The Projection Booth Podcast

Re-recording mixer Martyn Zub discusses the new film from Padraic McKinley, The Weight (2026), the story of a battle-scarred veteran in The Great Depression who's hired to help smuggle a fortune in gold across 100 miles of impenetrable wilderness. The film stars Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe and had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

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She's been dug up, renamed, reanimated, and gaslit — and Hollywood expects her to be grateful. Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! resurrects the Bride of Frankenstein for a 1930s Chicago that feels equal parts Weimar cabaret and fever dream, with Jessie Buckley delivering a ferocious, uncontainable performance at the center of a film that can't quite contain itself. Mike White and Chris Stachiw dig into the ideas the film gets right, the heavy hand that undercuts them, and why a $80 million feminist Frankenstein movie ending on The Monster Mash is both the most logical and least earned conclusion imaginable.

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Mike sits down with Julie Wyman, director of The Tallest Dwarf — a documentary that is as personal as it is political. 

When filmmaker and UC Davis professor Julie Forrest Wyman set out to make The Tallest Dwarf, she discovered she has hypochondroplasia dwarfism herself — and that hers is the last of a body type she has inherited. The film charts her quest to find her place within the little people community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change, exploring everything from the legacy of exploitation to the thorny ethics of pharmaceutical interventions promising to make little people taller.

Visually striking, humorous, and touching, The Tallest Dwarf invites audiences to rethink identity, disability, and what it means to belong in a world that wants to change who you are.

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Christine La Monte discusses her career and her latest work producing a pair of opera-themed documentaries, the uplifting Viva Verdi! (2025) and the stunning Ai Weiwei's Turandot (2025). La Monte talks about the importance of opera in the modern world and the Oscar-nominated song "Sweet Dreams of Joy."

For more information visit: https://www.lamonteproductions.com/

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Collision as courtship. Self-destruction as intimacy. Fatih Akın’s Head-On (2004) opens with two suicide attempts and spirals into a sham marriage between Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), German Turks who weaponize matrimony to escape themselves. What begins as a performance of tradition mutates into volatile love, violence, prison, exile, and a reunion that refuses catharsis.

Keith Gordon and Rahne Alexander join Mike to unpack Akın’s fusion of Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder fatalism, and arabesk despair. Is this a tragic romance, a critique of identity politics, or a brutal study of freedom curdling into nihilism? No easy redemption. No national reconciliation. Just survival.

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