Host Martin Kessler welcomes film writer and curator Vanya Garraway to discuss the various film versions of J. M. Barrie's oft-adapted Peter Pan, from the 1924 silent film to last year's Peter Pan & Wendy. Giving their personal assessment of each movie, they dig into the history of the free-spirited boy who refuses to grow up, what makes it such an…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers, the most tender and sensitive of all audiences, one week before their general release.https://www.patreon.com/thepinksmokeWe're joined by the great David Lambert to discuss one of the greatest Western subgenres, stories of cattle drives and the swarthy, sweaty men who oversee them! It's an ove…

1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between.Anyon…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers, the most determined and unsparing of all audiences, one week before their general release.{www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke}The Cannes Film Festival, May 1994. Two independent American crime films featuring guns, gangsters, torture, redemption, stylized artificial dialogue, quirky comedy, a cool s…

1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between.One o…

1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between.Despi…

A Pink Smoke tradition resurrected: our once annual Summer Movie Blockbuster Preview Extravaganza returns from the dead as we train a beady and judgmental eye on all that Hollywood has to offer over an increasingly marginalized and marginal summer blockbuster season. Even if audiences no longer flock (in droves!) to big budget star-studded special …

“War… war never changes…”Attention wastelanders, time to strap on the ol’ power armor and grab a rusty gauss rifle, we’re headed into (and out) of Vault 33 to explore the new streaming TV series based on the massively popular open-world RPG Fallout video game series. Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by fellow fans of the video game series, scr…

Episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers one week before their general release.{www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke}For the first episode of our new series 197:4 Fifty Years Later, we’re joined by the first guest ever to appear on the podcast, the peerless man of le cinema Brian Saur. The Pure Cinema and Just the Discs podcast impresario selecte…

Episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers one week before their general release.{www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke}1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choos…

In this episode, host Martin Kessler welcomes John Arminio of the Popcorn Eschaton! podcast to discuss Kevin Reynolds' underappreciated 1988 war film The Beast. Set during the second year of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, it follows a Soviet T-55 tank unit who lose their way in the mountains following a savage attack on a Pashtun village and …

The Pink Smoke brigade is back to discuss the movies of 2023. Hosts Martin Kessler, John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg look back on a year replete with above-average horror films, new works from tenured auteurs and theoretical physicists battling it out at the box office with living dolls. The conversation naturally digs into their personal fav…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers, the most tender and violent of all audiences, one week before their general release.Support our Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/thepinksmokeHosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs are joined by filmmaker & pulp paperback aficionado Steven Sheil to discuss semi-legendary, semi-forgotten crim…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers, the most tender and violent of all audiences, one week before their general release.{www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke}Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven often comes up in conversation about the greatest Westerns ever made, and even ones about the greatest films of the last 30 years. It served not only as…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers one week before their general release.{www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke}Having outmaneuvered the Outfit, shatterproof heister Parker resurfaces with a new face and a new caper. But there might be too much to watch with this armored car knockover in Jersey: a shaky accomplice, a surly waitress plann…

Support our Patreon:www.patreon.com/thepinksmokeHosts Christopher Funderburg, John Cribbs & Martin Kessler are joined by legendary poster artist Tony Stella to discuss Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1981 masterpiece Quest for Fire. A personal favorite of both Kessler and Stella, this is one of the most enthusiastic & passionate conversations ever recorded f…

In this emergency bonus episode, hosts Martin Kessler and Christopher Funderburg sit down to discuss Marvel’s The Marvels of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With an all-time low box office debut for an MCU film, the hosts use the film’s various artistic, conceptual and financial failures as a jumping off point to discuss the seeming impending end of…

This is it. Frank Henenlotter’s perfect six.Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg discuss one of their favorite filmmakers and his half dozen brilliant, unforgettable exploitation (not horror) films: Basket Case and its sequels, Brain Damage, Frankenhooker and Bad Biology. What more needs to be said? Put it in your ear.Support our Patreon:ww…

