Secret Movie Club Podcast

The AI disruption for movies is here. Poor movies, battered on the choppy seas of digital, streaming, COVID, and now AI, have yet another challenge to contend with. But we've been here before with sound, color, television, home video. In fact, if anything, the history of movies and the history of technological innovation and disruption are forever intertwined. And movies, at least so far, have found a way to innovate and to endure. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at where AI is in 2026 and what that may mean for cinema, movie jobs, and the art form going forward.

Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026) is a master documentarian who across 60 years made doc masterpieces about systems and institutions like TITICUT FOLLIES, HIGH SCHOOL, HOSPITAL, ESSENE, WELFARE, MULTI HANDICAPPED, IN JACKSON HEIGHTS. Although not as widely known as some of his narrative feature contemporaries, Wiseman is one of the greatest moviemakers who ever practiced the craft. His ability to find profound, ironic, incisive stories within his material and then to edit the material into a novelistic experience is auteur level. Secret Movie Club founder and programmer Craig Hammill talks about Wiseman's movies, working methods, and impact. And he begs you to get a library card so you can watch Wiseman's masterpieces on kanopy.com.

Across the age of cinema, the way a movie lover has been able to consume movies has changed. The movie repertory theater, the video store, and now the streaming channel all have pros and cons on how they expose cinemagoers to great cinema and the cinema experience. Secret Movie Club programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at each, gets the Secret Movie Club community in on the conversation to share their thoughts, and suggests a hybrid of all three may be the wave of the future.

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are now often universally viewed as the two great silent film movie comedians. And their personal biographies, even their physical characteristics (they were both 5'5), rhyme in a fascinating way.  They both made some of the towering comedies-The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, Seven Chances, Sherlock Jr., The General. Most intriguingly, Chaplin can be viewed as the grandfather of the art film tradition and Keaton the grandpappy of the action film.  Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill offers an initial overview of these two movie giants' biographies, body of work, and legacies.

The character actor is one of the most important yet least discussed aspects of cinema. Whether it's Thelma Ritter as a no nonsense feisty nurse in Hitchcock's Rear Window, Eli Wallach as a captivating roguish bandit in Leone's The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly or Tilda Swinton in almost about anything, character actors provide a rhythm, contrast, opposite color that provides shape, dynamism, form to a film. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at why the character actor is so critical to a movie's success and some of the greatest practitioners of the craft.