Four Play

Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for a book about a man walking a dead continent with his son, and Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club. Four Play opens the McCarthy arc with The Road, and Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin all agree on one thing before anything else: none of them plans to watch it again.

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John McTiernan directed Die Hard and Predator, and MonteCristo has now made this show cover three of his films. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin close out the recently departed arc with The Hunt for Red October, and the episode opens with Thorin calling for an intervention on MonteCristo's film picks before Richard pulls out two physical pages of handwritten notes on the first fifteen minutes alone.

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Tim Curry said on the record, many times, that his favorite film to work on was not The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it was not Clue. It was Muppet Treasure Island. So in the Recently Departed arc, Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin sat down with a 1996 children's musical and found it was better than any of them remembered.

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Dolly Parton's film debut made $100 million in 1980 and almost nobody has watched it since. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin sit down with "9 to 5" as part of the Recently Departed Arc, and Thorin opens by calling it the worst film the show has ever covered, worse than The 13th Warrior.

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John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" is not based on a single H.P. Lovecraft story, and it may still be the best Lovecraft film ever made. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo and Thorin argue that a 1994 horror movie nobody funded for years understood cosmic horror better than every official adaptation that came after it.

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Primer cost $7,000. Shane Carruth wrote it, directed it, produced it, starred in it, edited it and scored it, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and then more or less disappeared. Twenty years later it is still the most realistic time travel movie ever made, and nobody understands it on the first watch.

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Edge of Tomorrow cost $178 million, made $381 million, and stars two of the most famous actors alive. It arrived in 2014 alongside Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar and Gone Girl, and vanished. Everybody who has seen it loves it. Almost nobody has seen it.

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12 Monkeys made $170 million in 1995. It stars Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt got an Oscar nomination for it. Almost nobody talks about it anymore, and there is no good reason why.

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A beloved family film opens with a main character machine-gunned by Libyan terrorists in a mall car park, and spends its second act on a teenager talking his own mother out of being attracted to him. Back to the Future is much stranger than its reputation, and it is still close to a perfect movie.

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Thorin has been teasing The Prestige on Four Play for over a hundred episodes. It is his favorite film of all time. MonteCristo and Richard Lewis think it is Nolan's best. Twenty years after it came out and quietly underperformed, the critics ranking his catalog after The Odyssey are arriving at the same place.

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Richard Lewis turned Tenet off three times. On the fourth attempt he finally made it to the end, and he came out calling it an unfairly maligned film.

That is the story of this episode. Thorin picked Tenet expecting a bloodbath, hoping to be the lone defender of Christopher Nolan's most divisive movie. Instead Richard converted, MonteCristo landed somewhere in the middle, and the argument turned into something more interesting: is a film allowed to be incomplete after one viewing? Thorin's position is that Tenet is the only movie ever made that genuinely requires a s...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey spent a year being called woke by people who never opened the poem. Then it opened to $264 million worldwide and a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin recorded this one last, after filming an entire Nolan arc worrying on camera about what he would do to Homer. All three landed between a seven and an eight, and all three reached the same verdict: the loudest critics exposed themselves. Calling the non-linear structure a betrayal means you never opened a poem that starts in the middle. Emily Wilson has publicly d...

Inception is a nearly perfect film. It reinvented the summer blockbuster, proved a two-and-a-half-hour original movie about dream architecture could nearly make a billion dollars, and it's the reason Christopher Nolan gets to do whatever he wants in Hollywood. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo kick off the Christopher Nolan arc with his best original film, the Hans Zimmer score that might be the best since Gladiator, and the one flaw that reveals a fundamental limitation in everything Nolan makes.

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Thorin thinks Paranoia Agent sucks. MonteCristo and Richard think it's an 8 out of 10 and one of the most prescient pieces of media ever made about the internet. This is not a polite disagreement. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo spend 90 minutes arguing over whether Satoshi Kon's only TV series is a masterpiece of social commentary or everything wrong with anime condensed into 13 episodes.

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Christopher Nolan has never mentioned Paprika. Not once. The dream heist machine, the corridor where people fall through shifting gravity, the entering of dreams to steal information, the characters who are shockingly similar. Inception came out in 2010, the same year Satoshi Kon died of pancreatic cancer at 46. He never got to respond. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why Paprika is the masterpiece Inception borrowed from, why Kon might have been the best director of the 21st century, and why almost nobody has seen the proof.

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Everyone's seen Spirited Away. Everyone's seen Princess Mononoke. Almost nobody has seen the 1984 Miyazaki film that's better than both of them. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the pre-Studio Ghibli masterpiece that handles environmentalism with more intelligence and nuance than anything Miyazaki made after it.

