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Few bands burned brighter—or more colorfully—than Culture Club, and director Alison Ellwood joins Mike to unpack the making of her acclaimed documentary Boy George & Culture Club. From the group's improbable formation and meteoric rise to the personal relationships, creative tensions, and heartbreak that shaped their music, Ellwood reveals how she crafted an intimate portrait using the voices of Boy George, Jon Moss, Mikey Craig, and Roy Hay.
The conversation explores the joy and challenge of building music documentaries, why some stories are best told by the artists themselves, and how editing ultimately discovers a film's true shape. Ellwood also discusses Culture Club's unforgettable MTV presence, Boy George's groundbreaking public persona, the band's deep catalog beyond the hits, and the electric response to the documentary's Tribeca premiere. It's a lively look at the magic of collaboration, the power of pop music, and the enduring legacy of one of the 1980s' most iconic bands.
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What kind of man doesn't drink, avoids women, and prefers the company of other strange men in the park? Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) plays the alien-infiltration premise with surprising melancholy and remarkable restraint for a film with such a lurid title. Mike, Bill Ackerman, and Ben Buckingham dig into the film's overlapping readings — Cold War paranoia, the Lavender Scare, queer coding, and a feminist critique the film simultaneously makes and undermines.
They also take on the 1998 UPN TV remake directed by Nancy Malone and Rand Ravich's The Astronaut's Wife (1999), tracing how the same essential story mutates across four decades of American anxiety.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Editor Sarah Affleck pulls back the curtain on one of filmmaking's most invisible—and essential—arts. From cutting reality television to shaping animated features at LAIKA and Pixar, Affleck traces her journey through the editing room while explaining why animation offers creative possibilities unlike any other medium.
The conversation dives into her work on the acclaimed animated short Dear Upstairs Neighbors, exploring its painterly visual style, frantic creative energy, and the year-and-a-half process of transforming storyboards into a finished film. Along the way, Affleck discusses her love of Adobe Premiere, the unique relationship between editor and director, her unexpected stint editing The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and the challenge of finding the perfect comedic and emotional beats.
She also reflects on the film's sold-out premiere at Tribeca, the painstaking craft behind every minute of animation, and her upcoming directorial project, Nurture. It's a fascinating look at storytelling from the perspective of the person who helps every film find its rhythm, voice, and soul.
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Gregg Allman lived inside the central contradiction of American music — a white Southern kid who built his art on the blues, fled his demons while pouring them into song, and emerged as one of rock's most essential voices. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces that journey from a childhood shattered by his father's murder to the soulful authority the Allman Brothers Band carved out through relentless touring and hard-won survival.
Mike talks with director James Keach — whose previous documentary Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me earned an Oscar nomination — and producer Michael Lehman, Allman's longtime manager, about the making of an honest film about a complicated man. They discuss the archival footage, the band's quietly radical racial politics, and the personal losses — Duane's death, the addiction years, the very public marriage to Cher — that gave the music its weight.
Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul opens in theaters June 17, 2026.
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Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Proyas's tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a Philip K. Dick nightmare, a Kafka story with a superhero ending, and a filmmaker's self-portrait: the Strangers as producers, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) as the compromised writer, and Murdoch as the protagonist who tears through the painted backdrop and seizes the apparatus.
The conversation covers the film's screenplay stages and two finished cuts, the studio-mandated voice-over that Proyas spent a decade trying to undo, and Roger Ebert's role as the mechanism of the film's survival. Mike and the Robs also place Dark City within the remarkable 1998–99 cluster of simulated-world films — The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor — and examine what it means that Murdoch's triumphant ending leaves the city still a construct, still running on hidden machinery, with only the god changed.
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Mike and Aaron Carruthers kick off Sci-Fi June with William Dear's time-travel oddity Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, in which motocross racer Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) accidentally blasts a century into the past and spends the entire film completely unaware that he's done it. That central gag — a fish out of water who doesn't know he's a fish — drives most of the conversation, along with the film's quietly clever paradox, its improbably stacked character cast, and the eclectic score produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith.
Mike and Aaron dig into what makes Fred Ward's performance work, why Belinda Bauer's Claire registers as the true power center of her frontier town, and how Peter Coyote earns his villain credentials in a single scene. They also talk through Dear's resourceful low-budget filmmaking — shooting in desert locations, strapping cameras to bikes, hiring a second unit team for five grand — and the director's personal connections to early Sam Raimi and the Michigan indie scene, including The Northville Cemetery Massacre.
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Kenji Tanigaki is anything but furious when he discusses his latest film, The Furious (2025). The film stars Xie Miao and Joe Taslim as two men united by a common enemy - child trafficking. The movie combines pathos with some breath-taking fight scenes in a film reminiscent of The Raid, Taken, and John Wick.
Check local listings for where The Furious is playing near you.
