Michael Mann Reconsidered: Thief and The Insider

It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition, starting with Thief (1981) Vs. The Insider (1999). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

A Star Is Born has been filmed four times, but the first version is the best: a combination of Singin’ in the Rain and Death of a Salesman, David O. Selznick’s production drips with “movie” and artificiality, yet still delivers an ending that seems taken from Greek tragedy. No stars were harmed in the making of this film–yet the film also dramatizes the harm inflicted by a steady diet of fame. It’s not an indictment of Hollywood, but an illustration of how the machine works. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. If you’re interested in reading Dorothy Parker, Robert Carson, and Alan Campbell’s excellent screenplay, you can find it here. The collection Memo from David O. Selznick is an addictive edition of hundreds of memos, telegrams, and letters from the producer about the films he helped create, A Star Is Born among them. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China (U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Yanshuo Zhang investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Dr. Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Movies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (Lever Press, 2026), Stephen Lee Naish guides us through recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. He is the author of several books on film, politics, music, and pop culture. He lives in Kingston, Ontario. He has appeared on the New Books Network three times for previous books: Create of Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (2016), Deconstructing Dirty Dancing (2017), Riffs and Meaning (2018) From Star Wars-scope blockbusters and Hollywood coming-of-age comedies to independent horror productions, Naish draws out the ways these movies shape, and are shaped by, their audience's own dissatisfactions. In his discussion of the Star Wars franchise, Naish highlights a conflict between internet discussion-fueled fandom vs the Disney Empire that shares features with the ongoing rebellions depicted in the films themselves. A passionate fan base who can now voice their discontent via the internet is feeding back into the studio's agenda and criticizing the actions of characters within the film and the actors alike. Chapters on the super-heroes genre and disaster movies draw out the climate-based social tensions these reflect. Depictions of masculinity ("Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown") on screens large and small bleed into discussions of the work and presence of Nicholas Cage, David Lynch, and Dennis Hopper -- with a side-excursion into Valerie Solanas's strikingly prescient SCUM Manifesto. Stephen Lee Naish's Screen Captures adds a sharpening filter to the film-goer's experience on the big and little screen. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

February 24—Following a screening of the documentary Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry during the weekend of Feb. 20–22, 2026, filmmaker Laura Dunn and Mary Berry, executive director of The Berry Center, joined Library of America for an online Q&A focused on the film and its subject: author, poet, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry and his home in Henry County, KY. Hosted by Ben Lasman, online content and community manager for Library of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In her new book, Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon (Headpress, 2026) film historian Rachel Walther draws on extensive archival research delving into the film’s backstory, tracing how an unbelievable true crime tale of love, bank robbery, and LGBTQI+ activism became a box-office smash and catapulted a group of Brooklyn outsiders into the media spotlight. Name-checked on TV shows from The Simpsons to Drunk History, and now a Broadway play, Dog Day Afternoon’s legacy continues to inspire filmmakers, writers, and actors. Walther’s deep dive interrogates the film’s place in the 1970s zeitgeist, set against a background of antiwar activism and the fight for gay and trans rights, and in doing so shows its continuing relevance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Every other movie seems to be touted as a “tour de force”--but Philip Barantini’s 2021 look at ninety minutes in the life of a chef and everyone around him really earns that praise. The entire film was shot in one take, not to be “original,” but because doing so reflects the tension and stress of the whole enterprise: a restaurant, like a film, is a complicated ecosystem in which personalities, hang-ups, failures, and backstories collide. Join us for a conversation about how the restaurant is, like so many of our jobs, a petri dish in which radically different people are placed and forced to coexist. Sometimes, things get ugly. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Adam Reiner’s The New Rules of Dining Out explains how restaurants work and complements the film like a Cabernet Sauvignon does a steak. You can also see Adam Reiner being interviewed about his book and favorite restaurant-based films here on Pages and Frames. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

A deep dive into one of the most overlooked -- and fascinating -- sides of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature winner: Bob Dylan, the filmmaker. While his music and lyrics have been studied endlessly, his work behind (and in front of) the camera remains largely unexplored. No other book has taken this angle, and with Dylan's legend still growing, the audience is more than ready for a bold new take. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think (McNidder and Grace, 2026), the first book of its kind, opens up exciting new ways to think about the artistry of Bob Dylan. It offers a captivating exploration into movies that, according to Michael, showcase Bob Dylan not just as a subject, but as the primary author. These include Eat the Document--a short, experimental television film shot in 1966 and released in 1972; the sprawling, genre-blurring epic Renaldo and Clara (1978), both directed by Dylan himself; and the darkly surreal Masked and Anonymous (2003), directed by Larry Charles but co-written by and starring Dylan. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker explores what these movies reveal about "how it feels" to be Bob Dylan during three defining eras of his career: the revolutionary 1960s, the introspective 1970s, and the enigmatic early 2000s. Just as crucially, they illuminate Dylan's remarkable instinct for using film not merely as a medium, but as a deeply personal mode of expression. The book also provides an essential survey of Dylan's most recent movie projects, including those by other directors, in which Dylan's influence is less overt but no less powerful. Here, Michael argues that Dylan operates as a kind of "invisible co-author" in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), where Dylan appears as a slippery, self-mythologizing interviewee; Alma Har'el's haunting Shadow Kingdom (2021), a stylized livestream performance; and James Mangold's A Complete Unknown (2024), the Timothée Chalamet-led biopic shaped in part by Dylan's behind-the-scenes "script approval." Michael Glover Smith is a Chicago-based filmmaker, author and teacher. Michael's most recent movie, Hekla, starring Elizabeth Stam, will have it’s festival premiere in early 2026. Michael is also the director of four award-winning feature films, the most recent of which, Relative, stars Wendy Robie (Twin Peaks) and is distributed by Music Box Films. His previous book, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (co-written with Adam Selzer), was published by Columbia University Press to acclaim in 2015. He has seen Bob Dylan 100 times in concert. Michael on Twitter and Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann (Birkhaüser, 2024) is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others. Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier. Veronique Boone is an architect from the University of Ghent, Belgium and doctor from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAPL), France and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. She lectures on architectural history and theory as well as on the conservation of 20th-century architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theory, as well as the construction history, of modern architecture. She has published extensively in academic publications on Le Corbusier and the mediation of architecture by film and television, and is a correspondant for Belgian and international architectural magazines on contemporary architecture. She has worked on several exhibitions as curator and/or contributor to catalogues – among them, Lucien Hervé, l’oeil de l’architecte, CIVA, 2005; Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, 2012; L’Architecture modern à l’écran, Cinematek, 2014; In the Studio at 35, rue de Sèvres: an Amateur cameraman’s Informal View, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2017 and Atelier Jespers, 2018. She is also Vice-President of DOCOMOMO Belgium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Written by Professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández (Durham University), The Films of Bigas Luna (Manchester UP, 2025) is the first comprehensive English-language study of the complete filmography of Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna, spanning from Tatuaje (1976) to DiDi Hollywood (2010).Engaging with theoretical frameworks such as haptic cinema, erotic cinema, auteur theory, and studies of gender, sexuality, and national identity, the book situates close readings of Bigas Luna’s films within broader discussions of production and marketing. Fouz Hernández draws on extensive archival research―including original screenplays, press materials, and interviews with industry professionals―while engaging with previous scholarship in multiple languages.Structured into five thematic chapters, the book explores key concerns in Bigas Luna’s work, including genre, gender representation, Iberian and Mediterranean identities, and meta-cinematic narratives. It can be read as a cohesive study of his oeuvre or as a reference for specific films. The interview is hosted by Dr Fiona Noble, Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and the author of Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film