The Big Picture · Review · Discussion
March 6, 2026/ 143 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins split over Maggie Gyllenhaal's 'The Bride,' trace a century of reboots and reimaginings, give 'The Secret Agent' a second look, and run all five Best Documentary nominees.
70 films across 4 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
‘The Bride!’Sean's charmed, Amanda's checked out
Maggie Gyllenhaal's third feature, an $80M Frankenstein-adjacent swing with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in 1930s Chicago. Sean found it messy but audacious and had more fun than he expected; Amanda bounced off the feminist-retelling premise and the Mary Shelley framing device (Buckley switching between Chicago flapper and cackling British narrator). Both agree the Me Too finale and tacked-on Sarsgaard/Cruz detective plot are a bungle. Tracking for $14-18M.
James Whale's sequel, with Elsa Lanchester's wordless, shrieking bride: the wrong this movie sets out to correct by giving the character a point of view.
Del Toro's version, where the bride is just Elizabeth; Sean weighs whether 'The Bride!' is really that much worse.
Sean's closest comp: messy, movie-mad, metaphors on the nose, and he loves it.
A film stuck the same way: its thesis about a powerful female consciousness holds the genre back.
Same creative team (DP Lawrence Sher, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir); Sean sees the good parts of Joker here.
And the bad parts: the musical-misfire side of the comparison.
Amanda's touchstone for the greenish look and the 'girl-power reimagination' she's allergic to.
Gyllenhaal's messy-woman debut; the thematic core she carried into a bigger-budget swing.
Sean's model for the right move: keep the IP, invent a new character (Rey), and just let her catch the lightsaber. No one has to say 'but she's a girl.'
The direct box-office and critical comp ($133.5M global, 72 on Metacritic); another audacious swing that's too politically on the nose.
The 10 Wildest Reboots in Movie Historyreboots, remakes, and feminist reimaginings
Sean's model for how to do it: Leigh Whannell and Elisabeth Moss bury the social import under a tight 90-minute thriller instead of announcing it.
Warner Bros.' April release with Jack Reynor: a modern-set story using the Karloff-era framework, the same old-IP move Universal's Dark Universe kept failing at.
Spielberg's grown-up Peter Pan; a childhood favorite Sean cooled on. Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell: 'Tinker Hell.'
Cronenberg's 1980s riff, a good version of a reimagining that isn't a straight remake.
Carpenter's riff on the 1951 film: same premise, its own beast.
The original Carpenter riffed on.
Basically Bride of Frankenstein, brought to life by two horny teenage boys.
A reinvention of The Wizard of Oz.
The source The Wiz and countless others keep reworking.
A Shop Around the Corner update that also chains back to a Miklós László play: something based on something based on something.
Lubitsch's film, itself adapted from László's Austrian play.
The villain-reimagining strain: a feminist retelling pointed at the bad guy.
A 'not all men' retelling that makes the huntsman heroic.
Sean's 'clever and wildly unsuccessful' pick: Luke Evans' Vlad forced into monsterhood to save his nation, a sympathetic-villain origin.
A mean 1980s remake of the McQueen original.
The Steve McQueen original.
The first of four; the 'inherent feeling of being replaced' that keeps getting reimagined.
Philip Kaufman's version: more about 1970s paranoia.
Abel Ferrara's 1990s take.
The bungled Daniel Craig / Nicole Kidman fourth version.
A reimagining of The Little Mermaid, another attempt to fix the fairy tales. Currently the subject of an Academy Museum exhibit.
Dashiell Hammett and The Long Goodbye recast against the low-level angst of the Gulf War.
Altman's noir, itself part of the lineage Lebowski draws on.
Tarsem's Snow White refocused on Julia Roberts' evil queen, the perspective-shift version.
The Lily James version that arrived around the same time as Mirror Mirror's fairy-tale wave.
Bruce Willis 1920s gangster remake of Yojimbo, not the Tim Allen sitcom.
Kurosawa's original that Last Man Standing remade.
Rob Zombie's first. Sean's take: bad.
Rob Zombie's second. Sean's take: good. Don't at him.
The running bit: a reimagining where the Holy Grail becomes the sacred feminine ('we fixed Christianity!'). Also, still fiction.
The Kaitlyn Dever Hulu movie about Romeo's ex, the sidelined-character retelling as comedy.
Tarsem's other film, cited alongside The Cell as one of the most beautiful movies of the last 25 years. Now back in Julia Roberts' Letterboxd four.
Tarsem's debut, the other half of Sean's beauty pairing.
Filed under modern remake, not reimagining: the Emma update.
Same bucket: a modern-set remake (Taming of the Shrew), not a reclamation.
