The Film Board

Ever leave the theater desperate to talk about that one wild scene, that questionable plot twist, or the inexplicably shirtless cameo? The Film Board is here for you. Each month, host Pete Wright assembles a panel of film obsessives—Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger, and an ever-rotating cast of co-conspirators—for a round-table deep dive into the latest movies in theaters. Spoilers? Absolutely. Hot takes? Always. Polite, nuanced disagreement? We aspire. Perfect for film fans who love smart, spirited, and occasionally ridiculous conversations—and aren’t afraid of spoilers. Subscribe now and join the debate. Part of The Next Reel family of film podcasts. Find more at https://trustory.fm/the-film-board/.

The Film Board is a tv podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

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  Episode #10

  Primetime • Have a Seat Right There

  Sep 29, 20261h 10mS14

  Primetime is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Ocean Murff have a seat in Lance Oppenheim’s sting house to ask who the predator really is: Robert Pattinson’s ego-cracking Chris Hansen, Merritt Wever’s unapologetic producer, the Perverted-Justice volunteer at the keyboard, or everyone watching. The panel splits hard on whether Decoy Dan’s SAG card is a happy ending, whether Alex Winter’s DA earns any sympathy, and whether a movie built to look like TV belongs on a theater screen at all. Content note: this episode discusses suicide and crimes against children.Links & Notes The film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd , and follow The Next Reel while you’re there. Where the story comes from. Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire piece “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” , the account of the Texas sting that Ajon Singh adapted for the screenplay. The documentary we kept bringing up. Predators (2025), David Osit’s documentary about To Catch a Predator. It’s where Tommy and Steve met the real Decoy Dan, Dan Schrack, and it’s now on Ocean’s watchlist. More from the director. Lance Oppenheim’s documentaries Some Kind of Heaven , Ren Faire , and Spermworld , the last now at the top of Pete’s list. Letterboxd’s interview with Oppenheim covers the fever-dream approach. The ad before the movie. The real Chris Hansen bought pre-show ads in front of every screening to plug his streaming service, TruBlu. Pete was late and missed it, so he watched it on YouTube instead. Where we’ve been with Pattinson. The Batman , Mickey 17 , and The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer . Mad as hell. Pete puts Pattinson’s Hansen in the same class as Peter Finch’s Howard Beale, and The Next Reel covered Network years ago. And last month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day • Small Potatoes, Big Feelings . Referenced on the show. Booksmart and Vacation (2015), Tommy’s proof of Skyler Gisondo’s comedy range. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , a reminder of what else Alex Winter has done. Lost , the polar bears beating Hansen in the ratings. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , the time slot Hansen inherits. Severance , which, with this film, has Merritt Wever ready for a comedy. The rest of the family. The Next Reel with Andy Nelson and Pete Wright. Sitting in the Dark with Tommy, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete. Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson. Movies We Like . All five under The Next Reel Family of Film Shows . Support the show. Become a member for $5 a month or $55 a year and get every episode early and ad-free, plus member bonus episodes across all five film shows. Come argue with us in the TruStory FM Discord . Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year Join our Discord community of movie lovers The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements The Film Board Movies We Like The Next Reel Sitting in the Dark Connect With Us: Main Site: Web Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest Your Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream: Merch Store : Apparel, stickers, mugs & more Watch Page : Buy/rent films we've discussed Originals : Source material from our episodes Special offers: Audibl...

