Four Play

Christopher Nolan has never mentioned Paprika. Not once. The dream heist machine, the corridor where people fall through shifting gravity, the entering of dreams to steal information, the characters who are shockingly similar. Inception came out in 2010, the same year Satoshi Kon died of pancreatic cancer at 46. He never got to respond. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why Paprika is the masterpiece Inception borro...

Everyone's seen Spirited Away. Everyone's seen Princess Mononoke. Almost nobody has seen the 1984 Miyazaki film that's better than both of them. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the pre-Studio Ghibli masterpiece that handles environmentalism with more intelligence and nuance than anything Miyazaki made after it.

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The Wachowskis walked into a studio with a copy of Ghost in the Shell and said "we want to do that, but for real." Four years later, The Matrix made a billion dollars. Ghost in the Shell made nothing on release. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down why the 80-minute anime the Wachowskis ripped off is deeper, smarter, and more relevant in the age of AI than the franchise it spawned.

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There is a sentiment going around that Akira is mid. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo are here to tell you that the internet is wrong, but also that the people who told you it was a flawless 10 out of 10 masterpiece were wrong too. The truth is more interesting than either side.

Akira's animation is a genuine 10 out of 10. Nothing from 1988 looks like this. Almost nothing from 2026 looks like this. The craftsmanship is immacu...

A Civil Action has the most stacked cast of any movie you've never seen. Robert Duvall, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Tony Shalhoub, John Lithgow, William H. Macy, and Stephen Fry. It's a 6.5 out of 10 film elevated to must-watch by performances alone. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin break down why Duvall's Harvard defense attorney is the best thing in the movie and why the movie itself can't keep up with him.

Into the A...

Robert Duvall wrote it, directed it, and delivered his career-best performance in it. The Apostle is a $5 million Southern Gothic character study about a charismatic Pentecostal preacher who murders a man with a baseball bat at his own children's Little League game, flees to small-town Louisiana, and builds an entirely new congregation from scratch. He is a wife-beater, a womanizer, a killer, and a true believer. There is no rug pu...

Colors came out in 1988 and was the first film to put the Bloods and Crips on screen by name. It feels cheesy now. It would have felt raw as hell then. Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin open the Robert Duvall arc with the movie that crawled so Training Day, The Wire, and End of Watch could run.

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Marty Supreme should have won Best Picture, One Battle After Another is a career Oscar that might age like milk, and Michael B. Jordan playing two characters in Sinners is basically Mario and Luigi in different colored hats. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo break down every major film of the 2026 Academy Awards in a sprawling and contentious Oscars special.

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After Kill Bill nearly broke them, Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo close the Tarantino arc with the film that was supposed to prove he still had it. The verdict: Inglourious Basterds contains two of the finest scenes Tarantino has ever directed (the farmhouse interrogation and the basement bar), but the rest of the movie can't sustain the altitude those scenes reach. What could have been a profound meditation on the power of...

Kill Bill held a special place in a lot of hearts. The Whole Bloody Affair was supposed to be the definitive version: Tarantino's original vision restored as a single four-and-a-half-hour film. Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo sat through all of it, and what they found was the precise moment Quentin Tarantino disappeared up his own references. Everything that made Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction brilliant, such as the compell...

Pulp Fiction is one of the most hyped films in cinema history and Richard Lewis, Thorin, and MonteCristo are here to confirm that even after 30 years the hype is entirely earned. What shocked them most wasn't the violence or the nonlinear structure, but how slow the film actually is. Strip away the iconic moments seared into cultural memory and what you find is a movie dominated by two people talking, and it's riveting every single...

Before Pulp Fiction made Quentin Tarantino a household name, there was Reservoir Dogs — a film so raw and transgressive it was banned in the UK for years, circulated on pirate VHS tapes, and became the blueprint for an entire generation of filmmaking. A guy who worked in a video store in LA wrote and directed this. Wrap your head around that.

Richard Lewis, MonteCristo, and Thorin kick off Four Play's Tarantino Arc with the ...

In 1995, a film predicted POV recording technology, VR experiences you can buy on the black market, deepfake manipulation, police brutality caught on camera, and a society addicted to experiencing other people's lives through a screen. It starred Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and was written by James Cameron. Almost nobody saw it.

Strange Days bombed at the box office, nearly destroyed Kathryn Bigelow's career, and has been virtu...

Four film lovers revisit The Matrix (1999) for the first time in years.

The action still holds up. The philosophical ideas still land. But the script? That's where things get complicated. We break down the Hong Kong cinema influences Hollywood never credited, the Dark City and Invisibles connections, what Keanu Reeves actually brings to Neo, and whether the Wachowskis wrote a cyberpunk masterpiece or got carried by everyone around...

Was The Matrix the first film to ask whether our reality is manufactured? No! There are huge parallels between Dark City and The Matrix, with both films using some of the same themes, visuals, and even sets.

In this episode of Four Play, we dive into Dark City (1998): Alex Proyas’ noir-drenched sci-fi cult classic that arrived one year before The Matrix and explored memory, identity, and control in ways that still feel unsettl...

Four Play begins a brand-new Cyberpunk Arc with a deep dive into Blade Runner: one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made.

Released in 1982, Blade Runner didn’t just define cyberpunk aesthetics,  it also reshaped how cinema explores identity, consciousness, artificial intelligence, capitalism, and what it means to be human. Decades later, its themes feel more relevant than ever.

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David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is not an adaptation: it’s a psychological autopsy.

In this episode of Four Play, we dive deep into one of the most challenging films ever released by a major director: Cronenberg’s surreal, disturbing, and deeply personal interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ life and work.

Rather than translating Burroughs’ famously “unfilmable” novel to the screen, Naked Lu...

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995) is a time capsule of 1990s crime cinema: strange characters with even stranger nicknames who speak in impossibly slick slang.

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