On the eve of the Golden Globes, Dean and Phil got together via Zoom with the Best of 2025 very much on their minds. They discuss the recent Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild award nominations. They discuss why the Writers Guild awards pale in significance compared to the DGA and SAG. That leads to a review of the multi-Golden Globe nominated, but WGA-ineligible South Korean dark comedy No Other Choice from writer-director Park Chan-wook, and his co-writer Don McKellar, as well as to a discussion of some Park Chan-wook movies from the past that Dean and Phil hope to track down. From one dark comedy to another, Phil and Dean then tackle Ari Aster’s Eddington before cleansing their palate with the utterly delightful Nouvelle Vague from Richard Linklater. Finally, the CNN documentary “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not” gets analyzed before Dean and Phil set aside fifteen bonus minutes to peek ahead to what IMDB considers ten of the “most anticipated” movies coming out this year.

This week’s episode picks up where last week’s show left off with a deep dive into Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter the ending to which Dean greatly misunderstood. In fact, a special guest stops by to help explain the ending and to discuss the film through the prisms of expressionism, surrealism and absurdism. Then, Dean, Phil, and (frequent collaborator) Jon Lawlor discuss several filmmaking and film distribution and film marketing topics pertaining to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. In 1964, the United Nations produced four movies for television. One of them featured an all-star cast and a script by Rod Serling. Carol for Another Christmas gets discussed. Finally, the recent conversation the gents had about Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc inspired a thoughtful email from a loyal listener.

It’s a Labor Day edition of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour and Dean and Phil regale with tales of the labor they had to put into Labor Day Weekend, and discuss the history of the day itself. Phil rants about the truncating of summer before he and Dean revisit the following topics from last week: Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s 11th hour bid to take over Paramount, the cinematic legacy of the great leading man Alain Delon, and the nonlinear nature of Strange Darling. Many classic and recent films get appraised, including the Ryan Reynolds-starring If and the 2014 indie neo-noir Man From Reno. On the small screen, the new season of “Only Murders in the Building”, the third season of “Slow Horses” and the rookie season of “Bad Monkey” all get discussed, as does the literary voice of author Carl Hiaasen. All that plus, Phil reveals some very interesting tidbits about his essays and podcasts at “The Voice of Los Feliz”.

With the Oscars coming up this weekend, the book will finally close on the year in cinema 2019 … The Best Picture nominees are 1917, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Parasite. The top performing films at the US Box office released in 2019 (ranked from 1 thru 10) were Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: Episode 9 – The Rise of Skywalker, The Lion King, Frozen II, Toy Story 4, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Aladdin, Joker and Jumanji: The Next Level … Would any of these films make Dean and Phil’s lists of the best films of 2019? Find out this week as your friends in podcasting count down their Top Ten Films of 2019!