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The Wachowskis walked into a studio with a copy of Ghost in the Shell and said "we want to do that, but for real." Four years later, The Matrix made a billion dollars. Ghost in the Shell made nothing on release. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why the 80-minute anime the Wachowskis ripped off is deeper, smarter, and more relevant in the age of AI than the franchise it spawned.

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There is a sentiment going around that Akira is mid. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo are here to tell you that the internet is wrong, but also that the people who told you it was a flawless 10 out of 10 masterpiece were wrong too. The truth is more interesting than either side.

Akira's animation is a genuine 10 out of 10. Nothing from 1988 looks like this. Almost nothing from 2026 looks like this. The craftsmanship is immaculate, every frame hand-drawn with a fluidity and detail that makes anime produced a decade later look cheap by comparison. The soundtrack is spectacular. The...

Open Range (2003) proves Robert Duvall can carry a western on his back — even when Kevin Costner is standing right next to him.

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A Civil Action has the most stacked cast of any movie you've never seen. Robert Duvall, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Tony Shalhoub, John Lithgow, William H. Macy, and Stephen Fry. It's a 6.5 out of 10 film elevated to must-watch by performances alone. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why Duvall's Harvard defense attorney is the best thing in the movie and why the movie itself can't keep up with him.

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Robert Duvall wrote it, directed it, and delivered his career-best performance in it. The Apostle is a $5 million Southern Gothic character study about a charismatic Pentecostal preacher who murders a man with a baseball bat at his own children's Little League game, flees to small-town Louisiana, and builds an entirely new congregation from scratch. He is a wife-beater, a womanizer, a killer, and a true believer. There is no rug pull. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why this is the most honest film about faith Hollywood has ever made.

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Colors came out in 1988 and was the first film to put the Bloods and Crips on screen by name. It feels cheesy now. It would have felt raw as hell then. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin open the Robert Duvall arc with the movie that crawled so Training Day, The Wire, and End of Watch could run.

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Marty Supreme should have won Best Picture, One Battle After Another is a career Oscar that might age like milk, and Michael B. Jordan playing two characters in Sinners is basically Mario and Luigi in different colored hats. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down every major film of the 2026 Academy Awards in a sprawling and contentious Oscars special.

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After Kill Bill nearly broke them, Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo close the Tarantino arc with the film that was supposed to prove he still had it. The verdict: Inglourious Basterds contains two of the finest scenes Tarantino has ever directed (the farmhouse interrogation and the basement bar), but the rest of the movie can't sustain the altitude those scenes reach. What could have been a profound meditation on the power of cinema, the banality of evil, and Jewish catharsis instead settles for machine-gunning Hitler's corpse on the floor of a burning theater.

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Kill Bill held a special place in a lot of hearts. The Whole Bloody Affair was supposed to be the definitive version: Tarantino's original vision restored as a single four-and-a-half-hour film. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo sat through all of it, and what they found was the precise moment Quentin Tarantino disappeared up his own references. Everything that made Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction brilliant, such as the compelling dialogue, the clever homage, the subversion of genre, is replaced here by wholesale theft from better movies that the audience can now watch for free on YouTube.

Pulp Fiction is one of the most hyped films in cinema history and Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo are here to confirm that even after 30 years the hype is entirely earned. What shocked them most wasn't the violence or the nonlinear structure, but how slow the film actually is. Strip away the iconic moments seared into cultural memory and what you find is a movie dominated by two people talking, and it's riveting every single time.

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Before Pulp Fiction made Quentin Tarantino a household name, there was Reservoir Dogs — a film so raw and transgressive it was banned in the UK for years, circulated on pirate VHS tapes, and became the blueprint for an entire generation of filmmaking. A guy who worked in a video store in LA wrote and directed this. Wrap your head around that.

Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin kick off Four Play's Tarantino Arc with the film that started it all. They dig into why Reservoir Dogs was banned in the UK (and what the Jamie Bulger cas...

In 1995, a film predicted POV recording technology, VR experiences you can buy on the black market, deepfake manipulation, police brutality caught on camera, and a society addicted to experiencing other people's lives through a screen. It starred Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and was written by James Cameron. Almost nobody saw it.

Strange Days bombed at the box office, nearly destroyed Kathryn Bigelow's career, and has been virtually impossible to find ever since, as right now no streaming service carries it. But everything it warned us about has come true, and somehow the reality is worse t...

Four film lovers revisit The Matrix (1999) for the first time in years.

