The Film Talk
by Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins
The 20-year human conversation about movies and what they mean.In 2006 TV director Jett Loe and peace activist Gareth Higgins both walked out of the same, terrible, movie at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast, Northern/North of Ireland. They encountered each other in the lobby, started talking, and so began a 20 year, and counting, conversation about movies, how they're made, and more importantly, what they mean.They enjoyed their conversations so much they began recording and distributing them, with the first incarnation of the show debuting that year. It's still going.
Episodes
-
Remembering Patrick Stewart
What made Patrick Stewart such an extraordinary actor? And why, when Star Trek: Nemesis needed an evil clone of Captain Picard, didn't they just cast Patrick Stewart? In this special tribute, Jett and Gareth remember the great British actor, who died October 28 at age 86, and explore a career…
more -
Are Movie Theaters Going to Be OK?
Are movie theaters dying, or are we entering a new golden age of moviegoing? Jett sits down with Miles Williams, artistic director of the historic Alex Theatre in Glendale, California, to talk about the future of cinema, the remarkable resurgence of 70mm film, and why the experience of watching...
-
Boorman and the Devil and the Beautiful Disaster of Exorcist II: The Heretic
Is Exorcist II: The Heretic really one of the worst sequels ever made, or have we been watching it all wrong Dear Listener? Thanks to the documentary Boorman and the Devil, Jett and Gareth reconsider a movie that has been mocked for nearly 50 years. They explore Boorman's career, from Point Blank...
-
Digger: A Requiem for the World We Find Ourselves In
Jett and Gareth are overwhelmed by DIGGER, a film they see as exhilarating, horrifying and the most important movie of the moment. How do you make art in a world that too absurd to satirize? Is DIGGER a climate horror movie, a satire, (or farce), a work about our complicity in the systems we...
-
Should We Stop Anthropomorphizing AI? What 2001, Colossus and The Outer Limits Can Teach Us
Why are we working so hard to make artificial intelligence seem human? In this solo episode, Jett turns to three works of classic, and semi-classic, science fiction: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Harlan Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand, asking what...
-
Coyote vs. Acme: Absurdity, Empathy, and Why We Keep Going
A cartoon coyote, Albert Camus, Mira Nair, and Albuquerque walk into a podcast. Jett and Gareth dig into the wonderfully humane Coyote vs. Acme: a film about persistence, absurdity, and the radical possibility of seeing the world through somebody else's eyes—even when that somebody has spent...
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: Our Number Ones, and What Greatness Means
Six episodes later, the ranking project finally reaches the summit. Jett and Gareth reveal their respective No. 1 Steven Spielberg films, argue about greatness, wander briefly into Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life, and confront the terrifying possibility that ranking art may have told us more...
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: Late Epiphanies and the Road to No. 1
The Spielberg ranking has now escaped all reasonable containment. As Jett and Gareth approach the top of the filmography, old assumptions collapse, unlikely favorites rise, and Gymkata, Zodiac, and Quantum of Solace somehow enter a conversation ostensibly about Steven Spielberg. Cinema is a...
-
Blue Heron: Grief, Family, and the Miracle of Being Seen
Sophy Romvari's Blue Heron opens a conversation about memory, damaged families, grief, and the profound human need to be seen accurately. Jett and Gareth also consider why New Yorker critic Richard Brody remains such a vital voice—and why criticism is at its best when it risks having a point of...
-
The Odyssey: War, Homecoming, and Our Responsibility to Act
THE ODYSSEY: It's important that a film at this scale is speaking to this moment that we're in Dear Listener. In this wide ranging discussion our hosts Higgins and Loe get into why THE ODYSSEY is so thought provoking and important a piece of mainstream entertainment, while along the way enjoining...
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: Sam Neill, Near Misses, and the Top Tier
Jett and Gareth would like to apologize for believing Steven Spielberg's entire theatrical career could be ranked in one episode. Part Four gets them almost, but emphatically not quite, to the end, while making room to remember the wonderful Sam Neill and the films and performances that stay with...
-
The Mandalorian and Grogu: Does Star Wars Still Have Moral Weight?
What is Star Wars actually for? Jett and Gareth welcome educator and Star Wars expert Dan Zehr to talk The Mandalorian and Grogu, the future of the franchise, and whether this enormous mythology still carries moral weight—or has become merely a very expensive machine for moving familiar shapes...
