The Road Trip movie is a fertile sub-genre that allows all sorts of variations. You get broad warm comedies like National Lampoon's Vacation, Eurotrip, and Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. Wim Wenders used the road trip to explore character growth in his incredible 1974 Alice in the Cities as did Alexander Payne in his hilarious and painful 2004 Sideways. The Road trip movie is so pliable you can make world classics like Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Wild Strawberries which used the road trip structure to allow a modernist free form exploration of memory, dream, rumination, inner monologue. None other than Martin Scorsese would crib Strawberries structure for his 2019 The Irishman. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill works to examine exactly why the road trip plot is so. . .well. . .cinematic.
25 Sept 2026
SMC Pod #231: How to make political movies without annoying people
It's hard to make a good political movie. Or movie about political subject matter. You're always going to alienate a group of folks or worse. Yet the best political filmmakers by bringing the funny in a comedy/satire, showing rigorous depth of thought in how they handle characters on both sides of the issue at hand, creating a work of poetic tremendous cinema earn the good will of the audience whether or not they agree. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at political classics like Illustrious Corpses, Stray Dog, Grande Illusion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Last Hurrah, One Two Three, To Kill A Mockingbird, Weekend, One + One, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Do The Right Thing, Lincoln, Sound of Falling to try to examine and pin point what makes them work where so many other well intentioned movies fall short.
18 Sept 2026
SMC Pod #230: Bringing back Cinema pop culture relevancy
Buckle up Secret Movie Clubbers, it's going to be a bumpy pod. Movies have always found a way back to pop culture primacy when the naysayers have prematurely tried to call cinema out for the count. Exhibit 1: just a few months ago, both OBSESSION and BACK ROOMS came out of nowhere to make a combined $1B+ IN MOVIE THEATRES powered by 18-24 year olds at the international box office on nothing budgets and stunned the world. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a (hopefully tolerable) free form approach to look at how movies can build on that and come back to the pop culture center. He looks at cost, relevancy, the need for new (non-nepotistic) blood/voices, and the willingness to take risks addressing important issues of the moment.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.6 / 5
18 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 28 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
