Cinema Faith

  Oscar season is six months away, but we’ve already seen one of the best films of 2025. And believe it or not… it’s a vampire movie. The difference is...

  Welcome to our first podcast of the 2025 movie season! We’re starting things off with a bang — a British spy thriller from genre master Steven Soderbergh. Kathryn (Cate...

  Welcome to the season finale of the Cinema Faith podcast! 2024 was an incredible year for film and we’re ending it by discussing a movie up for 10 Oscar...

  Every time Sean Baker makes a movie, it feels like an event. His 2017 film The Florida Project landed on numerous top 10 lists and earned Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination....

  Conclave is what awards season is all about. A prestigious cast at the top of their game with an acclaimed director firing on all cylinders. Edward Berger’s last film, All...

  Joker was the surprise hit of 2019. Not only did it crush the box office, it was released to critical acclaim and 11 Oscar nominations. Needless to say, expectations were...

  If you were told the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now has been working on a sci-fi epic for the last 40 years and invested $120 million of his own money...

  Oscar season is months away, but we may have already seen the best movie of 2024. I Saw the TV Glow is a haunting tour de force from writer/director...

  The marketing campaign for Longlegs was perfection. Glowing early reviews, a knockout trailer, and glimpses of Nicolas Cage in the title role as a demonic serial killer. The movie… was not....

  Ah summer. The time for dumb, big-budget action movies that explode on a movie theater near you. Unless you’re Richard Linklater. Linklater’s Hit Man contains all the fun of the season...

  June is the month where we break from the normal format of the Cinema Faith podcast and deliver something different. This year, Cinema Faith founder Jonathan Butrin talks directly...

  Releasing Civil War in an election year could have been irresponsible, but Alex Garland knows better. The writer/director, best known for Ex Machina, has crafted a sober warning to America. Is anyone still...

  March is a wasteland for film — the place bad movies go to die after being rejected by the Academy and the box office. Every once in a while,...

Welcome to the last podcast of the 2023 movie season! And what a perfect show to end on. Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t make movies for everyone. He’s an absurdist filmmaker who...

Now that the holidays are winding down, it’s time to turn our attention once again to Oscar season. May December may have December in the title, but it’s far from a...

Four years after The Irishman, Martin Scorsese is back in the director’s chair. But this time, he leaves behind the familiar world of the Mob to explore a different kind of...

Remember your first cell phone? For some it was a BlackBerry, the do-it-all device with a physical keyboard that took the business world by storm. Today no one owns a...

We weren’t able to record a Cinema Faith podcast for September, but fear not! We’ll be back next month with a movie that was released to critical acclaim in 2023,...

Remember when Christopher Nolan made indies? We don’t either. Gone are the days of Memento and Insomnia, movies buoyed to success by raw power and word-of-mouth. Now every film Nolan makes is...

On a hot summer night in June, Jon Butrin drove to Kansas City, MO to visit Tim Nelson for four days. They went swimming, ate barbecue, and watched Cocaine Bear....

Nine years ago Guardians of the Galaxy burst on the scene like a breath of fresh air. Just as Marvel was starting to become repetitive and stale, Gunn introduced a brand new...

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the Top Gun: Maverick of 2023. A movie you go into expecting nothing and walk out from in movie heaven. How can a film based...

Damien Chazelle burst onto the scene with 2014’s Whiplash, a perfect film and one of the most memorable theater experiences of all time. Two incredible movies followed: La La Land and First Man....

Steven Spielberg. The name associated with the biggest moments in movie history. From killer sharks to Oskar Schindler, Spielberg re-defined movie magic, touched our hearts, and brought out the child...

It’s November and that can only mean one thing: Oscar season is officially here! For the next three months, studios will be rolling out their best releases of 2022. Want...

Halloween is almost here which means it’s time for all things scary. To celebrate, we’re reviewing a horror movie released in June called The Black Phone. Or as we call...

In the world of animation, Toy Story changed everything. With that instant classic in 1995, Pixar ushered in a new era of family entertainment with stunning visuals and and rich themes...

Few names in Hollywood carry with them event status. Jordan Peele is one of them. Ever since the first trailer dropped in February, Nope was marked as the event of...

Tim couldn’t be with us this month, but fear not! We found a worthy replacement. After talking about him all year, Dan Baker is finally a guest on the Cinema...

Who thought a sequel to Top Gun would actually be worth watching? Not us. But director Joseph Kosinski had other plans. His sequel to the 1986 original feels like the...

Everyone is familiar with the multiverse thanks to Marvel, but we’ve never seen it quite like this. Everything Everywhere All at Once offers a fresh take on the concept of multiple...

Coda won the highest honor at this year’s Oscars, but the academy failed to recognize the true best picture of 2021: Drive My Car. Car did win an Oscar for Best International Feature...

How many times can Batman be rebooted? We know the story. We know the villains. What fresh take could anyone add to the franchise? Enter Matt Reeves, a director with...

Welcome to the first Cinema Faith podcast in two years! Covid changed everything and Cinema Faith was no exception. Our website has been mostly dormant since March of 2020, but...

Christmas movies are overrated. Why not spend the holidays with a film full of sociopaths instead? That was Netflix’s gamble when they released Martin Scorsese’s latest offering on their streaming...

As protests spring up worldwide and economic populism becomes the defining politic of the moment, it was only a matter of time before a film tapped into the zeitgeist. That...

No film in recent memory has been as polarizing as Joker. A scroll through Rotten Tomatoes reveals a spectrum of reactions ranging from the highest praise of the year to...

Booksmart has been on our radar since its release in May. With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s one of the best-reviewed films of the year. But now, it’s our...

The ninth film from Quentin Tarantino is now playing, and it’s filled to the brim with everything you love or hate about his movies. When Once Upon a Time In...

Eleven years ago, Iron Man changed comic book movies forever. Not only was the movie great, it was the beginning of a journey through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with each...

April is too early to be talking about the Oscars, but sometimes a gem comes along that’s worthy of the discussion. Director Sebastián Lelio isn’t well-known to American audiences. His...

We’re back! After taking February off for all things Oscars, Jon and Tim are ready to turn the page on 2018…by talking about a really old movie. Yes, that’s right...

Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best...

It’s that time of the year again. Lights are glowing. Music is going. Food is flowing. That’s right — it’s Oscar season! The festive holiday where we live in movie...