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: War Horse, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Movies That Divide Us
The great Spielberg ranking rolls onward, pausing for Au Hasard Balthazar, Tom Stoppard's work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Gareth's entirely defensible—or indefensible—love of War Horse. The rankings matter less than the arguments they provoke, which is probably the point.…
more -
Disclosure Day: Spielberg, Wonder, and the Courage to Listen
Take out the earplugs of your mind, Dear Listener. Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day prompts Jett and Gareth to talk about wonder, attention, and what happens when popular cinema asks us to remain open to something larger than our own certainty. Sometimes the recommendation really is simple: see...
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: Raiders, Duel, and the Madness of Ranking Art
Gareth has placed Raiders of the Lost Ark somewhere Jett regards as evidence of a collapsing civilization. Part Two continues the impossible Spielberg ranking, with Duel helping clarify a useful principle: in the absence of reason, there is madness. Naturally, this does nothing to stop them....
-
Steven Spielberg Ranked: The Absurdity of Applying Metrics to Art
Can art be reduced to a numbered list? Almost certainly not. Jett and Gareth proceed anyway. Part One begins the dangerous work of ranking every theatrically released Steven Spielberg film from least great to greatest—or perhaps from slightly brilliant to most brilliant. Metrics meet movies.…
more -
Backrooms: AI Anxiety and the Death of the Analog World
Backrooms arrives disguised as analog nostalgia and turns out to be something more unsettling: a film about what it feels like to live amid synthetic images, AI-generated culture, and the nagging suspicion that reality itself is becoming less tangible. Recommended—with caveats, unease, and a...
-
Natchez: Southern Charm, American Myth, and the Need to See Clearly
Natchez dismantles comforting myths about the American South while asking a larger question: what happens when culture lets us float free of place, history, and consequence? Gareth calls it an early film-of-the-year contender; Jett recommends it without reservation. Before we act, the episode...
-
Field of Dreams: Fathers, Sons, Regret, and the Possibility of Repair
Gareth has spent roughly 20 years trying to make Jett watch Field of Dreams. The long national nightmare is over. What follows is a conversation about fathers and sons, baseball ghosts, Burt Lancaster, lost monoculture, regret, forgiveness, and whether it is ever truly too late to make amends....
-
Project Hail Mary: When Big-Hearted Sci-Fi Leaves Us Cold
What? Two film critics who may not actually recommend PROJECT HAIL MARY? It's true folks, in this massive episode we go in-depth into the pitfalls PROJECT HAIL MARY falls into and recommend some alternatives, namely: E.T., TITANIC, SILENT RUNNING, THE DAY AFTER (TOMORROW), THE CAT FROM OUTER…
more -
Oscars 2026: The Movies, the Crafts, and the Stories We Choose
The 98th Academy Awards become an excuse to talk about what awards occasionally get right, what they miss, and the hundreds of people whose work makes movies possible. Jett and Gareth discuss the directors, actors, cinematographers, editors, craftspeople, and Best Picture nominees—with the usual...
-
Song Sung Blue: The Crowd-Pleaser That Missed Its Crowd
Gareth loves Song Sung Blue. Jett attempts to survive the experience physiologically. Together they ask why this warm, unabashed crowd-pleaser failed to find the audience it deserved—and whether sincerity has become strangely difficult for modern movie culture to process. Come for the film talk;...
-
Marty Supreme and Eephus: Exhilarating, Empty—or Both?
Two very different movies raise a suspiciously similar question: can a film be exhilarating and leave you strangely empty? Jett and Gareth put Marty Supreme and Eephus into conversation, looking for the difference between cinematic energy and actual nourishment. Baseball may or may not provide…
more -
The Best Films of 2025: The Movies That Mattered
It's the end of the year folks, so time for lists! Here's Jett and Gareth's Top 10 films of 2025. Gareth: BLUE MOON, A LITTLE PRAYER, KÖLN 75, THE HISTORY OF SOUND, SENTIMENTAL VALUE, SINNERS, SORRY BABY, IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT, KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN and TRAIN DREAMS. Jett: AVATAR: FIRE AND…
more -
Avatar: Fire and Ash: Does Avatar Need the Big Screen to Work?
One host saw Avatar: Fire and Ash in IMAX 3D. One did not. What follows is TFT's most divided conversation of the year and a useful experiment in what spectacle actually does: is Avatar a movie, an experience, or something that fundamentally changes when the screen gets smaller? Reconciliation...
