Toni's Film Club - Season 5

Das Boot (1981) is one of the most obsessively realistic war films ever made. It doesn’t chase spectacle or heroism - it traps you inside a German U-boat and forces you to live there. The film feels less like a blockbuster and more like an anxiety-inducing documentary.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968) is one of the strangest, smartest, and most quietly groundbreaking films ever made. It doesn’t behave like a documentary or a narrative film - it turns the filmmaking process itself into the story.

"Sinners" is one of those rare films that somehow gets everything right - iIt’s completely original, audiences showed up for it, and critics embraced it in a big way, making it the most nominated film in Oscar history with 16 nominations.

"Roar" (1981) is one of the most dangerous, chaotic, and astonishingly ambitious films ever made. It is anything but a typical Hollywood production and turns living with a bunch of untrained lions, tigers, and other big cats into the story itself.

Project Hail Mary is one of the only books I’ve ever finished. And now, with Ryan Gosling in it, has become one of the most anticipated sci-fi films in recent years.

One Cut of the Dead (2017) is one of the most deceptively brilliant horror comedies I've ever seen. It looks like a clunky, low-budget zombie movie with awkward acting, weird pacing, and countless amateur-ish mistakes - until you realize that every single one of them is the point.

"The Drama" is one of those movies that forces you to reflect and confront yourself. The new A24 film starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson is exactly the kind of tense, stylish moral mind-game I’ve been missing lately.

Exploring one of the most famously disliked movies ever made, to the point of the director publicly apologizing. But is there more to the story?

Is physical media actually better than subscribing to a bunch of streaming platforms? Let's compare the pros and cons for each and find out.

My honest thoughts on "Backrooms" - the A24 feature film directed by Kane Parsons who went viral for his found footage series on YouTube and landed a major studio deal at just 20 years old.

The McPherson Tape (1989) is one of the most groundbreaking low-budget films ever made. It also happens to be the one that haunted me for my entire childhood.

I flew to Bulgaria, where I somehow managed to get a special, unlimited access to the largest film studio in Eastern Europe, where some of the biggest Hollywood movies get made without anyone even realizing it.

In the early 2000s, a company called Flexplay created a DVD designed to self-destruct 48 hours after opening, using a chemical reaction with oxygen that turned the disc unreadable. I got my hands on an actual unopened copy and tested it myself to see how it worked. It was one of several attempts, alongside DIVX and early Netflix, to solve the home video late fee problem, but streaming made it obsolete within a few years.

Over the years I've picked up all kinds of bizarre, rare, and downright cool film memorabilia, so it's about time to go through my collection and the stories behind them.

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" might be one of the best superhero movies yet. It isn't your typical spectacle blockbuster chasing world-ending stakes but instead a rather grounded story exploring Peter Parker's very real loneliness after losing nearly everyone close to him.

The Flicker (1966) is one of the strangest experiments ever put on film. After reading reports that it made the audience hallucinate, obviously I had to see it for myself.

Niu Lai (2026) is a $1,000 animated film that just became a viral phenomenon in China... and quite possibly the most profitable movie ever made.

As it turns out, a private home theater is not just really cool, but perfectly calibrated to provide the best possible way to experience a movie. Not just better than a TV in the living room, but better than pretty much any commercial theater as well. Oh well, a man can dream lol

Lion (2026) is one of the most ambitious nature documentaries in recent years - filmed with zero human intervention over 1400 days, it takes real lions and turns them into characters with real story arcs, all without a single line of dialogue.