I love Kirk Douglas, but it's true; he apparently never heard the expression "less is more." But when the part suited his gifts, he could knock you through the back wall of the theater, as he did in Detective Story and most especially Ace in the Hole. (And if any movie deserves a podcast, that one does!)

Or Angel Face, a first rate noir in which he plays - what else - another doomed, passive chump.

Titus Techera & Lafayette Lee discuss No Country For Old Men, the Coen Bros. movie & the Cormac McCarthy novel it's based on. We talk about manliness & war, confrontations with evil, & the transformations of America, North & South in their influence on the West, the 60s, & our world now...

ACF Critic Series #54 No Country For Old Men

Titus & Peachy Keenan discuss her new book Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, a funny but spirited battlecry, to rouse the moms of America, for family & also for faith.

ACF PoMoCon #44 Peachy Keenan

Titus & Steve Sailer discuss his upcoming anthology of articles, columns, speeches, & essays -- the first volume of a lifetime of noticing important facts about American society that respectable institutions don't want to talk about. This time around, we talk about the Sailer Law of Female Journalism.

ACF PoMoCon #45 Steve Sailer, Noticing

Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about Paolo Sorrentino's second movie, his first romantic story, or at least novelistic character study, starring the greatest Italian actor of the 21st c., Toni Servillo. Sorrentino comes up with a beautiful story about the secret power of love & morality over the heart of modern man, & a striking admiration for the past.

ACF Europe #20 The Consequences of Love

Titus & David Polasnky discuss dystopia & the transformation of elite opinion in the 50 years since Soylent Green came out--a movie whose horrors of poverty are now offered as policy proposals for a progressive future.

ACF Critic Series #55 Soylent Green

Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk Italian politics & Paolo Sorrentino's artistic vision of the Italian republic in Il Divo, the secrets of the politicians & the transformation brought about by democracy...

ACF Europe #21 Il Divo

Titus & Lafayette Lee talk Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath Of God -- conquistadors in the Amazon, El Dorado & terror, a journey into the heart of darkness, a return to the origins of monsters & heroes. Manly nihilism, the indifference & hostility of nature, incest.

ACF Europe #22 Aguirre

Titus & Chris Rufo discuss the last remarkable Peter Sellers film, Hal Ashby's Being There, a satire on Washington, D.C., but also an existential drama with a philosophical interest in the problem of nihilism. We touch on everything from the zombie Biden presidency to Heidegger's Dasein!

ACF Critic Series #56 Being There

Titus & Joshua Steinman discuss the Coen Bros.' Hail Caesar, a vision of the American mid-century, the post-war moment when glamour & technology competed in Los Angeles, when the beautiful visions of the past  held sway & science had not yet replaced them.

ACF Critic Series #57 Hail Caesar

Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about The Young Pope, Paolo Sorrentino's HBO comic miniseries about a reactionary American pope calling the modern world to account before the mystery of God!

ACF Europe #23 Young Pope

Titus & Terry Teachout turn to Out Of The Past, Bob Mitchum's best noir, his defining role as a chump, & a great variation on the femme fatale & the corrupted noble man. This is a rare story for juxtaposing the morality of the small town & the corruption of the city, the erotic lawlessness South of the border with the disheartening unhappiness of American life, & then showing how erotic tragedy grows out of this opposition between innocence & experience. The corruption of glamour is the them, & it's all-American.

ACF Critic #20 Teachout, Out of the past

American Cinema Foundation

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Thomas Parker

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