This week’s show covers a lot of ground thematically AND geographically! The death of João Donato takes us to Brasil and the era of bossa nova. The death of Dianne Feinstein takes us back to San Francisco of 1978. The death of Jane Birkin inspires discussion of her daughters, fashion, Hercule Poirot, Dirk Bogarde, and Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania! And the death of Sir Michael Gambon inspires Phil to get up on his soapbox railing against those who think of the great actor as “Dumbledore”! The charms of Savannah, Dean’s ongoing battle with Covid after-effects, the end of the Writer’s Strike, and murder mystery dinners are all on the menu as well!

Your friends in podcasting have been teasing episode #568 for weeks! They had really been looking forward to counting down their all-time favorite Mystery films and the final results prove to be a lot of fun. So, get those Netflix queues handy, because Dean and Phil will hit you with more than two dozen movies they discuss at length with four films actually finding a place on both their Top Tens. There are comedy “whodunits” from the 1930’s, foreign language allegories from the 2000’s, independent films that launched careers, classics from international masters that launched entire sub-genres, mysteries based on books, mysteries based on plays, mysteries set in the farthest reaches of space, mysteries full of post-war romance and cold war anxiety. The biggest mystery of all is after almost eleven years, how do Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness keep managing to provide an hour (plus) of free audio entertainment each week?!