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  Episode #187

  Spider-Man: Brand New Day • Small Potatoes, Big Feelings

  Aug 4, 20261h 6m

  Spider-Man: Brand New Day is here, and The Film Board is spoiling all of it. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger, Ocean Murff, and Matthew Fox debate spider puberty, the Jean Grey of it all, whether Peter Parker is secretly the villain of his own franchise, and one very bad post-credits scene. Full spoilers. Ratings from 3.5 stars to a full five.Links & NotesThe film. Rate it with us on Letterboxd , and follow The Next Reel while you're there.Where the title comes from. "One More Day" ran from late 2007 into 2008 and ended with Peter trading his marriage to Mephisto in The Amazing Spider-Man #545 , by J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada. "Brand New Day" picks up the very next month in #546 , with Steve McNiven on art and Dan Slott kicking off a run that lasted a hundred issues.Frank Castle's first appearance. The Amazing Spider-Man #129 , February 1974, by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, and John Romita Sr. The Jackal hires him to kill Spider-Man. Marvel's own Punisher reading guide starts in the same place.Where we've been on this beat. Spider-Man: No Way Home is the spell that started all of this. Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse are the films Matthew still thinks are the best of the bunch. Thunderbolts* is where Yelena and the mental-health throughline come from. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is Cretton's first MCU outing and where Banner's inhibitor turns up. Captain America: Civil War is Peter's introduction, and the moment Matthew says this movie finally rhymes with. Captain America: Brave New World is the Harrison Ford cherry-orchard fight Tommy holds up as the opposite of good stunt work. Deadpool & Wolverine is the last time Fox mutants crossed this street. Avengers: Endgame held the opening-day record until Friday.Tommy's joke, explained. Yes, we really did an episode on The Finest Hours .And last month. The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer — the other Tom Holland movie in theaters right now, and the one Tommy pairs this with.Referenced on the show. The Punisher: One Last Kill , the Disney+ special Steve watched for homework and Ocean advises against. Legion , Noah Hawley's FX series, which Tommy credits for making Jean Grey's power set legible to him. Fallen (1998), his touchstone for the body-hopping possession relay. X-Men: The Last Stand , the mutant cure Ocean invokes when he describes Peter's suppression device. Wonder Man , Cretton's Disney+ series, which Pete would like everyone to appreciate — and which really did get canceled after one season. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, where Sony dropped the Fresh Start suit as a free update three days before release.The rest of the family. The Next Reel with Andy Nelson and Pete Wright. Sitting in the Dark with Tommy, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust, and Pete. Cinema Scope with Andy Nelson. Movies We Like . All five under The Next Reel Family of Film Shows .More from this panel. The Ethical Panda , home of Superhero Ethics and Star Wars Generations . The Adrian Moment . Marvel Movie Minute . Make Me a Nerd with Mandy Kaplan.Support the show. Become a member for $5 a month or $55 a year and get every episode early and ad-free, plus member bonus episodes across all five film shows. Come argue with us in the TruStory FM Discord . Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year Join our Discord community of movie lovers The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements The Film Board Movies We Like The Next Reel Sitting in the Dark Connect With Us: Main Site: Web Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart Social Media:

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  Episode #186

  The Odyssey • Nolan Points the Whole Machine at Homer

  Jul 21, 20261h 16m

  Christopher Nolan does not do anything small, so of course his Odyssey is shot entirely on IMAX film, scored on Bronze Age instruments, and staged with a sixty-foot practical Cyclops in an actual cave full of actual bees. Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Ocean Murff, and Steve Sarmento pull up an oar for The Film Board's monthly round-table to figure out what all that machinery is actually in service of — because the surprising thing about The Odyssey isn't the spectacle. It's that Nolan takes Homer's victory lap and turns it into a reckoning.Full spoilers throughout. The board digs into how the film reframes the hero: Matt Damon's Odysseus is a man who's very good at winning and increasingly sick about what winning costs, the Trojan Horse recast from clever trick to war crime, the whole story quietly asking whether "war hero" is a contradiction in terms. They get into Nolan the skeptic making a fantasy — the gods pushed to the psychological margins, Athena reimagined as guilt wearing Zendaya's face — and how a stacked cast (Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Robert Pattinson as a suitor you will genuinely want dead) grounds all the myth in something human.But the craft you guys… Ludwig Göransson's relentless, orchestra-free score built from gongs and scrap metal; the editing that makes a 172-minute movie move; the new camera Nolan had built and the reels that had to change every three minutes mid-scene. Steve saw it in the pristine 70mm format and comes back a little evangelized. Is a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score is earned or just the Nolan logo doing its work? What is the film is really saying about who we root for in a war? Plus, stick around past the credits for a genuine argument about whether the gods exist in this movie at all.The Film Board is a monthly round-table on new theatrical releases. Part of The Next Reel family of film shows at thenextreel.com . Links & Notes Christopher Nolan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — the interview Pete cites, where Nolan says Oppenheimer is the only reason this got made. YouTube · Deadline recap "Blucifer" — the Denver airport horse Pete wants to stab. It's Luis Jiménez's "Blue Mustang," and, fittingly for this episode, a piece of it fell on and killed the artist before it was finished. Blue Mustang – Wikipedia The Sea Peoples / Late Bronze Age collapse — the real history behind "we are the people from the sea." Sea Peoples – Wikipedia · Late Bronze Age collapse How Göransson built the score — no orchestra, Bronze Age instruments, thirty-five gongs, scrap metal. Variety The custom IMAX camera and 70mm format we kept raving about. PetaPixel: IMAX's new large-format film camera Errol Morris's "Interrotron" — Tommy's reference for the mirror rig that let Damon and Hathaway fake eye contact. Interrotron – Wikipedia The Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes — the 98% critics / 96% audience split we land on. Rotten Tomatoes Read-alongs (Homer & friends) Homer's The Odyssey — the source; Pete's got the audiobook queued on Libby. Free text: Project Gutenberg Virgil's the Aeneid — Steve's "same war, Trojan side" reference. Project Gutenberg Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year Join our Discord community of movie lovers The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements The Film Board Movies We Like The Next Reel Sitting in the Dark Connect With Us: Main Site: Web Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest Your Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream: Merch Store : Apparel, stickers, mugs & more Watch Page : Buy/rent films we've discussed Originals : Source material from our episodes Special offers: Audible