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Mike welcomes Andrew Nette and Jedidiah Ayres back to dissect Dark of the Sun (1968), a brutal, kinetic men‑on‑a‑mission film whose pulp thrills sit atop a surprisingly rich political and historical foundation. The trio digs into the movie’s Cold War backdrop, its depiction of the Congo Crisis, and the real mercenaries who inspired characters like Curry and the sadistic Henlein — from “Mad” Mike Hoare to Siegfried “Congo” Müller, whose Iron Cross‑wearing exploits echo through the film. They explore Jack Cardiff’s muscular direction, the film’s obsession with logistics, its uneasy colonial gaze, and how Rod Taylor and Jim Brown anchor a story that veers from heist film to war movie to moral reckoning.
Chainsaws, trains, diamonds, and geopolitics collide in one of the wildest action films of the 1960s.
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Mike talks with re-recording mixer Duncan McRae and sound designer/supervising sound editor Jeffrey A. Pitts about their work on They Will Kill You (2026), the action-comedy horror film directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov. Co-written by Sokolov and Alex Litvak, the film stars Zazie Beetz as an ex-convict who answers an ad for a housekeeping job at a mysterious New York City high-rise, only to discover the building has a long history of disappearances. Sokolov stages brutal combat sequences in wide angles with largely unbroken takes before introducing a supernatural element that raises the stakes further.
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In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie completed his second film, Reconstituirea — known in English as Reconstruction or The Reenactment — and, within a month of its 1970 release, it vanished. Not banned outright, but buried: withdrawn, never televised, never revived for nearly two decades. By the time Romanian audiences could see it freely in 1990, it had acquired near-mythological status. A 2008 critics' poll ranked it the greatest Romanian film ever made.
The premise is deceptively simple: two young men, Vuică and Ripu, get drunk at their graduation party, brawl with a bartender, and are offered a deal — reenact the fight for an educational film about the dangers of alcohol and walk free. What follows is a sustained, darkly comic, and finally devastating examination of what happens when institutional power turns a camera on the people it controls.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and Andrei Idu about Pintilie's deliberate subversion and why this film became the foundation for the entire Romanian New Wave. Guest interview Radu Toderici -- whose essay about the film will be featured as part of the upcoming book ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie.
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Mike talks with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, whose work — spanning documentary, fiction, and experimental forms — is now collected on the Criterion Channel. Takesue grew up shuttling between Honolulu and Massachusetts, and that cross-cultural, biracial upbringing informs every frame she has made, from early shorts rooted in identity politics to acclaimed features documenting cross-cultural encounters in Uganda, Laos, and Hawaiʻi.
Her films, including Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, examine those encounters through an observational lens, tracing the power dynamics and unspoken tensions that emerge when tourists and locals share the same unequal terrain. Takesue discusses her practice of traveling without research or agenda, letting one thing unfold into the next, and how a devastating failed fiction project directly led to the making of Where Are You Taking Me? She also talks about the rhythm and formalism of Onlookers, the tension between aestheticizing beauty and critiquing the tourist gaze, the influences she only fully embraced later in her career, and her current work-in-progress following tour guides at Cambodian atrocity sites.
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Orson Welles spent thirty-five years trying to put Sir John Falstaff on screen. Chimes at Midnight (1966) is the result: a film drawn from five Shakespeare plays — primarily the two Henry IV parts, with passages from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor — that lifts Falstaff from comic supporting player to tragic protagonist. Welles plays the knight himself, a lumbering, larger-than-life tavern dweller and unlikely father figure to Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), heir to the guilt-haunted Henry IV (John Gielgud). When Hal must choose between loyalty to Falstaff and the demands of the crown, the film becomes what Welles called a lament "for the death of Merrie England." Dismissed by critics on its 1966 Cannes premiere and barely distributed in the United States, the film spent decades trapped in rights disputes — finally reaching audiences properly through the Janus Films/Criterion restoration in 2016.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and David MacGregor about the film's three-decade gestation across stage and screen, the filmmaking ingenuity behind its legendary Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, the autobiographical dimensions of Welles's performance, and why Chimes at Midnight now stands for many critics as the greatest Shakespeare film ever made.
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In 2025, New Jersey's favorite hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength returned — twice. Writer/director Macon Blair's big-budget reimagining, The Toxic Avenger (2023), finally received a wide theatrical release in August 2025. Peter Dinklage voices Winston, a terminally ill janitor at a corrupt pharmaceutical company who falls into a vat of toxic chemicals and emerges as Toxie — a mop-wielding mutant vigilante. Kevin Bacon stars as the company's scheming CEO and Elijah Wood as his security-minded brother, in a film that wraps its splatter comedy around themes of healthcare, corporate greed, and unlikely heroism.
Also in 2025, Troma's own Andrew L. Miller and Adam Peltier reconstructed The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989) and Part III (1989) into the single film they were always meant to be. Titled Mr. Melvin, the 127-minute cut restores the narrative logic Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz originally intended — following Toxie's post-heroic depression, a manipulated journey to Japan, and a Faustian deal with Apocalypse Inc. that turns him into a corporate sellout before the ultimate confrontation with the Devil himself.
Mike talks with Rob St. Mary about both films, and the episode includes interviews with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman and Mr. Melvin co-producer and co-editor Andrew L. Miller.
