Send us Fan Mail

In 2004, Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep starred in a remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," a political thriller that depicts a plot to use brainwashed soldiers to seize the Presidency. Gary and Jim compare the two movies and discuss how the political climate of 1962 and 2004 affected the making of each movie.

Send us Fan Mail

It's 1962 and the Cold War is raging in this classic thriller. The Communists have infiltrated the highest reaches of the American political system and it's up to Frank Sinatra to stop them. Jim and Gary agree that this is one of the most exciting political films ever made, although Gary has more qualms about its plausibility than Jim does.

Send us Fan Mail

Before he was a stiff figure on the one dollar bill, George Washington was a hot-blooded ambitious striver who made a lot of mistakes. "Young Washington" illustrates how the father of our country learned to be great through his early failures. It's also a thrilling war movie.

Send us Fan Mail

In the brand new movie "Pressure," General Dwight Eisenhower has to decide whether to launch the D-Day invasion in the face of an incoming storm that could make it impossible to convey Allied troops across the English Channel. And to make things more complicated, his meteorologists can't agree on a weather forecast. Jim and Gary admire Eisenhower's leadership skills and discuss whether it's important to get all the details right in a movie made about an historical event.

Send us Fan Mail

Rob Reiner's "LBJ" is a meticulously accurate rendering of the five tumultuous days from President Kennedy's assassination to the newly installed President Johnson's address to a joint session of Congress. While not avoiding LBJ's earthiness and aesthetic flaws, the movie seems to want to rehabilitate Johnson's tarnished legacy, while surprisingly taking a less charitable view of his longtime nemesis -- Robert F. Kennedy.

Send us Fan Mail

Meryl Streep pulls out one of her best accents to play Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 biopic "The Iron Lady." Jim and Gary both agree that Streep is a great actress and that Thatcher was one of the major figures of the last half of the 20th Century, but they are not completely aligned on the use of scenes where Thatcher is shown to have dementia. Jim also reminisces about the time he met her in Number 10 Downing Street.

Send us Fan Mail

In their second podcast about movies from 1975 -- designated by Netflix as the greatest year in movie history -- Gary and Jim discuss Nashville, the sprawling epic about country music and politics. It's one of the most cynical movies of the Seventies and also secretly one of the funniest. But is it as smart about politics as it thinks it is?

Send us Fan Mail

Warren Beatty has long insisted that his sex farce "Shampoo" set on the night in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President, was a political satire. But was it really, or does it tell us more about the 1970s than it does the 1960s?