Happy New Year! The Lodgemaster & Lodgemistress are back with another intimately Wicked episode! Will they love this epic conclusion to the popular musical tale, or will they rip it apart with tornados of scorn? You are but a clock tick away from finding out!

Merry Christmas! Our holiday special Lodgecast movie this year is Tyler Perry's Finding Joy. Tyler Perry has been churning out movies faster than we can cover them in the past few years. He wrote and directed 4 movies plus 40 episodes of TV in 2025! Finding Joy dropped onto Amazon Prime Video in November. It stars Shannon Thornton as Joy, along with Tosin Morohunfola, Brittany S. Hall, Inayah, and Aaron O'Connell. Joy is a fashion designer in New York City who travels to Colorado for the holidays only to discover an unlikely love interest in backwoodsman Ridge (Tosin Morohunfola). While this might not be Tyler Perry's finest movie, it left us with plenty to talk about in this holiday feast of a Lodgecast. We hope that you all find joy in the New Year!

Director Edgar Wright has remade The Running Man! The Richard Bachman (Stephen King) 1982 novel was set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, so I guess this is the year to remake it. We talk about the superior adaptation from 1987 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then we get into the new one starring Glen Powell. The cast of the new Running Man also features William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo, and Josh Brolin. Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards who goes on a dangerous network TV reality show to try to survive 30 days and possibly win $1 billion dollars. Now we live in a world where the mass media is in heavy decline and The Running Man seems like a satire of network television that is way outdated. And that's just one of the many criticisms we'll throw at this latest rendition of The Running Man!

Die My Love received a D+ CinemaScore, which pretty much made it a must-see for the Lodgecast! The movie is directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a young mother in rural Montana grappling with severe postpartum depression and psychosis that unravels her marriage to her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). The supporting cast includes LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte, and Sissy Spacek. We’ll give our thoughts on the cinema of Lynne Ramsay before we cover how this movie consistently beat us down for 2 hours. It’s a brutal film with a wild performance by Jennifer Lawrence and a miscast Robert Pattinson. We took the cinematic beating so you don’t have to! This is Die My Love!

Matt's Movie Lodgecast Episode Number 200 is upon us! For this, we picked the highly anticipated and prestigious film Bugonia from Greek god and director Yorgos Lanthimos. For this film, Yorgos has remade a 2003 South Korean movie called Save the Green Planet! Jesse Plemons plays a conspiracy theorist who, along with his cousin, abducts the CEO of the pharmaceutical company played by Emma Stone. Plemons' character delves into all sorts of alien conspiracy theories as Emma Stone's character tries to convince him otherwise. The film also stars Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone. It's another strange Yorgos vision with a wild ending that we'll spoil in this 200th episode!

Happy Thanksgiving! Sit down to the table and enjoy our Lodgecast feast as we consume Predator: Badlands! We'll discuss the Predator franchise, including the six movies leading up to Predator: Badlands. Then we'll take you to the hostile planet of Genna, where Dek, a young Yautja, has to kill the apex predator Kalisk. It's a hostile environment, and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is joined by Thia (Elle Fanning), a damaged, legless Weyland-Yutani Corporation synthetic. Predator: Badlands was written by Patrick Aison and directed by Dan Trachtenberg. We indulged in some specialty Predator-themed drinks from the MacGuffins Bar for this special holiday episode!

Writer/director Ari Aster's Eddington is now available to watch on HBO Max. We caught it in theaters back in July, and we'll tell you all about our experience. We knew after Beau Is Afraid (2023) that we were in for a wild ride, and we were correct in that assumption. Only a trickster provocateur like Ari Aster would have the gall to make a 150-minute set during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic! For many people, the trauma of that period is too soon, but not for the Lodgecast. The movie features an excellent cast led by Joaquin Phoenix as a sheriff in small town Eddington, New Mexico, along with Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, and Emma Stone. Put your masks on and stay six feet apart as you listen to our take on Ari Aster's Eddington!

The Toxic Avenger remake finally made its way to theaters in all its unrated glory. It's a remake of the classic Troma film The Toxic Avenger (1984). This reboot stars Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, who becomes the Toxic Avenger! The movie also stars Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon. It was written and directed by Macon Blair. We saw it on the big screen and we'll let you know just how gross it got!

Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen is given the music biopic treatment with the brand new film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Based on a 2023 book by Warren Zanes, the movie covers Springsteen's turbulent time around the making of his 1982 album Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen as he battles his demons and tries to stay true to his working-class New Jersey roots. Jeremy Strong plays Springsteen's manager Jon Landau, and the movie also features Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, and Odessa Young. It's written and directed by Scott Cooper, who made the film Crazy Heart (2009) and other films. We talk about our relationship with Springsteen and then dive into a bumping Dolby screening of the movie on discount night!

