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PODCAST

The Film Board

Ever leave the theater desperate to talk about that one wild scene, that questionable plot twist, or the inexplicably shirtless cameo? The Film Board is here for you. Each month, host Pete Wright assembles a panel of film obsessives—Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger, and an ever-rotating cast of co-conspirators—for a round-table deep dive into the latest movies in theaters. Spoilers? Absolutely. Hot takes? Always. Polite, nuanced disagreement? We aspire. Perfect for film fans who love

tv & film after shows

All Episodes

70:06

Primetime • Have a Seat Right There

The Film Board ·

2026/09/29

Primetime is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Ocean Murff have a seat in Lance Oppenheim’s sting house to ask who the predator really is: Robert Pattinson’s ego-cracking Chris Hansen, Merritt Wever’s unapologetic producer, the Perverted-Justice volunteer at the keyboard, or everyone watching. The panel splits hard on whether Decoy Dan’s SAG card is a happy ending, whether Alex Winter’s DA earns any sympathy, and whether a movie built to

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66:02

Spider-Man: Brand New Day • Small Potatoes, Big Feelings

The Film Board ·

2026/08/04

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger, Ocean Murff, and Matthew Fox debate spider puberty, the Jean Grey of it all, whether Peter Parker is secretly the villain of his own franchise, and one very bad post-credits scene. Full spoilers. Ratings from 3.5 stars to a full five.Links & NotesThe film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd, and follow The Next Reel while you're there.Where the title comes from

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76:02

The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer

The Film Board ·

2026/07/21

Christopher Nolan does not do anything small, so of course his Odyssey is shot entirely on IMAX film, scored on Bronze Age instruments, and staged with a sixty-foot practical Cyclops in an actual cave full of actual bees. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Ocean Murff, and Steve Sarmento pull up an oar for The Film Board's monthly round-table to figure out what all that machinery is actually in service of — because the surprising thing about The Odyssey isn't the spectacle. It's that Nolan takes Homer's

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58:53

Disclosure Day: The Truth is on the Run

The Film Board ·

2026/06/16

Steven Spielberg is seventy-nine years old, and he just made the movie where the government finally stops lying about aliens. Disclosure Day caps the loose trilogy he started with Close Encounters and E.T. — private awe, then childhood friendship, and now a global broadcast that yanks the curtain back on all of it. This month the Film Board gathers to toss about whether the old master still has the magic.Full spoilers, of course. The panel digs into Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as the searching

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62:46

The Lunchbox Mandalorian • The Mandalorian and Grogu

The Film Board ·

2026/05/26

Seven years after The Rise of Skywalker, the saga finally got off the couch, and what it brought back was a tin-canned dad, a green gremlin, and a teenage Hutt with a glandular disorder. The Film Board lands split right down the middle, mostly in the affectionate way. Everyone agrees the adventures of Grogu are the heart of the thing. Everyone also agrees the plot is thin enough to read a newspaper through, and that this plays less like a movie than like the best three episodes of a Mandalorian

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61:00

Project Hail Mary: The Buddy Movie That Made Us Love...

The Film Board ·

2026/04/14

Project Hail Mary gives us a spider-shaped rock creature with no eyes, no face, and a simplified vocabulary who makes a choice so selfless that four grown men on a podcast had to take a beat. That's the kind of movie this is. Andy Weir's third novel has been adapted by Lord and Miller — the filmmakers who made you cry about a Lego — and the result is a two-and-a-half-hour space movie where the most compelling relationship is between Ryan Gosling and a practical puppet made of granite.Pete, Tommy,

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55:55

Scream 7: The Past Keeps Calling

The Film Board ·

2026/03/12

Ghostface is back. Sidney Prescott is back. Kevin Williamson — the writer who started it all in 1996 — is back, this time in the director's chair. And The Film Board is here to pick through the wreckage.Pete Wright convenes the panel — Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan — for a full-spoiler autopsy of Scream 7, the franchise's seventh installment and its most complicated origin story yet. The film arrives trailing the collapse of a whole other movie: Melissa Barrera's firing, Jenna

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61:52

Mercy: The Algorithm Wants Your Lunch Money

The Film Board ·

2026/02/10

This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright drags Andy Nelson, Tommy Metz III, and Steve Sarmento into an emergency bonus hearing because Andy texted, essentially, “We can’t skip a month. Also I found a movie.” That movie is Mercy, a slick, noisy, deeply committed screenlife thriller where Chris Pratt wakes up strapped into a futuristic execution-chair-courtroom and has 90 minutes to prove he didn’t kill his wife. The judge is an AI who looks like Rebecca Ferguson. Which is frankly unfair to every

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58:58

Avatar: Fire and Ash • When Spectacle Outpaces Story

The Film Board ·

2026/01/13

This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright sits down with Tommy Metz III and Steve Sarmento to wrestle with a question that keeps resurfacing throughout Avatar: Fire and Ash: how can a movie built with such extraordinary care feel so strangely forgettable?James Cameron’s return to Pandora is, once again, a monumental technical achievement. The scale is enormous. The craft is meticulous. The effort behind it is undeniable. And yet, as the conversation unfolds, the panel keeps circling the same uneasy

