Titus & Sebastian discuss Paolo Sorrentino's most famous movie, Oscar-winner La Grande Bellezza, a worthy heir to Fellini as an examination of European decadence & the problem of nihilism in the midst of the most celebrated civilization, in Rome.

ACF Europe #18 La Grande Bellezza

Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Paul Newman's Thanksgiving movie, Nobody's fool, a story about a man returning to family & learning what he might have that he should give thanks for. We talk about upstate New York, a rural setting, post-industrial, becoming impoverished, & how people have to deal with aging & mortality. I compare this setting, full of quarrels & tinged by despair, with social media!

ACF Middlebrow #45 Nobody's Fool

Titus & Sohrab Ahmari discuss Mulholland Dr., David Lynch's story of Hollywood, love of the beautiful leading to murder--the glamour that sustains FantasyLand & the misery that leads to corruption--dreams & morality!

ACF Critic Series

ACF Critic #49 Mulholland Dr

Titus & Steve Sailer discuss the unpleasant facts of political life in America & the study of those facts through the use of statistics. Steve talks about how he studies patterns of behavior and what conclusions this leads him to about the two major political coalitions & the ways of life they make possible, as opposed to the rhetoric & the ideology peddled by pundits in the mass-media.

ACF PoMoCon #43 Steve Sailer

Titus & David Polansky discuss Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a dark comedy, a tale of future tyranny, also a Romantic fantasy--we talk about the ways in which it describes our troubles, & more adequately than the more famous entries in dystopian science fiction.

ACF Critic Series #50 Brazil

Titus & L0m3z discuss David Fincher's Fight Club & its relation to right-wing Twitter anons -- the age of agonizing men looking for causes, who attack capitalism & matriarchy but find it difficult to associate or be productive.

ACF Critic Series #51 Fight Club

Titus & Ryan Shinkel discuss David Lynch's Blue velvet, a movie about suburbia & the city, a boy growing up to be a man by facing evil, & the predicament of American freedom, which might mean ignoring evil or embracing it...

ACF Critic Series #52 Blue Velvet

Titus & Jack Fowler talk about Battleground, the first major cinematic depiction of the Battle of the Bulge, the end of WW2, & the conflict that revealed American character.  Happy Memorial Day!

ACF Middlebrow #46 Battleground

Titus & David Polansky discuss the wonderful war-time movie The Life & Death of Col. Blimp, a Powell-Pressburger combination of propaganda & art, & a rare opportunity to reflect on British character through the Imperial wars & the World Wars, as well as on America & its wars in the comparison.

ACF Critic Series #53 The Life & Death of Col. Blimp

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 & Miles Smith IV discuss Visconti's adaptation of the most famous 20th c. Italian novel, Lampedusa's Gattopardo. The end of the aristocracy, the beginning of the bourgeoisie, the problem beauty poses for art.

ACF Europe #24 The Leopard

Titus & Prof. William Allen discuss his new translation of Montesquieu's The Spirit of The Laws.

PoMoCon #46 Montesquieu

Titus & Jeremy Carl talk about Carl's new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart -- we discuss the changes in conservatism & America, the attack on equality before the law & what needs doing to restore it.

PoMoCon #47 The Unprotected Class

Titus & Terry Teachout celebrate the ACF podcast's first anniversary! The celebrated critic, playwright, musician, joins Titus to discuss Vertigo, Hitchcock's most daring artistic endeavor. We talk about actors, studios, performances, music, the character of the tragedy & the darkness in Hitchcock himself.

American Cinema Foundation Movie Podcast

ACF Critic #12 Teachout, Vertigo

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Agniezska Holland's story in honor of Jan Palach, Burning Bush. This is the 50th anniversary of the violent end of the Prague Spring, so we talk about the promise of freedom in in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion that ended it, & the noble self-immolation of the young student Palach in protest against tyranny. We talk about the moral realism & the technical competence of the Burning Bush mini-series & connect it to Charter77 & the collapse of communism in 1989.

American Cinema Foundation movie Podcast

ACF Europe #2 Burning Bush

Titus & John Presnall discuss Apocalypse Now, which ended the 70s, the decade of vastly ambitious Coppola movies which started with the Godfather. We talk about Coppola's vision of America & the Vietnam war, his exploration of varieties of manliness, some more insane, others less, his ideas about British imperialism--his allusions to Kipling, Conrad, & T.S.Eliot--& the amazing & awful qualities of the movie, which lead the audience to discover, in the emerging chaos of war, possibilities that had seemed foreclosed by civilization & thus forgotten, but which come alive again as humanity regresses symbolically & thematically back beyond peace, war, & the cosmos.

ACF #16 Apocalypse Now

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.

American Cinema Foundation Critic Podcast

ACF Critic #20 Teachout, Out of the past

Titus & Armond White discuss the great movies of 1968, especially the Godard pictures then first brought to America, Les Carabiniers ('63), Weekend, & La Chinoise ('67), which form a sort of trilogy of the past, present, & future of Europe--from war to revolution. (We also talk about his latest, The Image Book.) We focus on Godard's ironic documentary style & prophecies about modern society, his criticism of left-wing terrorism & right-wing consumerism--both versions of materialism. We also point to one of his signs of the alternative: Goethe.

American Cinema Foundation Critic Series

ACF Critic #22 Armond White, Godard

Titus & Spotted Toad talk about education, the experience of the teacher, the crisis in public education & how to rethink it in the present circumstances. We talk about his book--13 Ways Of Going On A Field Trip--about his ten years teaching science in New York & the place of nature in our attempt to become rational.

American Cinema Foundation PoMoCon Podcast

ACF PoMoCon #5 Education

Titus & Molly McGrath discuss Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa's finest movie about the problem of justice. We talk through the different contradictory testimonies which deepen the crisis of justice--the conventional lies lead gradually to the full collapse of honor--but also about the relationship between humility, telling the truth, & saving a baby. Human nature emerges not only in its ugliness, but also in its beauty. Rashomon is both a story about Japan's collapse in WWII & a counsel of hope that times of decay need not lead to chaos.

ACF Asia #1 Rashomon

Titus & Zena Hitz talk Sturges' very popular solution to the money problem in a marriage--be astonishingly beautiful & not too moral. Money & images are twin themes in America, in politics as much as in the movies, since we're all trying to figure out what we want, what we're chasing after, & how to get it. We also talk about Zena's other love--Frank Capra, & a preview of coming attractions...

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