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  The Film Board

  Disclosure Day: The Truth is on the Run

  Jun 16, 202659 min

  Steven Spielberg is seventy-nine years old, and he just made the movie where the government finally stops lying about aliens. Disclosure Day caps the loose trilogy he started with Close Encounters and E.T. — private awe, then childhood friendship, and now a global broadcast that yanks the curtain back on all of it. This month the Film Board gathers to toss about whether the old master still has the magic.Full spoilers, of course. The panel digs into Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as the searching heart of the thing, Colin Firth's body-hopping menace, the cosmic-FaceTime dinner table, a train sequence that actually pays off its punchline, and a panic attack they call of the most accurate they’ve ever seen on screen. They argue the device nobody understands (Duraflame theory included), the news-station climax, and a big-swing ending that stops cold at the moment of disclosure and whispers a single word.Then the larger brawl: whether a 79-year-old's plea for empathy and transparency lands in a cultural moment where the same disclosure could just as easily become a hunting license.The Film Board is a monthly deep-dive on new releases, part of The Next Reel family of film podcasts. Want to hear more? Over on Make Me A Nerd…Disclosure Day is the back half of a Spielberg conversation Steve already started. Over on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy hands him the mic for Close Encounters of the Third Kind — one of his top five films of all time — and gets the full package: curiosity, obsession, government lies, blinking lights, and questionable parenting. It's the hunger for connection that Disclosure Day spends fifty years catching up to. Mandy arrives late to the party, but by the end she understands exactly why this movie meant — and still means — so much. If you want the origin point of every instinct this new one is paying off, that's the room. Make Me A Nerd • Close Encounters with Steve Sarmento Over on The Next Reel…Pete Wright and Andy Nelson took Close Encounters apart for the Next Reel's Original Sci-Fi series — the three existing cuts of the film, what's different, why the changes were made, and which to watch — plus an older-and-wiser reckoning with how the parenting of both Roy and Gillian now feels incredibly poor. The private-awe-versus-government-stonewall DNA that Disclosure Day scales up to a global broadcast starts right here. The Next Reel • Close Encounters of the Third Kind 🎬 Watch & Discover 🍿 Watch: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd 📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year Join our Discord community of movie lovers The Next Reel Family of Film Shows: Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements The Film Board Movies We Like The Next Reel Sitting in the Dark Connect With Us: Main Site: Web Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest Your Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean Shop & Stream: Merch Store : Apparel, stickers, mugs & more Watch Page : Buy/rent films we've discussed Originals : Source material from our episodes Special offers: Audible

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  Episode #9

  The Lunchbox Mandalorian • The Mandalorian and Grogu

  May 26, 20261h 3mS14

  Seven years after The Rise of Skywalker, the saga finally got off the couch, and what it brought back was a tin-canned dad, a green gremlin, and a teenage Hutt with a glandular disorder. The Film Board lands split right down the middle, mostly in the affectionate way. Everyone agrees the adventures of Grogu are the heart of the thing. Everyone also agrees the plot is thin enough to read a newspaper through, and that this plays less like a movie than like the best three episodes of a Mandalorian season nobody got to make.Pete, JJ, and Ocean are...

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