-
Rob Reiner, Train Dreams, and Sorry, Baby: Kindness, Grief, and How Movies Can Hold Pain
Remembering Rob Reiner leads Jett and Gareth back to a quality that ran through his work almost regardless of genre: kindness. From there, Train Dreams and Sorry, Baby open two different windows onto grief, vulnerability, survival, and the strange ability movies have to hold pain without reducing...
-
Frankenstein: Why Tell This Story Again?
There have been hundreds of Frankensteins. So why another one? Jett and Gareth ask whether a filmmaker's obsessive need to tell a familiar story can itself justify the retelling—and what a new Frankenstein has to say about creation, responsibility, monsters, and the people who make them.…
more -
Bugonia: The Genre You Shouldn't Know Before You See It
Bugonia is one of those films best approached with as little protection as possible. Jett and Gareth discuss a movie they regard as a pinnacle of something they refuse to name because doing so would ruin one of its great pleasures. Watch first. Then return. Trust can occasionally be rewarded....
-
A House of Dynamite: Is Dread Enough?
A House of Dynamite is brutally effective at producing nuclear dread. But what responsibility does a film assume once it has frightened us? Jett and Gareth consider catastrophe cinema from Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove onward, asking whether depicting the train coming at us is enough—or whether…
more -
Tron: Ares, Diane Keaton, and the Radical Act of Being Yourself
Tron: Ares, The Cat from Outer Space, and Diane Keaton may not seem like natural companions. TFT accepts the challenge. Jett and Gareth consider the latest Tron while remembering Keaton and the rare quality she embodied so completely: the courage to be unmistakably, gloriously yourself. Subscribe...
-
One Battle After Another: A Great Film That's Painful and Funny at Exactly the Same Time
Jett sees an all-time great. Gareth finds the experience almost unbearable—and may still agree. One Battle After Another opens a conversation about visual grandeur, political violence, white supremacy, resistance, vulnerability, and the difficult distinction between admiring a film and enjoying…
more -
Weapons: A Horror Film for Our Age / Remembering Terence Stamp
Gareth calls Weapons a lament that earns the right to call itself a true story. Jett and Gareth explore why this horror film feels disturbingly fitted to its moment, then remember the presence, mystery, and startling career of Terence Stamp. Horror looks backward, sideways, and directly at us....
-
Superman: Kindness as Radical Power
Jett and Gareth disagree sharply about one performance in Superman. On the larger point they are united: this is a movie willing to treat empathy and kindness not as weakness, sentimentality, or branding, but as genuine forms of power in a world very good at rewarding cruelty. Sometimes decency...
-
28 Years Later: Horror, Compassion, and Caring About Strangers
"It made me care about strangers." That may be the most important thing Gareth says about 28 Years Later. Jett and Gareth explore a startlingly beautiful horror film whose cinematic ancestry reaches toward Boorman, Powell and Pressburger, Mike Leigh, and Lynne Ramsay, and whose real subject may…
more -
The Phoenician Scheme: Wes Anderson, Harris Yulin, and Learning to Love the Artificial
Has Jett finally become a Wes Anderson person? Civilization awaits the verdict. Jett and Gareth discuss why The Phoenician Scheme works for both of them and make room to remember Harris Yulin, one of those extraordinary actors capable of making a few minutes of screen time feel like an entire…
more -
Mountainhead and Friendship: Can Men Really Be Friends?
Can men actually be friends? Jett puts the question to Gareth, his co-host and possible friend, on TFT's 300th episode. Mountainhead and Tim Robinson's Friendship become entry points into masculinity, status, loneliness, Emerson, Joseph Beuys, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and whatever friendship…
more -
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Why This Impossible Movie Works
Surprise: Jett and Gareth love it. The Final Reckoning somehow evokes Lawrence of Arabia, The Abyss, and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe while remaining very much a Mission: Impossible movie. The conversation considers spectacle, sacrifice, the series as a whole, and why some gigantic movies still feel...
-
Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources: Crime, Hope, and Atonement
Spoiler alert: your neighbors are terrible. In a culture offering an infinite amount of "content," Gareth proposes something better: watch Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. Jett and Gareth explore two enduring films about cruelty, inheritance, consequence, hope, and atonement. Please watch...