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From indie narratives to deeply personal documentaries, filmmaker Mye Hoang has built a career around stories about identity, community, and unexpected connections. On this episode of *The Projection Booth*, Mike sits down with Hoang to trace her creative journey—from her early work to her breakout documentary Cat Daddies—before diving into her latest film, 25 Cats from Qatar.
The new documentary follows an extraordinary rescue effort as a network of volunteers races to save stray cats living on the streets of Doha, where the feline population has spiraled into crisis. What begins as an uplifting animal rescue story quickly reveals larger issues involving migration, class, labor, and global responsibility. Hoang discusses balancing advocacy with storytelling, capturing high-stakes rescue missions on camera, and why the film resonates far beyond cat lovers.
The conversation also highlights the film’s screening at the Arab American Film Festival at Cinema Detroit, where audiences can catch the film and a post-screening discussion with Hoang and subject Katy McHugh. It'll be sure to be lively conversation about documentary filmmaking, compassion, and the surprising ways a film about 25 cats can say a lot about the world we live in.
Find out more at https://www.25catsfromqatar.com/
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Mike talks with Simon Glassman, the writer-director of the 2025 Canadian horror-comedy Buffet Infinity, a feature debut that premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival to instant cult acclaim.
Buffet Infinity takes place in the fictional Alberta town of Westridge County, where an all-you-can-eat restaurant chain arrives alongside a mysterious sinkhole and begins swallowing the local community whole — literally and figuratively. The film is constructed almost entirely from mock television commercials and news bulletins, building its cosmic horror narrative through the grammar of low-budget local advertising.
Follow https://www.instagram.com/buffetinfinitymovie/ for more.
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Comedy Month wraps up as Mike talks with Rob St. Mary and Heather Drain about Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Producer Lauren Lloyd joins Mike for an interview about working on the film that was almost universally trashed on release.
Green wrote, directed, and stars as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist who heads to Hollywood to sell his drawings as an animated series. After a catastrophic pitch meeting, Gord retreats to live with his parents—long-suffering father Jim (Rip Torn), mother Julie (Julie Hagerty), and younger brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas). Also along for the ride: Marisa Coughlan as Betty, a wheelchair-using rocket scientist.
Closer in spirit to Dadaist provocation than anything else at the multiplex in 2001. Mike, Rob, and Heather dig into Green's career, the film's reception, deleted material from the trailer and behind-the-scenes footage, and the question of what Freddy Got Fingered is actually trying to do.
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Mike talks with editors Martin Biehn and Kevin Hibbard about their work on Drift (2026), directed by Deon Taylor.
Isaac "Drift" Wright is an Army veteran and self-taught photographer whose trauma finds an outlet in illegal high-rise climbing — scaling some of the world's tallest structures to capture images from vantage points no permit would allow. The film documents his pursuit of art and healing while tracking an escalating confrontation with law enforcement that puts his freedom at risk. It premiered at South by Southwest in 2026.
Follow Wright on his Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/driftershoots/
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Identity fractures and reality starts to slip in this deep dive into The Infinite Husk. Mike sits down with the film’s writer-director-composer-etc., Aaron Silverstein, to unpack a mind-bending indie that blurs memory, selfhood, and the fragile boundaries of perception. The conversation cuts straight to process—how the film’s layered structure took shape, the challenges of sustaining ambiguity without losing emotional grounding, and the visual language that turns disorientation into design. Expect talk of influences, production hurdles, and the tightrope walk between narrative coherence and existential drift.
Find out more at https://www.theinfinitehuskmovie.com/
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Todd Solondz's disowned debut finally gets its day in court. Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989) follows Ira Ellis, a bespectacled, self-deluding playwright adrift in the last gasp of the East Village art scene — too busy pining after a performance artist named Junk to notice the woman who actually loves him.
Mike Sullivan and David Rodgers join Mike to dig into the film Solondz famously begged a friend not to rent, examining what makes it both a fascinating time capsule of downtown New York bohemia and an unmistakable preview of the tragicomic sensibility that would eventually produce Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse. They also make the case for why this orphaned debut — unavailable on any legitimate platform since its 1990 VHS release — deserves a proper restoration and re-release.
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Paul Gallico's 1970 novel Matilda told of a male boxing kangaroo who becomes an unlikely heavyweight contender, upending the worlds of sports promotion and organized crime. Producer Albert S. Ruddy, fresh from his Oscar-winning triumph with The Godfather, acquired the rights and brought the story to the screen in 1978, co-writing with Timothy Galfas.
The resulting G-rated family comedy stars Elliott Gould as Bernie Bonnelli, a small-time talent agent who discovers the boxing kangaroo and sees his ticket out of obscurity. Clive Revill plays Billy Baker, Matilda's devoted owner and former British boxer, while Robert Mitchum turns up as Duke Parkhurst, a manipulative sportswriter, and Harry Guardino heads the mob contingent scheming to control the outcome of Matilda's fights. The kangaroo himself was portrayed by Gary Morgan in a Rick Baker $30,000 suit.
Mike talks with co-hosts Cullen Gallagher and Mike Sullivan about the film, then brings in interviews with actors Gary Morgan and Elliott Gould along with two posthumously-released interviews with producer Albert S. Ruddy and screenwriter Timothy Galfas,
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