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PODCAST

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics

Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics

Two friends with strong opinions watch films separately then discuss them on the show for the first time. Can their friendship survive? Join Mike and Dan as they discuss one film each episode--and in only fifteen minutes, give or take a few. There are no long pauses, pontifications, or politics--just two guys who want to share their enthusiasm for great movies. On Twitter. On Letterboxd. Email: fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com.

tv & film film reviews

All Episodes

28:07

History Is Made at Night

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/09/29

Every so often, you encounter The Perfect Movie: something with a screenplay, cast, and direction that combine in a way that reminds you of what happens when everyone working on a movie gets it exactly right. History is Made at Night (1937) is one of those movies. Join us for a conversation about how a film that accelerates emotions almost to the level of farce and shifts between genres like a bored teenager with a remote control still dramatizes perfectly what it’s like to fall in love.Hervé

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29:28

The Straight Story

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/09/15

Everybody was shocked when, in 1999, David Lynch released a G-rated film with a Norman Rockwell setting that didn’t have a dark underbelly or wild reveal; if you have a David Lynch bingo card, The Straight Story is the free space. And while The Straight Story is as wholesome a film as you can find, it's never sentimental or corny. Dan thinks it’s Lynch’s best. Join him and Mike as they talk about all the ways that the film could have gone wrong and, more importantly, all the things that Lynch gets

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33:01

Excalibur

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/08/25

We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original quite like Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 film that can be called, without insult, “aggressively two-dimensional.” Join us for a conversation about how Boorman makes the experience of watching a film like the experience of reading the legends. We also talk about the two best portrayals of King Arthur: Nigel Terry and Graham Chapman.If the

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23:51

The Boston Strangler

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/08/18

In a film in which the audience buys its tickets knowing who will play the title role, what happens when you don’t have him enter the frame until a solid hour has passed? How does the focus shift from the horrific villain to the horror felt by his victims? Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) isn’t a faithful retelling of Albert DeSalvo’s crimes or an explanation of his compulsion: he’s not Raskolnikov or Buffalo Bill. Instead, the film masterfully involves its viewers in the procedure of

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22:32

If I Should Die Before I Wake

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/07/25

Flannery O’Connor said that stories about pious children tend to be false. She’s right, of course, but she doesn’t even say the half of it: stories about children in general tend to be false. The kids are always too brave, self-aware, or smart; they’re like the children in medieval paintings who look like miniature adults. If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952) by the Argentine director Carlos Hugo Christensen is the exception: it’s one of the best portrayals of childhood in film history as well as a

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27:59

Moonstruck

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/07/21

Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw it, he sought forgiveness for the errors of his ways. That’s an appropriate theme to consider in light of a film saturated with Italian Catholicism that explores themes of sin and redemption, but with a light touch and in a celebratory mode. It’s a terrific film that couldn’t be made today; listen to the show to learn why.Ira Wells’s Norman

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23:29

Love and Mercy

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/07/07

Love and MercyA film by Bill Pohlad Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see Brian Wilson’s Kubrick-like devotion to getting Pet Sounds exactly like he wants it, as well as his becoming a whole person through the force of his future wife. The film is a nightmare version of Peter Pan, examining a boy who won’t grow up until he finds the two things mentioned in the title. We all know from history that he does, but the

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24:35

American Gangster

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/06/23

American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the

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25:54

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/06/03

The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from too much exposition is a matter of taste (and debated by the hosts), but both agree that the movie does what only its star can do: deliver thrills that derive from both the plot and the knowledge that what they are seeing is, in some sense, real. Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, and Tom Cruise all make themselves as much of a character in the films

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22:43

Heist

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/05/28

Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed performances and of Mamet’s highly unrealistic dialogue. (Yes, you read that correctly–and we love David

