot, and Why Shoot the Teacher? Kremer lays out the decades-long fascination that fueled his mission to rescue Narizzano’s reputation from footnotes and dismissals. The conversation then...
Nov 27, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 676
Noirvember closes with James B. Harris’s Cop (1988)—the first time James Ellroy’s feverish fiction hit the big screen. Mike teams with Andrew Nette and Rod Lott for a deep read of Harris’s adaptation, where James Woods’s unhinged Detective Lloyd Hopkins hunts a killer across eighteen years of buried violence. The trio digs into Ellroy’s original novel Blood on the Moon and the wilder, abandoned incarnation that came before it—L.A. Death Trip, the unsold, manuscript that first birthed Hopkins. Us...
Nov 26, 2025•2 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 774
Mike talks with filmmaker Todd Rohal in a lively, no-holds-barred tour through one of the most delightfully unclassifiable careers in American indie cinema. From Knuckleface Jones to The Catechism Cataclysm, Rohal has carved out a lane where misfits, surreal detours, and emotional gut-punches live side-by-side. The conversation zeroes in on F*** My Son (2025), his bold and darkly comic new feature that pushes his sensibilities into feral, confrontational territory. Rohal talks process, chaos, co...
Nov 25, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 674
The Projection Booth enters Edgar Wright territory with a deep dive into The Running Man (2025), his audacious adaptation of the dystopian classic. Mike teams up with Midnight Viewing’s own Father Malone to break down Wright’s maximalist world-building, razor-cut action choreography, and the film’s commentary on media spectacle and state-manufactured violence. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support . Become a supporter o...
Nov 24, 2025•49 min•Season 1Ep. 673
Noirvember 2025 keeps rolling as Mike teams up with author Dahlia Schweitzer and artist Rahne Alexander to crack open V.I. Warshawski (1991), Jeff Kanew’s glossy, big-city take on Sara Paretsky’s groundbreaking detective. Kathleen Turner commands the screen as V.I., whose night on the town swerves into murder, a dead former Blackhawks star, and a teenager who refuses to stay out of danger. This episode brings together an incredible lineup: Sara Paretsky, creator of the V.I. Warshawski novels; sc...
Nov 19, 2025•4 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 772
Mike talks with cultural critic Dan Schindel and Lyle Zanca of GKIDS to discuss Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 anime film, Angel’s Egg (AKA Tenshi no Tamago), a gorgeous lyrical film about spiritualism and redemption. The film has been recently restored and given a 4K scan that will be screened across the U.S. starting November 19, 2025. Check local listings and be on the lookout for the upcoming Blu-Ray release. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podc...
Nov 18, 2025•20 min•Season 1Ep. 672
Noirvember keeps rolling with Helmut Käutner’s Black Gravel (1961), a scalding portrait of postwar Germany buried under guilt, corruption, and American occupation. Mike is joined by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan to dig into this bleak anti-Heimatfilm, where gravel trucker Robert Neidhardt (Helmut Wildt) scrapes by on the black market and rekindles an affair with Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), now married to a U.S. officer. When an accident turns deadly, their secret unearths a moral wasteland of compli...
Nov 12, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 773
Mike sits down with the sibling filmmaking duo Josh Holden and Nick Holden (a.k.a. the Holden Brothers) to unpack their sharp new dramedy Sell Out, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival. Shot in and around Austin and Louisiana, the film follows novelist Benny Dink as his career stalls, his love life unravels and a too-good-to-pass ghostwriting job forces him into a reckoning with art, ambition and identity. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection...
Nov 11, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 600
Mike talks with Caleb Alexander Smith and David Krumholtz about Forelock, a dark, biting satire set on the margins of Hollywood. The film follows Caiden, a drifting ex-athlete pulled into the bizarre world of boulevard impersonators and small-time hustlers by Randy, a disillusioned veteran of the trade. Together they chase a missing payout and sink deeper into the city’s surreal underbelly. Smith and Krumholtz discuss the film’s blend of desperation, performance, and self-mythology—how Forelock ...
Nov 10, 2025•25 min•Season 1Ep. 601
Noirvember 2025 roars to life with Walter Hill’s sleek, existential chase film The Driver (1978). Ryan O’Neal plays the nameless getaway specialist who moves through Los Angeles like a ghost, pursued by Bruce Dern’s manic lawman hell-bent on taking him down. It’s a lean, hypnotic duel between predator and prey where style is substance and silence is power. Mike rides shotgun with Beth Accomando and Walter Chaw to unpack Hill’s minimalist approach, his homage to Melville’s Le Samouraï, and the co...
Nov 05, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 770
Mike talks with author Mark Edlitz about his latest deep-dive into superhero history, Look Up in the Sky: The Forgotten Superboy Series. The book uncovers the behind-the-scenes story of the short-lived Superboy TV show (1988–1992) — a fascinating chapter in the Superman legacy that’s often overlooked. Edlitz explores how the series evolved across its four seasons, the creative battles that shaped it, and the actors who brought the Boy of Steel to life. From licensing chaos to Kryptonian lore, th...
Oct 30, 2025•33 min•Season 1Ep. 598
