This whole episode is a trap. In it, we join Josh Hartnett scholar and The Film Stage gentleman Dan Mecca to dissect the ins and outs of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap.

We talk about: baby bangs, Hartnett always being a little bit weird, the tooth gap, Sleeping with the Enemy’s hand towels, auteur theory, one good part in The Village, Hayley Mills on the walkie-talkie, and more.

Further reading: Dan’s interview with Hartnett for Film Stage, Nicholas Russell’s M. Night Shyamalan essay for BWDR, and you can even run it back to Dan’s first-ever The B-Side episode on Hartnett himself.

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The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can find all 134 issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room, including our most recent issue on Spike Lee, at brightwalldarkroom.com. Please help us find more ears: follow, rate, comment, leave us a review!

This episode is sponsored by ⁠Galerie⁠: a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for 3 full months of free access to curated film lists & streaming films, essays, live screenings and much more at ⁠join.galerie.com⁠.

Inspired by the curation of costume designer ⁠Sophie de Rakoff⁠, this month we're taking a loving look at the gear-shifting, hybrid charms of Jonathan Demme's screwball noir, Something Wild—and the Ray Liotta entrance that changes everything.

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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for 3 months of free access here.

Joining us this month: Blank Check co-host & staff writer at The Atlantic, David Sims!

In summer’s last gasp, we go back to a flashpoint of summer blockbuster season: Jan de Bont’s 1996 Twister, plus its legacy in Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024), epic ensemble casting, craving movies about grown-ups, Hollywood’s dangerous brunettes, why not kissing at the airport matters, whether anyone votes in the world of Twisters, cinema sequences and storm spectatorship, Daisy Edgar Jones’s accent work, and the Spielberg touch.

Stuff we reference: Jan de Bont in conversation with Tim Grierson, and Lee Isaac Chung on the Twisters ending.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

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This episode is sponsored by ⁠Galerie⁠, a new kind of film club featuring curated films, original articles and interviews, and interactive live events. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for three full months of free access to Galerie through ⁠this special link⁠.

Chad goes full dad in this mini-episode on Richard Linklater’s 2014 coming-of-age epic Boyhood. Specifically, the plural meanings of Patricia Arquette’s anguished move-out speech, and why raising children to lead their own lives is a bittersweet success.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

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This episode is sponsored by Galerie, where you can join Veronica & Chad for a watch party this Sunday, August 18 at 3pm ET/12pm PT. We'll be hosting a viewing of Olivier Assayas' ⁠Clouds of Sils Maria⁠, with live commentary and conversation, and would love to have you stop by and say hello!

(BW/DR listeners can currently sign up for three months of free access to Galerie ⁠here⁠.)

Welcome back to the pod Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius out now from St. Martin’s Press.

Carrie joins us to discuss Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), her honeymoon horror film co-starring May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin as doomed newlyweds and Cybill Shepherd as the coed for whom Grodin’s Lenny quite literally risks it all.

Further reading: here’s Chad’s interview with Carrie in the June 2024 issue. BW/DR did its own Elaine May issue back in September 2019, where you can find the genesis of Carrie’s May scholarship along with Ethan Warren on The Heartbreak Kid, and Veronica on May’s first feature, A New Leaf.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com. Podcast-wise, we appreciate your ratings and reviews. We’re on Twitter @BWDR and @TheBWDRPodcast, and welcome feedback and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club featuring curated films, original content, and live events. BW/DR listeners can now sign up for three months of free access at https://join.galerie.com⁠.

Follow us into one of Rachel Kushner’s picks: Maurice Pialat’s slow ode to the sacred and profane, Under the Sun of Satan (1987). Co-starring Gérard Depardieu and Pialat’s muse Sandrine Bonnaire alongside Pialat himself, Under the Sun is a pastoral parable with a lot of dialogue and a few good screams.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club.

As summer begins in earnest, we're looking back at a 2022 highlight—Charlotte Wells’s staggering debut feature Aftersun—and revisiting one of our most popular episodes ever: a conversation with film critic, author, and educator ⁠Adam Nayman⁠.

Adam shares special insights from his ⁠conversation with Wells⁠ about the film, plus the case for cinematic mystery, Paul Mescal crying, analog devices and the technology of memory, good karaoke scenes, fatherhood feelings, and why 2022 stinker The Whale stumbles precisely where Aftersun soars.

For more on Aftersun, check out producer ⁠Barry Jenkins’s conversation⁠ with director Wells for the Directors UK podcast, Filmmaker’s ⁠profile⁠, and Wells’s own ⁠letter to audiences⁠ for A24.

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by ⁠Veronica Fitzpatrick⁠ and ⁠Chad Perman⁠ and produced and edited by ⁠Eli Sands⁠. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

You can find all 130+ issues of Bright Wall/Dark Room, including our most recent, Breaking Point, at ⁠brightwalldarkroom.com⁠.

Please subscribe, rate, and flatter us with a review, it truly helps the show!

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. Bright Wall/Dark Room listeners can sign up using this special link to get two months of free access to Galerie's essays, live conversations, and streaming catalogue!

This episode originally aired in January 2023.

It’s showtime–in this episode, Chad takes us through the opening of one of Ethan Hawke’s curator picks: Bob Fosse’s autobiographical kaleidoscope, All That Jazz (1979).

Here’s the Motion Pictures Editors Guild on what makes All That Jazz the fourth-best edited film in history, and Hawke himself on “personal filmmaking at its finest.”

The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman and produced and edited by Eli Sands. Our theme music is composed by Chad.

This episode is sponsored by Galerie, a new kind of film club. BW/DR listeners can sign up for two months of free access via this link.