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27:01

The Fisher King

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/05/12

It’s our 300th episode and we honor a listener request for this milestone. The Fisher King (1991) could not be made today–not because of politics or cultural changes, but because it’s impossible to neatly classify. A love story, a tale of redemption, a disturbing study of psychosis, a romantic comedy, and an Artthurian quest, the film combines genres in ways that some audiences–or at least producers–might not appreciate. But the film is hilarious, frightening, and ultimately affirming of its two

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35:47

Peeping Tom

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/04/28

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we see demonstrated in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which boldly employs every convention of the horror film in order to achieve a stunning, authentic portrait of a disturbing mind at work. But Mark is no ordinary slasher: he’s an artist who is also a perfectionist and whose compulsion to destroy is like the compulsion to create. As Mark

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38:04

The Truman Show

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/04/14

Picasso said that art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly. Hamlet, Emma, and Citizen Kane are wonderfully constructed lies so convincing that we speak as if we knew their title characters. Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) investigates how this strange phenomena occurs. Under what conditions could something authentic arise from artifice–and what does it mean to have an authentic experience anyway? We all say that we’d be better off living in the real world instead of a fool’s

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33:29

Woman in the Dunes

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/03/24

In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau said he wanted to “drive life into a corner” and “reduce it to its lowest terms.” We often feel the appeal of that idea: to get away from civilization and really “live.” But would that always be a pleasurable series of epiphanies? Would the natural world always provide a backdrop against which we could explore our “real” selves? Thoureau also said that “a man is free in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.” Sounds good–unless that freedom from

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33:26

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/03/10

Every Western since Stagecoach seems to have been touted as “about the western.” To what degree is that true for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill’s 1969 contribution to the genre? Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about how the film wonderfully reminds its viewers why they love westerns as it also offers its more hip viewers a vision of an alternative lifestyle–think Easy Rider with horses.Tom Clavin’s Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild

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32:22

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/02/24

When George V. Higgins’s first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was published in 1970, it was widely acclaimed as an insider’s look at Boston’s criminal underbelly. Three years later, Peter Yates directed Robert Mitchum in one of his best performances as the mid-level gunrunner who is tempted to help “uncle” by turning in his associates to the cops. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about how Robert Mitchum eating pie is better than a thousand bank robberies and how the dialogue for which Higgins is

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30:04

American Made

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/02/10

Imagine you’re in a bar, holding forth about the news of the day–maybe it’s 1985 and, like everyone else, you’re talking about Iran-Contra, Oliver North, and the CIA. As you signal to the bartender that you’re ready for another, an unassuming, somewhat chubby guy next to you smiles and says, “You really want to know how all of that went down?” Then he begins a two-hour monologue that gets crazier every twenty minutes. American Made is that monologue, shot with all the speed and adrenaline as its

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36:01

The Rainmaker

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/01/27

All of the nearly three hundred episodes we’ve done so far have been enthusiastic celebrations of artists whose work we admire so greatly that we had to invent a podcast to talk about it. But in this very strange episode, we talk about a film so awful in so many ways that we are baffled by how it came from the same man who directed four unquestionable masterpieces in a row. The Rainmaker (1997) is–and we mean this without irony–a fascinating film that does everything that films like The

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30:14

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/01/20

Every movie in our current moment, regardless of quality, seems to have spawned sequels, prequels, and reboots; in this episode, we lament that the one film that we wish had been the beginning of a series didn’t make enough money to do so. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s 2003 adaptation of Patrick O’Brien’s novels, is rich, unironic, and inspiring; it’s a study of leadership, the tension between technology and human skill, and the ways in which discipline and restraint

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34:03

Miller's Crossing

Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics ·

2025/01/06

The opening scene of Miller’s Crossing (1990) tells the viewer that the film to follow is about friendship, character, and ethics–and it is, but done in such a way that the first-time viewer cannot fully appreciate the ways in which its protagonist, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), acts as if these are his private religion: a set of beliefs so secret that other characters, the viewer, and even, at times, Tom himself cannot fully articulate. That sounds very highfalutin’, but the film is also a joyful

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310 results

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