Critic Series

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 delivers a lecture on American society & cinema, from Tocqueville to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The ACF goes to college!

ACF Critic #1 The Marvel Cinematic Universe & America

Titus & Jason Eberl & George Dunn take a look at several movie made by the Nolan Brothers, Christopher & Jonathan, in light of various philosophical theories, from Aristotle's ethics of individual to Augustine, Kant's moral theory, & eventually Rene Girard's mimetic theory. Enjoy pop culture & philosophy!

American Cinema Foundation Movie Podcast

ACF Critic #2 Nolan Bros

Titus & James Poulos discuss Twin Peaks, the original series & the new season, the meaning of morality in an almost hopeless world, & the importance of art as a reflection on our predicament.

ACF Critic #3 James Poulos, Twin Peaks

Titus & Armond White talk about the collapse of criticism & cultural journalism. The triumph of a shallow liberal ideology in several, maybe most, mass media has made both art & ideology invisible in ways that cause them to deteriorate.

ACF Critic Series

ACF Critic #4 Armond White

Titus & Paul Rahe, Professor of political science, discuss assigning the Godfather to college students so that they understand the fundamental modern & ancient political alternatives, the transformation of concepts of justice, & the diversity of cultures contained within America, as well as their transformations.
Then the discussion moves to Scorsese's Silence & its magisterial description of the conflict between Caesar & Christ in the case of late-medieval Japan.
The Prof. explains the importance of learning about fundamental political alternatives for the student of foreign affairs, for diplomacy & for the press, as well as the delusion that globalization has annihilated great differences between regimes, countries, & ways of organizing life & faith.

American Cinema Foundation Middlebrow Podcast

ACF Critic #5 Paul Rahe on religion & politics

Titus & Armond White discuss the Better Than list summarizing 2017 in movies, in counter-cultural terms. We talk about Lady Bird & A quiet passion (the Emily Dickinson biopic), Valerian (the Luc Besson galactic blockbuster), & finally about Theo & Hugo & Call me by your name. The Better Than list is the only counter-cultural idea for awards season! Listen & share!

ACF Critic #6 Armond White's Better Than list (2017)

Titus & Peter Paik discuss Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina. Sci-fi is the last place for heroes, where movie-makers and audiences explore together human nature and confront the future. In this case, technological creation & the Biblical account of creation in Genesis are juxtaposed in order to bring out the complicated relationship between freedom & control. This movie is a morality play of sorts, a warning about the mistakes we're liable to make, but also an affirmation of the human desire for freedom. Listen & share!

American Cinema Foundation movie podcast

ACF Critic #7 Ex Machina

Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Jeff Nichols's Mud (2012, nominated for the Palme D'or in Cannes). It's a coming of age story set in Nichols's native Arkansas, on the Mississippi, & owes a lot to both Mark Twain's Huck Finn & Flannery O'Connor's violence & religion storytelling. It's all-American in the best way, not least because it showcases the full humanity of the drama of rural communities that seem to have run out of future.

ACF Critic #8 Mud

Titus & Matt Zoller Seitz, famed critic, discuss Alex Garland's Annihilation. We go through the beautiful & the weird things en route to MZS's theory of the sci-fi as a cinema of ideas. I add a parallel theory of the horror movie. We talk Kubrick, Malick, Lynch, & Spielberg--on whom more in a future episode--to get at the grandeur of the director-poets who confront the crisis of our time.

ACF Critic #9 Matt Zoller Seitz, Annihilation

Titus & George Dunn & Jason Eberl return in trio formation to discuss more Nolan movie-making--this time Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy's Westworld. They bring their academic expertise with them & we go through lots of philosophical ideas that are important to Westworld, to the story of American self-creation & its tech-empowered & tech-endangered future.

ACF Critic #10 Westworld

Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Never let me go, the 2010 movie made from Nobel Prize Winner Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel about a dystopia where clones are exploited for organs & have to discover their humanity. Flagg is a poli.sci professor & has taught the novel in a course on dystopias, along with Orwell, Huxley, C.S. Lewis, & Koestler. We talk about the troubling realism of the story & the way a scientific take over of human lives reflects our society.

ACF Critic #11 Never let me go

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.

ACF Critic #12 Teachout, Vertigo

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Laura, the most beautiful noir movie--a beautiful noir about the beautiful. We talk about the great achievements of the actors--the cinematography--the score--the direction--the source novel--in every way we try to bring out what a surprising collaboration of talents this movie is, rather than the handiwork of one single author. More, we discuss the achievement of middlebrow culture in Laura & the meaning of noir!

ACF Critic #13 Teachout, Laura

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Charles Laughton's directorial debut, The Night Of The Hunter, a remarkable movie about false prophets--the possibility that the devil would come among us in the clothes of a preacher. We talk at length about the various aspects of the making of the movie--actors, script, production, score, & even some editing & cinematography. & we also talk about the moral seriousness served by all these crafts & Laughton's unity of conception.

ACF Critic #14 Teachout, Night of The Hunter

Titus & Terry Teachout talk noir! Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, the best Robert Ryan noir--a story that moves between social criticism & Romanticism effortlessly, the tragic story of a man who believes in justice & who learns to believe in innocence, too. We talk about the many attractions of the movie--Ida Lupino, the Bernard Hermann score, George Diskant's cinematography, Ward Bond's remarkable portrayal of a father mad to avenge his daughter's murder--& we also talk about noir, genre pictures, social criticism, how America learned about tragedy in WWII, & the new depth of character in story-telling this ushered in. Listen & share!

ACF Critic #15 Teachout, On Dangerous Ground

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss In A Lonely Place, the 1950 Nicholas Ray noir, Bogart's most daring performance--a movie with a modern feel, with sophisticated adult characters, men & women, who nevertheless suffer great misery. We talk about Ray's talent for bending genre to tell stories that feel true to characters he establishes within genre. We also talk about film noir's connection to tragedy, to post-war America, & to our own times. Listen & share!

ACF Critic #16 Teachout, In A Lonely Place

Titus & Paul Cantor, America's eminent Shakespearian, talk movies, TV shows, & tragedy. From Godfather to Breaking Bad, from Aristotle to Mark Twain, we talk about how to understand pop culture & how to understand America's great love affair with tragic heroes (now called anti-heroes).

ACF Critic #17 Paul Cantor

Titus & Terry Teachout talk about the pluperfect noir: Double Indemnity, written by Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler. Every element of the all-American tragedy is present here, for the first time. We talk about the conflict between love & law, the different claims of eroticism & friendship, & also where insurance stands to the all-American future.

ACF Critic #18 Teachout, Double Indemnity

Titus & Paul Cantor discuss Frankenstein on its 200th an.--the novel, its history on the stage in the 19th c., & various movie adaptations in the 20th c. We talk about the genius of Mary Shelley & the rarity of a new myth being created by a single person under the historical spotlight! We talk about Enlightenment, Romantic poetry, & how new technologies of communication provoke nostalgic storytelling.