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by The Ringer
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins review the movies you need to see. Plus: Top 5s, Movie Drafts, Oscars analysis, and more.
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In a live Halloween-themed episode of The Big Picture Conversation Show from San Francisco, hosts Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan, joined by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, engage in a spirited horror movie draft with categories ranging from Halloween franchises to holiday horror. Amanda, once a horror novice, now confidently drafts Scream and Marriage Story, while Sean embraces his self-proclaimed megalomania with picks like Hubie Halloween and The Shining. The conversation blends film critique, personal anecdotes, and absurd humor, culminating in Amanda’s surprise victory in a live audience vote — a triumph of emotional resonance over genre purism.
Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan kick off their annual horror tradition with a spirited discussion of the year's best horror films, while also diving into the DC horror-comic crossover Clayface, the video game adaptation Street Fighter, and Shea Serrano’s list of the greatest movie fight scenes of all time.
The Big Picture hosts Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins unpack a wild weekend at the movies, spotlighting the surprise success of the documentary You Can See Everything, the divisive reception of Whalefall, and the underwhelming response to the new Sense and Sensibility. They also analyze Netflix’s recent executive shake-up and preview Fennessey’s in-depth conversation with Kyle MacLachlan about his early career and Blue Velvet.
You Can See Everything, a new documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is a genre-defying exploration of Elizabeth Holmes, documentary ethics, truth, and celebrity. The film begins as an intimate portrait of Holmes in the 34 days before her prison sentence but evolves into a mind-bending meditation on perception, manipulation, and the nature of reality, culminating in a layered, self-reflexive narrative that blurs the line between documentary and performance.
Ben Affleck gets a long-overdue Hall of Fame treatment on The Big Picture, while the hosts debate the merits of Other Mommy—a horror film that won the box office but bored one co-host—and Animals, Affleck’s latest Netflix thriller that’s messy but oddly watchable. The conversation veers into Aaron Sorkin’s box office struggles, the cultural ripple of Digger, and the audacity of four Beatles movies in four weeks.
Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennessey deliver a sharp, critical takedown of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a belated sequel to The Social Network, which they argue fails both as cinema and as social commentary. The film, directed and written by Sorkin without David Fincher, is dismissed as a self-indulgent, tonally unbalanced procedural that lacks the depth, character study, and cinematic rigor of its predecessor.
Verity, the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, was the biggest movie of the weekend but is a pulpy, campy mess. Meanwhile, the Hollywood landscape shifted dramatically with the ousting of Pam Abdy and Mike DeLuca from Warner Brothers ahead of the Warner Brothers-Paramount merger, marking the end of an era of auteur-driven cinema.
Digger, Alejandro González Iñárritu's apocalyptic satire starring Tom Cruise, is not a masterpiece but a deliberately provocative and irritating film that polarizes through its layered storytelling and meta-theatrical structure. The hosts, Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, grapple with its audacity, finding it flawed yet fascinating, especially for the way it uses Cruise’s performance as both a critique and a showcase of movie stardom.
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