‘The Secret Agent,’ a Second LookKleber Mendonça Filho's Best Picture contender, now on Hulu
Wagner Moura carries a languid, phantasmagoric 1977 Recife thriller: Marcelo/Armando hiding out under the dictatorship, a shark-swallowed leg that goes on a spree, a framing device of two young women reviewing the historical record. Sean's third watch; both call it one of the wildest Best Picture nominees ever and are torn between it and Sentimental Value for International.
The hovering god over the movie and its emotional key: Fernando's line that he was scared of it until he finally saw it, and then all the fear went away.
The season's recurring comp: two secret societies, revolution vs. control, and the long fallout.
The prior year's Brazilian-dictatorship film; more traditional and tightly focused, where this one sprawls. Both end on a memory-and-family flash-forward.
Mendonça Filho's memory doc about Recife, probably better seen after The Secret Agent.
His earlier film with the same trick of turning into a horror movie for ten minutes, then stopping.
The dual-role comp: Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and Stack; Moura effectively plays three (Marcelo, Armando, and son Fernando), each looking like a different person.
The Best Documentary Contendersall five premiered at Sundance; Sean and Amanda have concerns
Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman's six-year investigation of Alabama's prisons, built from footage the incarcerated men shot themselves. The one both agree earns its nomination (sturdy, classical, no ethical qualms), if a little information-dump over narrative.
Ryan White's film about poet Andrea Gibson's terminal diagnosis and their partner Megan Falley. Amanda respects the bravery but didn't want to sit in it; the medical-portal scenes landed hardest.
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni follow Sara Shahverdi, the first woman on her conservative Iranian village council. Fully observed, great access, a well-chosen subject, but Sean wanted more interrogation than slice-of-life.
David Borenstein and Pasha Talankin on a Russian school turned recruitment center. Amanda's bugaboo: named, identifiable students still in Russia while the vainglorious narrator smuggles himself out. Both find it self-serving.
Gita Pullapilly's body-cam assembly of the Susan Lorincz shooting of Ajike Owens. Formally inventive and shattering (the scene of the children being told is the most pained Sean's been at a movie all year), but both are queasy about how it rubber-stamps the surveillance it indicts, and yada-yadas the Stand Your Ground stuff. The most-watched doc of the year on Netflix; won the Sundance directing award.
Laura Poitras' Seymour Hersh portrait, the category's big snub. Sean loves that it shows the murky, error-prone reality of the work; suspects that honesty is why it missed.
The DGA winner Amanda would have taken over Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
A five-hour part-one that took Critics Awards; a deeper Cutting Through Rocks and a better film about being in Russia. Getting distribution April 3.
Sean's favorite of the also-rans: a fascinating, unscripted-but-unbelievable look at a Chinese custom of hiring someone to break up an affair. 'The bride of this group.'
A Sundance standout on the To Catch a Predator apparatus and its cultural knockdown effect; never got over the hump with audiences.
A clever deconstruction: a filmmaker who lost the book rights narrates the true-crime doc he can't make. No chance in the category, but the kind of thing the branch should notice.
Sean's beloved making-of on Coppola and 'Megalopolis'; no making-of doc has ever won Best Doc.
A compelling, deep character portrait whose eligibility is fuzzy: conceived as a film, released as a miniseries.
Matt Wolf's Paul Reubens doc, Sean's rejoinder to the celebrity-doc snobbery. Reubens dies mid-production and the film finishes without him.
Raoul Peck's not-great-but-interesting essay using Orwell's prescience, read by Damian Lewis.
The tonal opposite of Come See Me in the Good Light: a colon-cancer diagnosis played as madcap unwinding.
Mariska Hargitay's Jayne Mansfield doc, the PGA winner and not nominated: a sign of how scattered this year's precursors were.
Also mentioned raised along the way
The Skydance/Paramount slate CompanionThe Alto KnightsA Minecraft MovieSinnersFinal Destination BloodlinesF1SupermanWeaponsThe Conjuring: Last RitesOne Battle After AnotherWuthering Heights
Around ‘The Bride!’ HamnetDreamgirlsNorbit
‘The Secret Agent’ influences The Parallax ViewPoint BlankInvestigation of a Citizen Above SuspicionClose Encounters of the Third KindThe Omen
The doc-branch canon American FactoryIcarusMy Octopus TeacherTwenty Feet from StardomSearching for Sugar ManAmyHoneyland
In passing The Little MermaidSentimental ValueMarty SupremeBeing EddieThe Lost BusKokuho
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV The JinxSaturday Night LiveJohn Mulaney & the Sack Lunch BunchTo Catch a Predator
Books CirceThe Penelopiad
Ads Nordstrom RackState FarmVolkswagenWhite ClawAthletic BrewingHiltonFIFA World Cup