Support our Patreon:www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke"Central County was a big, rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks. The loneliness was called the Dead Hills. They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and b…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers one week before their general release.We’re joined by screenwriter Tom Vaughan to discuss a pair of cult classics by director Gary Sherman. We dig into the small-town murder-conspiracy thriller Dead and Buried as well as the ne plus ultra sleaze-thriller Vice Squad. The strengths and weaknesses…

All episodes are made available to Patreon subscribers one week before their general release.www.patreon.com/thepinksmokeThe Pink Smoke dives headfirst into the world of American pulp magazines of the 30's & 40's with two tales of derring-do featuring adventurer/scientist/detective/explorer and superhero prototype Doc Savage. Known as the Bronze Ma…

John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are back with their rundown of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival! From the highest highs (The Boy and the Heron) to the lowest lows (Limbo) and the poutine in between, they take a look at the state of cinema as explicated by one of the world’s premiere film festivals.They discuss new films by Wim Wend…

John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg return to the Queen City for the 48th annual Toronto International Film Festival to watch all the best in the current world of le cinema. With a line-up seemingly handcrafted to get us excited, we talk our must-see films, wildcards, and the ones we’re dreading.Included in this year’s slate are new movies by Haya…

Christopher Funderburg is joined by Martin Kessler to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Bundesrepublik Deutschland trilogy: Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun and The Longing of Veronika Voss. Collectively one of the most incisive looks at post-war West Germany and the re-birth of a nation shattered by Nazism, Fassbinder’s uncompromising and tender…

All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available one week before their general release to Patreon subscribers. Subscribe to get early access & so much more:https://www.patreon.com/thepinksmokeReality is under attack! Chaos reigns in an unnamed capital city where unwholesome apparitions exist among the besieged citizens, projected by apparatuses i…

A classic episode (utterly classic) episode released from behind the Patreon paywall. Savor it like some kind of a savory soup.Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are joined by Marcus Pinn of Pinnland Empire as well as Calgary's own Carly Schmidt to discuss the new film from Olivier Assayas, NON-FICTION.…

What more can possibly be said about Dziga Vertov & Mikhail Kaufman's Man With a Movie Camera, one of the most studied, discussed and written-about films ever made? Is everybody sick of hearing how amazing it is? Perhaps it speaks to the film's timeless artistic energy and bold experimentation that there's always something to say about the camera t…

The Pink Smoke is coming in from the cold to debrief our listeners on 100 years worth of espionage thrillers. Starting in the 1920's, we chose one notable spy movie (as well as a few alternate picks) for each decade leading to our present day in order to decode how they reflect the history and pop culture of their respective epoch. From the years l…

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss (possibly) their favorite film of the year, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters.This episode, recorded in 2018, was released from behind our Patreon paywall. Enjoy it. Think about it. Perhaps someday... learn to love it.De către The Pink Smoke

The Pink Smoke is coming in from the cold to debrief our listeners on 100 years worth of espionage thrillers. Starting in the 1920's, we chose one notable spy movie (as well as a few alternate picks) for each decade leading to our present day in order to decode how they reflect the history and pop culture of their respective epoch. From the years l…

PSP: Pulp Fictions covers the "Bond Novel That Never Was" - crime writer Donald Westlake's FOREVER AND A DEATH! Westlake is a favorite author of hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs so they're at full force in discussing this curious posthumously published work that on the surface seems to have nothing to do with 007.…

Over a decade after his high-octane cyber-punk metal mutilation fetishism monster debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), director-producer-writer-cinematographer-editor-star Shinya Tsukamoto truly discovered himself as an artist and filmmaker with the blue-tinted, rain-drenched fever nightmare A Snake of June (2002). His seventh feature film, it follow…

"There's no such thing as an unfashionable hero or an unsuitable heiress."Hot off their five-hour excursion into Swishbuckler Cinema, hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg trace the sordid subgenre's origins to George MacDonald Fraser's expansive series of novels featuring Harry Paget Flashman, a self-described "scoundrel with no proper feel…

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by Martin Kessler to finally settle the debate of "what is art?" and "what is trash?" in cinema! Using the similarities between a Tales from the Crypt episode and a Patricia Highsmith short story as a jumping off point, the duo digs into the differences between artists and artisans, art and entertainment, high …

