The 10 Best Movie Podcasts of 2016

Podcasting is the hardest thing that everything thinks they can do. It’s like writing on the Internet: Opinions are currency, and if you have enough you think you can pretty much get away with anything. Let a movie critic get behind the mic and you’ll be suppressing rage mixed with FOMO hearing all of the good movies that have come out that you won’t be able to see for at least six months.
Which is why the best movie podcasts of 2016 were those which, whether they enjoyed an established brand or not, continued to figure out what it is they were actually there to do. It’s partly why I love podcasts so much, or at least why I love the podcasts that I love so much: The medium, immediate and often improvisatory, lends itself uniquely to change. It costs barely anything to record, so why not just start and see what happens?
I wrote a column this year called An Ear for Film, so I know a thing or three about what constitutes good podcasting. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about movie podcasts is like listening to someone describe someone dancing about architecture. As an opinionated Internet Writer/Editor, you should probably listen to me describe someone dancing about architecture before anyone else.
The following are all movie-based podcasts I adored in 2016, but shout-out to others I discovered now in regular rotation—Fighting in the War Room; Black Men Can’t Jump (in Hollywood); Loose Canon; I Was There Too; Cinematic Sound Radio; The Cinephiliacs; The Talkhouse; The Film Comment Podcast—as well as the podcasts everyone knows, for good reason: The Flop House, Filmspotting (SVU too), The Canon (RIP?) and Elvis Mitchell’s The Treatment.
Listen up:
10. The Important Cinema Club
Justin Decloux and Will Sloan know no one is really asking for another movie podcast hosted by more than one erudite white guy, so they operate as if no one’s listening (and, in most accounts, it seems like no one is) and don’t pretend their conceit is any more original than any other movie podcast hosted by more than one erudite white guy. Each week, the two introduce a filmmaking topic shrouded in some sort of renown, and then run a primer on why that thing—person, genre, event—is worth knowing about, given that, in a culture of hot takes and all access, any one person only has so much time to consume something supposedly worth that time. It helps that by sticking to directors (Orson Welles, Wong Kar-Wai, Lucio Fulci, Sammo Hung) and assorted filmstuff (Warren Beatty, the Toronto International Film Festival, Steven Seagal, the Friday the 13th series) they love, they can build up an authority that pays handsomely when it comes to having people take their recommendations seriously, but that’s not why anyone should listen to The Important Cinema Club. You should listen to the Important Cinema Club because everything they talk about is completely soaked in their love, in the kind of love that demands a lot of reading and research and humility and the kind of genial nature that sees the words “soaked in their love” and thinks that was a good thing to write.
Start Here: Episode 39: “The Toronto International Film Festival Special,” in which two guys who live there both reflect on their times spent at TIFF—which they seem to have either sparsely attended this year, or not attended all—and decry what TIFF has become, demonstrating the kind of existential FOMO that makes me very personally, futilely angry on a regular basis.
9. The Projection Booth
Mike White makes podcasts the way I write: We overdo everything and we can’t help it. If he’s going to explore Jacque Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, he’s going to have Jonathan Rosenbaum help him; if he’s going to talk to Oliver Stone, then he’ll invite Matt Zoller Seitz to the podcast in order to serve as his trusty #2, but presciently remove himself from the back-and-forth while Seitz (who literally wrote the book on the director) shares a believably chummy repartee with the filmmaker. If he’s going to have a 300th episode, it’s going to be three and a half hours long, cover Highlander, and talk to living-death the director and screenwriter. Whether White is a fearless interviewer or he’s just unable to not say absolutely everything that comes to mind, it hardly matters: The podcaster demands respect both for his support of Detroit-area film festivals and events, and for his peerless attention to film fandom. If he thinks a movie is worth watching, he does whatever he can to let people know—know everything—about it.
Start Here: Episode 262.5: “Special Report: Room Full of Spoons,” in which White welcomes Rick Harper, director of documentary Room Full of Spoons, a film that chronicles the making of The Room but ends up being as much about Tommy Wiseau’s film as it is about Harper’s fandom and how that pushed him into filmmaking.
8. Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period
The title of the podcast isn’t one to draw much offense, even if you don’t agree. W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery’s long-form dissection of Denzel Washington’s career is a grand celebration of the man who has every right to be known by first name only, but it’s also a podcast which intimately knows it’s limits: One day they will have covered every inch of Denzel’s career, and then they will have to come to grips with the totality of what they’ve accomplished. Which is why Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period is less about Denzel Washington—though the hosts are always game to spend a half an hour dissecting specific interactions the actor has had with the press—than it is about what African American celebrity entails and whether iconography is a sufficient end, or just a less-than-sufficient means to it. In that headspace, Bell and Avery wander through and around prominent personality and cultural artifact after another, questioning what it means to be a responsible member of a marginalized community, and if responsibility can overcome such #problematic bellybuttons of the zeitgeist as The Birth of a Nation.
Start Here: Episode 81: “The Black Film Canon w/ Aisha Harris, Dan Kois,” in which three Denzel Washington movies make the Slate critics’—one of whom is white—list, and the whole purpose of such “Big Lists” is put into contention from the perspective of representation and accessibility.
7. The Rialto Report
The Rialto Report is so beautifully thorough that even avid fans of pornography will probably greet the medium with eyes and appetite anew. In each episode, walking adult film encyclopedia Ashley West (joined by such porn intellectuals as April Hall, Michael Bowen and Stephen Horowitz) leads either a typically over-detailed interview with an adult industry stalwart—someone who helped define whatever the Golden Age occupied in the sphere of sex films—or, in the case of the more tragically oriented or unavailable luminaries, an oral history of that figure’s rise and inevitable fall. Rather than chronicle the depravity and vicissitudes of an industry which has changed as drastically as any other over the past 40 years, The Rialto Report is careful to make sure that pornography is given its due, detailing all of the sex-positive innovation, groundbreaking attitudes and racial revolution the progenitors of the form championed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s something you can listen to with your parents—though the episode interviewing Johnnie West, the first African American to have an on-screen interracial sex scene in the Mitchell brothers’ Behind the Green Door offers a comprehensive, welcome snapshot of an America seemingly always in violent flux—but The Rialto Report knows how indelible pornography is to the landscape of our country’s moral fiber, and it treats the subject with all of the respect and intellectualism it deserves.
Plus, we need someone to consistently point out, with evidence, the explicit ties between president-elect Donald Trump and Al Goldstein, former presidential candidate and owner of a porn publishing empire.
Start Here: Episode 62: “Tina Russell: Searching for the Lost Girl of Porn,” in which an oral history of the “original porn star” reveals a tear-inducing tragedy of what the late-’60s and early-’70s became as free thought and free love finally confronted the puritanical generation they were attempting to undo.