Recommend or Refute | Practical Magic (1998), L'avventura (1960), Conan the Barbarian (1982)

It's recommendin' and refutin' time. John explores the Madonna starring sexy thriller Body of Evidence (1993), Ryan goes completely off the rails and talks about some fucking video game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025), and Dixon dissects Orson Welles' favorite Fellini film The White Sheik (1952).

Take a journey with us to the small town of Virgil, Texas and meet its many quirky inhabitants. Like Louis Fyne, a big dancin' bear on the hunt for matrimony, Earl Culver, the bigwig in charge of growing tech company Varicorp, and The Lazy Woman, who's too rich to ever leave the comfort of her bed. The influential and unforgettable True Stories (1986) shows Texas at a turning point and David Byrne at the height of his artistic powers.

Freshly waking from the nightmare of Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut, the Afterthoughts crew is back with a more grounded, less rant-filled Recommend or Refute. Join John, Dixon, and Ryan as they try to push the trauma of Zack Snyder's vision from their mind's eye with some more digestible cinematic offerings.

It's a day late to publish, but it was truly the greatest April Fools prank to ever be played on Dixon.What do you get when you take a groundbreaking comic series (DON'T SAY GRAPHIC NOVEL) and adapt it into a hyper-stylized, bloated, overly simplified late-aughts superhero film? You get Zack Snyder's Watchmen! What happens when John picks this film for his episode? You get quality Dixon rants, passionate Ryan critiques, and an abundance of John attempting to stifle his sadistic laughter all in an episode that somehow clocks in under the runtime of the theatrical version.

Ryan's not with us for this episode (he's still alive as far as we know), so John and Dixon are doing our first ever Recommend AND Refute episode, in which they both bring one movie to recommend and one to refute. Can you guess which is which? Dixon discusses Emerald Fennell's new romance Wuthering Heights (2026) and Michael Winterbottom's hangout comedy The Trip to Italy (2014) while John dissects the conflicted VH1 biopic Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story (2004) and Baz Luhrmann's EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026).

Ryan, John, and Dixon grapple with mortality, divinity, and the meaning of life as they piece together Ingmar Bergman's inconic masterpiece The Seventh Seal (1957).  Join us in our futile search for purpose as we await our inevitable dance with Death.

Dixon and John grab a quick cup of coffee and chat about a few films that didn't make it into the 2025 Retrospectacular episode. Grab your "Don't talk to me until I've had my movies" mug and add a few extra shots of cinema to your usual intake, courtesy of Afterthoughts' first pour over episode.

We've got some recommends and refutes hot and ready for you. Ryan breaks down the latest Disney animated film Zootopia 2 (2025), Dixon reviews the Italian road buddy comedy Il Sorpasso (1962), and John tackles the new horror film from Youtube sensation Mark Fischbach Iron Lung (2026).

Just three wankers yammerin' on about a classic British comedy in the countryside.