On this episode, we're joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss some of his favorite moments of bittersweet love in the movies. Having made One Day Since Yesterday, a documentary about Peter Bogdanovich's unsung sleeper They All Laughed, Teck knows something about cinema's most achingly romantic, heart-wrenchingly complicated relationships and craf…

Here it is. Our massive exploration of one of the most disreputable genres imaginable: The Swishbuckler. A loose collection of movies created in the mid-70s through the mid-80s parodying the classic swashbucklers of yore, swishbuckler films like Zorro The Gay Blade, Pirates, Yellowbeard and Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers are marked by their…

In 1986, NBC debuted the series Crime Story, co-created by former Chicago cop Chuck Adamson and produced by hot-off-Miami Vice Michael Mann. The show adapted an unconventional serial format in order to span three decades in the conflict between MCU detective Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and rising mobster Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). The ambitio…

All episodes of The Pink Smoke podcast are made available to Patreon subscribers a week before their general release.Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are joined by Martin Kessler to discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally digs into their favorite films of the year, everything from an animated French adaptation of a Japanese…

"Nobody enjoyed having pie in the sky turn into pie in the face."Keenly aware of the 1988 Chevy Chase vehicle Funny Farm (the last movie directed by George Roy Hill), hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs only recently discovered its source novel written by sports columnist and humorist Jay Cronley. In this episode, they travel into rural li…

We get high-vallewton* with Tim Quirk, longtime cinephile and frontman of one of The Pink Smoke's favorite bands, Too Much Joy. At the height of the pandemic, Quirk initiated a binge of great movies that led him to Val Lewton's legendary run of low-budget horror films produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940's. Quirk was captivated by these deep philo…

On our massive new episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs are joined by longtime friends of the show John Arminio and Bill Teck to discuss one of the greatest film series in the history of le cinema: the Indiana Jones tetralogy! Join them at their own podcasting Club Obi-Wan as they tackle Mr. Play Mountain’s brilliantly fun series t…

“Only pain and suffering will make you realize who you are.”A Halloween double feature! Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg look at a pair of re-marriage thrillers in which the new spouse turns out to be diabolically psychotic: Audition and The Stepfather. Director Takashi Miike and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (the respective creative …

“I’ve looked into his eyes and seen the blackness of the beyond, the great nothing that waits for our warmth.”The podcast gets as metal as it will ever get: we’re joined by Tenebrous Kate of the Bad Books for Bad People podcast to discuss David Peak’s utterly indefensible horror novel Corpsepaint. Its snaking story slithers its way from a grimy tra…

“The chaste woman loves to contemplate dawn.”Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg sit down to discuss Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece of suspense, Les Diaboliques. The film follows a pair of abused women seeking revenge on their tormentor as it builds to one of cinema’s greatest (and most diabolical) twist endings. The conversation cove…

“The trouble with us Americans is that we all want a tragedy with a happy ending.”Sophie won't tell anyone she's sleeping with her professor. He's young, handsome, and passionate - perfect for Sophie, who just wants to write about love. When they hook up, he drops everything and her notebook begins to fill with poetry. But while he's head-over-heel…

For this episode in our Patreon-exclusive series on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, we’re joined by Martin Kessler to discuss unfinished masterpieces, over-finished masterpieces, post-humous puzzles, re-edits, rejiggerings, and all manner of ways in which the “completeness” of a masterpiece can remain unresolved.Naturally, Kafka’s work leads the way in th…

We’re back. After an extended Covid, malaise and illness-induced hiatus, John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg return to the 47th annual Toronto International Film Festival to watch all the best in the current world of le cinema. The preview follows their traditional format: each picks 3 must-see films, 3 films to avoid & a handful of wildcards!Incl…

Parker, that stoic solo brute of independent career criminals, made his debut in the pages of Richard Stark's The Hunter 60 years ago. Stark (the pseudonym under which legendary crime fiction writer Donald E. Westlake chronicled the Parker stories) introduces the world to this ultimate anti-hero at his lowest: backstabbed by a coward, shot by his o…

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the second of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person.Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-…

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the second of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person.Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-…