Happy Halloween Lodgecast listeners! Blink and you missed this exorcism movie starring Al "Dunkaccino" Pacino. It played in theaters only one week, and we missed it there, but we caught it on VOD! Set in 1928 in Iowa, the movie follows Theophilus Riesinger (Al Pacino) and Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens) as they attempt to exorcise the demon of a young woman named Emma Schmidt (Abigail Cowen). It is directed by David Midell in a truly bizarre manner, with cinematography resembling the American TV series The Office. We'll let you know how weird it gets in this terrifying episode of the Lodgecast!

As we near Halloween, we watched this spooky movie about a haunted house told from a dog's perspective. This low-budget 77-minute feature was directed by Ben Leonberg and stars his Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Indy. Indy is truly a good boy, putting up with filming for over 400 days to capture his incredible performance. In the movie, his owner is dying of chronic lung disease, and Indy sticks by his side. The film is beloved for Indy the dog's performance, but we'll let you know if we loved it!

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the big screen with his epic action comedy film One Battle After Another. We took in this $175 million budget, 162-minute film in full IMAX at the Burbank 16. It goes without saying, go see this movie on the big screen! Marvel at Sean Penn's beautiful mug as big as you can see it! Then once you've taken it all in, you might enjoy our hawt take. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti. It is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland. It's got a wild score by Jonny Greenwood. It's undoubtedly going to be up for a bunch of Oscar nominations. Check it out! Then hear our hawt take review!

Renaissance man Finn Wolfhard is having a helluva year. In June, he released his first album called Happy Birthday, featuring the single "Choose the Latter". And back in April, Finn Wolfhard's directorial debut horror comedy film Hell of a Summer was released in theaters. We saw it on the big screen! It's a summer camp slasher starring Fred Hechinger, Abby Quinn, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Billy Bryk, Pardis Saremi, Rosebud Baker, Adam Pally, and Finn Wolfhard himself. We have a long and complex history with Mr. Finn Wolfhard, and we'll explore it all in this episode.

David Cronenberg directed a new body horror film this year. Released back in April, it's called The Shrouds and stars Diane Kruger, Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce, and Sandrine Holt. Four years after his wife Becca's death from cancer, businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has invented "GraveTech", a tombstone that broadcasts a live, interactive 3D image of a deceased's decomposing corpse. Sound tasty? Then dive into our episode covering director David Cronenberg's examination of grief!

Horror auteur Zach Cregger wrote and directed Barbarian back in 2022, which delighted most of us. Now he returns with his follow-up film Weapons (2025). At 2:17 AM seventeen children from the same third-grade classroom suddenly run away from their homes. That's the premise. The film features an ensemble cast including Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan. The film received critical acclaim and was a minor hit, grossing $264 million. We'll let you know what all the buzz is about in this episode!

Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye plays himself in his movie Hurry Up Tomorrow. The movie serves as a companion piece to his latest album. We caught this vanity project in theaters. In the movie, The Weeknd is a pop superstar in crisis who has lost his voice. His manager (played by Barry Keoghan) is trying to boost his ego. Jenna Ortega plays a deranged fan hell bent on tracking The Weeknd down. Trey Edward Shults directs. This movie was reviled by audiences and critics alike. We'll let you know what we witnessed!

When H.G. Wells penned the classic 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, he could scarcely have predicted that in the futuristic year of 2025, a man named Ice Cube would be starring in a desktop cinema adaptation of the novel. Even Orson Welles, with all his imagination, when he produced the 1938 Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, couldn't have conceived that in 2025, a tech company called Amazon would create a Prime Video adaptation of the story featuring a surveillance expert that utilizes the Amazon Prime delivery service in order to save the world. No one could've predicted what dropped onto Amazon Prime Video on July 30, 2025. Due to popular demand, we fast-tracked this episode so we can tell what we watched so that you never have to watch it!

Slapstick comedy is back in theaters in the year 2025 with The Naked Gun! Liam Neeson stars as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., son of the late Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen). We share our love and light for the original Naked Gun trilogy before taking on this legacy sequel directed by Akiva Schaffer. In this new one, Pamela Anderson stars as the love interest, Paul Walter Hauser stars as Drebin's right-hand man, and Danny Huston stars as the villain. The gags are many, and some of us laughed while others did not laugh as much. Tune in to find out about the latest filing of The Police Squad!

It's been a number of months since we saw this one, but we did cover Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 back in March. Director Bong follows up his masterpiece Parasite (2019) with this sci-fi dark comedy starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey. Warner Bros. gave Bong over $100 million to make this movie, and unfortunately, it was a commercial flop with middling reviews. Our takes on it were quite middling as well. Set in the year 2054, the plot follows a man who joins a space colony as an "Expendable", a disposable worker who is cloned every time he dies. It features a good cast, including Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Stephen Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. The film is currently streaming on HBO Max, if you wish to fire it up!

All Nicolas Cage wants to do is surf in the new movie The Surfer. But he's thwarted at every turn by surfing gangs and much more in this unique psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Thomas Martin. It's the Nic Cage show as he struggles with anguish in the hot sun, and his life falls apart. It's a movie called The Surfer without much surfing, but plenty of Cage! We'll let you know what we thought!