The action still holds up. The philosophical ideas still land. But the script? That's where things get complicated. We break down the Hong Kong cinema influences Hollywood never credited, the Dark City and Invisibles connections, what Keanu Reeves actually brings to Neo, and whether the Wachowskis wrote a cyberpunk masterpiece or got carried by everyone around them.

Plus: our 10-point rating and the one scene that still divides the room.

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Was The Matrix the first film to ask whether our reality is manufactured? No! There are huge parallels between Dark City and The Matrix, with both films using some of the same themes, visuals, and even sets.

In this episode of Four Play, we dive into Dark City (1998): Alex Proyas’ noir-drenched sci-fi cult classic that arrived one year before The Matrix and explored memory, identity, and control in ways that still feel unsettlingly modern.

Is Dark City just a forgotten cyberpunk curiosity or is it one of the most important science fict...

Four Play begins a brand-new Cyberpunk Arc with a deep dive into Blade Runner: one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made.

Released in 1982, Blade Runner didn’t just define cyberpunk aesthetics,  it also reshaped how cinema explores identity, consciousness, artificial intelligence, capitalism, and what it means to be human. Decades later, its themes feel more relevant than ever.

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David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is not an adaptation: it’s a psychological autopsy.

In this episode of Four Play, we dive deep into one of the most challenging films ever released by a major director: Cronenberg’s surreal, disturbing, and deeply personal interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ life and work.

Rather than translating Burroughs’ famously “unfilmable” novel to the screen, Naked Lunch fuses biography, addiction, sexuality, guilt, and creativity into a dream-logic nightmare that feels closer to a hallucination than a movie.

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THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995) is a time capsule of 1990s crime cinema: strange characters with even stranger nicknames who speak in impossibly slick slang.

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THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021) is often described as abstract, slow, or confusing, but those labels miss what the film is actually doing. Directed by David Lowery, this Arthurian adaptation isn’t a puzzle to be solved, but a moral fable about avoidance and the cost of refusing to grow up.

In this episode of Four Play, Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why The Green Knight is less concerned with symbolism and mythology than it is with character. Gawain’s journey isn’t about heroism, it’s about procrastination, self-deception, and the terrifying moment when excuses r...

THE FOUNTAIN (2006) is one of the most ambitious, polarizing, and misunderstood films of the 21st century. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film weaves together three timelines: a conquistador’s quest for eternal life, a modern scientist racing against death, and a cosmic traveler drifting toward transcendence, which all bound by love, grief, and humanity’s refusal to accept mortality.

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THE OLD MAN & THE GUN (2018) feels less like a typical crime movie and more like a gentle farewell  not just to a character, but to an entire Hollywood era. Directed by David Lowery, the film stars Robert Redford as Forrest Tucker, a lifelong bank robber whose crimes are defined not by violence, but by charm, politeness, and an irresistible love of the game.  

As the final entry in our Robert Redford Arc, this episode explores why THE OLD MAN & THE GUN works as a perfect swan song. The film distills everything that made Redford an ico...

SPY GAME (2001) looks like a slick, early-2000s spy thriller, but beneath Tony Scott’s kinetic style is a surprisingly thoughtful film about loyalty, institutional cynicism, and the quiet mechanics of real espionage. Rather than gadgets or superhuman assassins, SPY GAME is about phone calls, favors, leverage, and knowing the system well enough to bend it without breaking it.  

Robert Redford plays Nathan Muir, a veteran CIA operative on his final day before retirement, racing against the clock to save his former protégé Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), who has been captured in a Chinese prison...

QUIZ SHOW (1994) shouldn’t work on paper: a quiet film about a 1950s game-show scandal, congressional hearings, and a rigged trivia show with no violence, no twist ending, and no flashy hook. And yet Robert Redford turns it into one of the most compelling American dramas of the decade: a deceptively sharp story about class, ambition, performance, and the birth of mass media.

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Robert Redford and Paul Newman reunite for one of the greatest con-artist films ever made and one of the most purely entertaining movies Hollywood has ever produced. In the first episode of our Robert Redford Arc, Four Play dives into The Sting (1973), a film that blends slick plotting, old-school charm, and razor-sharp chemistry between two of cinema’s most charismatic stars.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most influential works of horror, science fiction, and gothic literature, but does Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited 2025 adaptation succeed in its representation of the novel? In this episode of Four Play, MonteCristo, Thorin, and Richard Lewis dig into why this debate the merits of the films visuals, story, and faithfulness to the original themes.

While our hosts may not enjoy the source material, the ideas behind the story could be compelling on film if interpreted properly. However, considering the narrative inconsistencies and the surprising lack of tension, the h...