The Long Take Review

Thirty years after the original Mad Max films — Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) — George Miller wowed critics and Academy voters with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The dystopian post-apocalyptic action spectacle won six Oscars, and has earned a spot on countless best of lists for 2015, the decade, and even the century. It stan

May the 4th be with you! Just in time for Star Wars Day this year, The Phantom Menace, the 1999 prequel film written and directed by George Lucas, returned to theaters in honor of its 25th anniversary. In those 25 years, the film has been on a tumultuous journey. After its initial release, it withstood harsh reviews from critics and backlash from fans. The more toxic among them har

After a strike-induced 8-month delay, Luca Guadagnino’s psychosexual sports drama, Challengers has finally bounced into theaters. The film follows a tennis coach and her star player husband who find themselves competing against a former friend and lover. A powerhouse trio comprises the cast: household name Zendaya, Mike Faist, who stood out as Riff in West Side Story, and Josh O�

We’ll basically take any excuse to talk about Dune on this show, but for this episode we had two fairly good reasons. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two recently became available to rent or buy at home, and it likely won’t be long before the science fiction epic hits streaming services — I would guess on Max this summer. Now that the film has become more widely accessible, w

At the Long Take Review, we have one eye always on the Oscar race. Usually, that means we are looking forward to the upcoming Academy Awards, talking through the race as it happens. But given our collective history of caring about these silly awards, we thought it would be fun to occasionally step back and train our eye on an earlier year in Oscar history. Regular listeners know we

Monkey Man, directed by and starring Dev Patel, opened this past weekend. That, apparently, was a small miracle. The cast crew had to maintain a covid “bubble” during the pandemic, Dev Patel broke his hand during filming on location in Indonesia, Netflix dumped the film, their co-financier Bron Studios went bankrupt, and then, after all seemed lost, Academy Award winner Jordan

With the Oscars for 2023 releases in the rearview mirror, we look to the movie slate for the rest 2024. And we’re left with a lot of questions. With the studios’ slow resolution of the actor and writer strikes halting production for months, for example, will the release schedule feel thinner than years past? And considering Marvel has scaled back in the wake of recent flops and

Last month, P.T. and I traveled to Albuquerque for an academic conference hosted by the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association. Like Oppenheimer, we thought that if we could find a way to combine podcasting with New Mexico, our lives would be perfect. We presented on a panel titled “Pedagogy and Popular Culture Roundtable: Between Two Scholastic Worlds: Teaching, Blog

When Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last year, many critics were blown away by it, but unsure whether or not it would be “too weird” for the Academy. Months later, the fantastical dark comedy would win four Oscars: Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Costume, and, of course, one of the biggest surprises of the night, E

That’s a wrap, folks! We have arrived at the end of awards season, with one of the better Oscar telecasts in recent memory. Oppenheimer’s predicted success largely came to fruition, but there were also some key surprises in categories Oppenheimer did not take. In this episode of The Long Take Review, Greg, P.T., and I share our experience watching the 96th Academy Awards, evalu