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52:57

Wake Up Dead Man

The Film Board ·

2025/12/16

A locked church. A sermon mid-amen. A knife that absolutely should not be where it is. This month, The Film Board turns its attention to Wake Up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the most austere—and maybe most confrontational—entry yet in Rian Johnson’s whodunit canon. From the opening minutes, the film dares the audience to argue with it: what you just saw could not have happened… and yet here we are.Pete Wright is joined by Steve Sarmento, Mandy Kaplan, and Tommy Metz III to wrestle with a mystery

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66:45

The Running Man

The Film Board ·

2025/11/18

“Stop filming me!”The Film Board Gathers! This time, they're racing through Edgar Wright's adaptation of The Running Man, a sharper, more faithful take on Richard Bachman’s/Stephen King's dystopian manhunt. Glenn Powell stars as Ben Richards, sprinting for survival and truth in a world where entertainment is weaponized and every choice is content.Pete Wright leads Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Matthew Fox, and Mandy Kaplan through a deep dive into this reimagining. The panel tackles everything

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54:50

TRON: Ares

The Film Board ·

2025/10/21

Greetings, Users! The Film Board Gathers again—this time to boot up TRON: Ares, Disney’s latest attempt to update a franchise that still doesn’t understand what “updating” means. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan log on to debate Jared Leto’s turn as an AI messiah with great hair and no emotional bandwidth, and Greta Lee’s heroic attempt to act her way out of the mainframe.The panel tackles the film’s tangled themes—AI, empathy, and whatever Jared Leto thinks a “character

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59:48

PTA Goes Full Action Dad with One Battle After Another

The Film Board ·

2025/09/30

Paul Thomas Anderson just made an action movie you can take your in-laws to without a 20-minute lecture about American masculinity and bowling metaphors. One Battle After Another is PTA’s $175 million plunge into the now, mixing the absurdity of a stoner dad in a bathrobe with a razor-sharp allegory about fascism, power, and family. Leonardo DiCaprio leads as a washed-up revolutionary trying to rescue his daughter (Chase Infinity) from Sean Penn’s snarling, broken military villain, and the result is

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53:50

The Thursday Murder Club

The Film Board ·

2025/09/02

Case Notes, August 30th, 2025: A suspiciously cozy murder mystery has been committed. The suspects—Tommy Metz III, Mandy Kaplan, Steve Sarmento, and Justin “JJ” Jaeger—have assembled remotely, each with their own dubious alibis and hot takes. The film: The Thursday Murder Club, Netflix’s big adaptation of Richard Osman’s beloved novel. The crime? A charming cast, a confusing mystery, and a script that may or may not have committed third-degree exposition.This month’s Film Board roundtable dives

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87:34

Superman (2025)

The Film Board ·

2025/07/15

The Film Board Gathers! And this time… it’s for Superman. Yes, again. James Gunn has rebooted the Big Blue Boy Scout for the 37th time (give or take), and this version comes with a sunnier tone, a superpowered dog, and—brace yourself—feelings. Actual feelings.David Corenswet slips into the tights with impressive sincerity, Rachel Brosnahan delivers the Lois Lane we didn’t know we desperately needed, and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor is basically what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg and Elon

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72:43

Jurassic World Rebirth

The Film Board ·

2025/07/08

The gang of thugs dons their most practical jungle gear and reluctantly boards the biotech boat for Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth. Scarlett Johansson leads a mission to harvest dinosaur DNA in what Universal hopes is the beginning of a new trilogy—but does this franchise still have life in its genetic code, or has it gone full dino-extinct?In this episode, Pete Wright, Steve Sarmento, Tommy Metz III, Justin “JJ” Jaeger, and Mandy Kaplan unpack everything from ADR overload and

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63:00

The Phoenician Scheme

The Film Board ·

2025/06/10

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme crash-lands into theaters with a symmetry—and we’re here to unpack the wreckage. Benicio Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, a morally exhausted arms dealer who survives a plane crash and decides, rather abruptly, to become a better man. His daughter, a nun (played with unsettling calm by Mia Threapleton), may be his salvation. Or his reckoning. Or both. Along for the ride: Michael Cera as a soft-spoken entomologist, a council of multinational

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57:57

Thunderbolts*

The Film Board ·

2025/05/20

Are you tired of superheroes who always do the right thing? Exhausted by teams that save the day and, dare we say it, have a plan? This month, The Film Board dives into Marvel’s Thunderbolts—the super squad you get when you order the Avengers from the bargain bin. Pete Wright is joined by Mandy Kaplan, Justin Jaeger, Tommy Metz III, and Steve Sarmento for a roundtable that spoils everything, celebrates Florence Pugh’s star turn, and debates whether more MCU movies should end with a hug

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68:50

Sinners

The Film Board ·

2025/04/22

Some stories we inherit. Some are whispered through family trees. Others are passed down through song—riffs on pain, echoes of joy, blue notes of survival. In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, we get all three. And this month, The Film Board—Pete, Tommy, and Andy—gathers to talk about a film that bends genres, then drips them in blood and gospel and IMAX-saturated twilight.This is a vampire movie. But not really. It’s a family tragedy. And a juke joint musical. And a war story. And a funeral

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68:35

Mickey 17

The Film Board ·

2025/03/11

Prepare yourselves for a journey into the bewildering world of Bong Joon Ho's latest sci-fi offering. That's right—the director who brought you parasites in the basement and tentacles in the river has now delivered expendable humans on a frozen planet.In this week's utterly perplexing episode, Pete Wright gathers his gang of film-analyzing thugs to dissect "Mickey 17," a movie that asks the profound question: "What if your corporate job literally killed you repeatedly and you STILL couldn't

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