-
Sinners: What Ryan Coogler's Film Means for the Future of Movies
Friends, lovers, sinners all: see this movie. Jett and Gareth take on Ryan Coogler's sprawling, multifaceted Sinners and the reasons it feels bigger than a single successful film. What does it reveal about genre, popular cinema, authorship, and the kinds of ambitious movies audiences might still...
-
Black Bag: Trust, Marriage, and Politics in a Dangerous Moment
Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag arrives as a sleek spy film and becomes something much more useful: a story about trust, loyalty, intimacy, and what people owe one another when institutions become unstable. Jett and Gareth consider why this deceptively elegant entertainment feels unusually alive to...
-
Gene Hackman, the Oscars, and the Responsibilities We Can't Duck
The episode goes off the rails. This is acknowledged early. Jett and Gareth remember their favorite Gene Hackman performances and what made him irreplaceable, examine what the 2025 Oscars did—and did not—say about the surrounding world, and ask the harder question underneath both subjects: when...
-
Oscars 2025, Part Two: Nickel Boys, Wicked, The Substance and More
Emilia Pérez, I'm Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance and Wicked - these are the films we're discussing today Dear Listener. As always Gareth Higgins and Jett Loe agree to disagree, especially about Gareth's shocking pick for best film out of the nominees. Enjoy. Subscribe on Patreon Apple…
more -
Oscars 2025, Part One: Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Dune and More
Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave and Dune: Part 2 - these are the films we're discussing today Dear Listener. Of one of these Gareth Higgins says, "It's about 80 percent as good as The Godfather". Listen in and find out what he's talking about, if you can stand our rendition of...
-
The Brutalist: Beauty, Ambition, and the Cost of Building Something Real
The Brutalist is bleak and beautiful at exactly the same time. Jett is ready to call it magnificent. Gareth is almost there. Their disagreement opens into a larger conversation about ambition, architecture, history, suffering, and what happens when monumental acts of creation are built on lives...
-
David Lynch Remembered: The Dream Never Ends
David Lynch has passed away. What strange words to be typing. We, like many others one suspects, expected him to be around always, and maybe he is…he's before and after, or perhaps there's no actual now. Subscribe on Patreon Apple - The Film Talk Spotify - The Film Talk Facebook.com/TheFilmTalk…
more -
The Best Films of 2024: The Movies That Mattered
The annual list arrives with categories, disagreements, honorable mentions, movies everybody missed, movies everybody saw, and one film that is emphatically not the best film of the year. From Dune: Part Two and Conclave to Nickel Boys, Challengers, All We Imagine as Light, and Joker: Folie à…
more -
A Complete Unknown: Bob Dylan, Identity, and the Mystery of Other People
Can we ever really know another person? James Mangold's Bob Dylan film gives Jett and Gareth a reason to ask, while also raising the equally urgent question of why A Complete Unknown occasionally appears to inhabit the same cinematic universe as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Identity,...
-
Wicked: Transcendence, Ugliness, and the Tension of Opposites
Can Wicked contain genuine seeds of transcendence while simultaneously looking strangely awful? Yes, apparently. Jett and Gareth embrace the contradiction, traveling through Jung, Attack of the Clones, the glorious color of 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the possibility that learning to...
-
What to Watch After an Election: Movies for Purpose, Connection, and Joy
What might help us become part of somebody else's happiness? In the aftermath of the 2024 U.S. election, Jett and Gareth turn to movies not as an escape from reality but as companions for meeting it: After Life, Ed Wood, Starship Troopers, and other films about purpose, absurdity, courage, and...
-
Conclave: Power, Compassion, and the Possibility of Change / Remembering Teri Garr
We recorded this episode on Monday, November 5th, right before the U.S. Presidential Election Dear Listeners, yet, rather than seeming dated, it feels more timely than ever as we navigate choppy waters ahead. In this episode Jett and Gareth both revel in Conclave, a high-end, well-produced slice…
more
About this show
The 20-year human conversation about movies and what they mean.In 2006 TV director Jett Loe and peace activist Gareth Higgins both walked out of the same, terrible, movie at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast, Northern/North of Ireland. They encountered each other in the lobby, started talking, and so began a 20 year, and counting, conversation about movies, how they're made, and more importantly, what they mean.They enjoyed their conversations so much they began recording and distributing them, with the first incarnation of the show debuting that year. It's still going.
Hosted by
Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins