The Film Board

Project Hail Mary gives us a spider-shaped rock creature with no eyes, no face, and a simplified vocabulary who makes a choice so selfless that four grown men on a podcast had to take a beat. That's the kind of movie this is. Andy Weir's third novel has been adapted by Lord and Miller — the filmmakers who made you cry about a Lego — and the result is a two-and-a-half-hour space movie where the most compelling relationship is between Ryan Gosling and a practical puppet made of granite.Pete, Tommy, Steve, and JJ dig into all of it: the parallel storylines that cut between Grace's amnesia-fueled space crisis and his reluctant conscription on Earth, the razor wire on the inside of the fence, Sandra Hüller's karaoke scene that had JJ in a puddle, and why Greig Fraser and Paul Lambert called this the most complex film they've ever worked on — including two Dune movies. The panel splits on whether the earthbound story or the space-bound story lands harder, and Pete makes a case that the movie's real antagonist isn't a villain at all but the weight of impossible choices.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: Apple TV | Letterboxd
Original Theatrical Trailer
📚 Adapted from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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Ghostface is back. Sidney Prescott is back. Kevin Williamson — the writer who started it all in 1996 — is back, this time in the director's chair. And The Film Board is here to pick through the wreckage.

Pete Wright convenes the panel — Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan — for a full-spoiler autopsy of Scream 7, the franchise's seventh installment and its most complicated origin story yet. The film arrives trailing the collapse of a whole other movie: Melissa Barrera's firing, Jenna Ortega's departure, two directors exiting before a frame was shot, and Neve Campbell finally getting what she was owed to come back. What ended up on screen bears those scars — and the panel doesn't look away from them.

There's plenty to argue about. Tommy arrives as the franchise's longest-tenured Film Board voice and delivers his most critical take yet — the kills are flat, the villain reveal is the weakest in franchise history, and the AI deepfake conceit is nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Steve, against form, finds himself in the film's corner: the Sidney-Tatum mother-daughter dynamic gives him something real to hold onto, and he'll take that over clever-but-hollow any day. Mandy had a genuinely good time, found Anna Camp's casting as transparent as a freshly-cleaned window, and would very much like Tatum's next chapter to be a musical. Pete sits somewhere in the middle — glad to have Kevin Williamson back, troubled by what he had to work with, and still thinking about the better movie that never got made.

They get into the production chaos, the Barrera-shaped hole in the script, the question of whether the AI angle says anything worth saying, the correct use of a panic room, the mystery of a certain line reading, and whether Scream 7 has dethroned Scream 3 at the bottom of the franchise pile.

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📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer
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If you like this ep... check out some other horror favorites from across the Next Reel Family!

Scream (2022) • The Film Board • January 18, 2022
With: Ocean Murff (host), Tommy Metz III

Where the Film Board's Scream run begins. Ocean and Tommy dig into Radio Silence's relaunch — Woodsboro, the Carpenters, and a film that earns real affection while already showing the cracks Tommy will spend two more episodes cataloguing. His 1.5 stars for Scream 7 are a long way from where he started here.

Scream VI • The Film Board • March 14, 2023
With: Pete Wright (host), Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin Jaeger

New York, no Sidney, and the episode where this panel finds its Scream voice. Steve calls the villain motivation the franchise's Achilles heel — a verdict that lands even harder when you hear how Scream 7's killer reveal plays out. The complaints are all road-tested here first.

Last Woman Standing • Sitting in the Dark• March 28, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan Dias

The evolution of the Final Girl from Janet Leigh to the present day, examined through Prey, Sweetheart, and The Invisible Man. Scream 7 hinges on Sidney Prescott as the franchise's ur-Final Girl and closes by anointing Tatum as the next one — this is the essential companion.

Mommy Acts This Way Because She Loves You • Sitting in the Dark • May 30, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan Dias

Horror's obsession with maternal protection, control, and what happens when the drive to shield your child from harm becomes its own kind of damage — through Run, Goodnight Mommy, and mother! Steve's reading of Scream 7 as fundamentally a story about Sidney's fear of visiting her own trauma on Tatum lands squarely in this episode's territory.

Rug Pullers: Topsy-Turvy Horror Twists • Sitting in the Dark • August 29, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kynan Dias, Chelsea Stardust

Three films built entirely around the sucker punch — Ghostwatch, Barbarian, Strange Darling. If you want context for why the Film Board found Scream 7's killer reveal so deflating, this is the episode that sets the bar for what a well-earned horror twist actually requires.

Tommy's Terror Trope Tutorials: Book of the Vampyre and Final Girls • Sitting in the Dark • April 28, 2023
With: Tommy Metz III, Pete Wright, Ray DeLancey

Tommy builds the theoretical groundwork on the Final Girl as a horror archetype — where it comes from, what it asks of its protagonist, and whether it holds up. Essential backstory for understanding why Tommy holds the Scream franchise to the standard he does, and why this movie's handling of Sidney and Tatum hits so differently once you've heard him make that argument.

Ghostface is back. Sidney Prescott is back. Kevin Williamson — the writer who started it all in 1996 — is back, this time in the director's chair. And The Film Board is here to pick through the wreckage.Pete Wright convenes the panel — Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, and Mandy Kaplan — for a full-spoiler autopsy of Scream 7, the franchise's seventh installment and its most complicated origin story yet. The film arrives trailing the collapse of a whole other movie: Melissa Barrera's firing, Jenna Ortega's departure, two directors exiting before a frame was shot, and Neve Campbell finally getting what she was owed to come back. What ended up on screen bears those scars — and the panel doesn't look away from them.There's plenty to argue about. Tommy arrives as the franchise's longest-tenured Film Board voice and delivers his most critical take yet — the kills are flat, the villain reveal is the weakest in franchise history, and the AI deepfake conceit is nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Steve, against form, finds himself in the film's corner: the Sidney-Tatum mother-daughter dynamic gives him something real to hold onto, and he'll take that over clever-but-hollow any day. Mandy had a genuinely good time, found Anna Camp's casting as transparent as a freshly-cleaned window, and would very much like Tatum's next chapter to be a musical. Pete sits somewhere in the middle — glad to have Kevin Williamson back, troubled by what he had to work with, and still thinking about the better movie that never got made.They get into the production chaos, the Barrera-shaped hole in the script, the question of whether the AI angle says anything worth saying, the correct use of a panic room, the mystery of a certain line reading, and whether Scream 7 has dethroned Scream 3 at the bottom of the franchise pile.🎬 Watch & Discover🍿 Watch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer
Become a Member of The Next Reel Family of Film Shows
If you like this ep... check out some other horror favorites from across the Next Reel Family!Scream (2022) • The Film Board • January 18, 2022
With: Ocean Murff (host), Tommy Metz IIIWhere the Film Board's Scream run begins. Ocean and Tommy dig into Radio Silence's relaunch — Woodsboro, the Carpenters, and a film that earns real affection while already showing the cracks Tommy will spend two more episodes cataloguing. His 1.5 stars for Scream 7 are a long way from where he started here.Scream VI • The Film Board • March 14, 2023
With: Pete Wright (host), Tommy Metz III, Steve Sarmento, Justin JaegerNew York, no Sidney, and the episode where this panel finds its Scream voice. Steve calls the villain motivation the franchise's Achilles heel — a verdict that lands even harder when you hear how Scream 7's killer reveal plays out. The complaints are all road-tested here first.Last Woman Standing • Sitting in the Dark• March 28, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan DiasThe evolution of the Final Girl from Janet Leigh to the present day, examined through Prey, Sweetheart, and The Invisible Man. Scream 7 hinges on Sidney Prescott as the franchise's ur-Final Girl and closes by anointing Tatum as the next one — this is the essential companion.Mommy Acts This Way Because She Loves You • Sitting in the Dark • May 30, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kyle Olson, Kynan DiasHorror's obsession with maternal protection, control, and what happens when the drive to shield your child from harm becomes its own kind of damage — through Run, Goodnight Mommy, and mother! Steve's reading of Scream 7 as fundamentally a story about Sidney's fear of visiting her own trauma on Tatum lands squarely in this episode's territory.Rug Pullers: Topsy-Turvy Horror Twists • Sitting in the Dark • August 29, 2025
With: Pete Wright, Tommy Metz III, Kynan Dias, Chelsea StardustThree films built entirely around the sucker punch — Ghostwatch, Barbarian, Strange Darling. If you want context for why the Film Board found Scream 7's killer reveal so deflating, this is the episode that sets the bar for what a well-earned horror twist actually requires.Tommy's Terror Trope Tutorials: Book of the Vampyre and Final Girls • Sitting in the Dark • April 28, 2023
With: Tommy Metz III, Pete Wright, Ray DeLanceyTommy builds the theoretical groundwork on the Final Girl as a horror archetype — where it comes from, what it asks of its protagonist, and whether it holds up. Essential backstory for understanding why Tommy holds the Scream franchise to the standard he does, and why this movie's handling of Sidney and Tatum hits so differently once you've heard him make that argument.
Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year
Join our Discord community of movie lovers
The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements
The Film Board
Movies We Like
The Next Reel
Sitting in the Dark
Connect With Us:Main Site: Web
Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart
Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest
Your Hosts: Pete | JJ |

This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright drags Andy Nelson, Tommy Metz III, and Steve Sarmento into an emergency bonus hearing because Andy texted, essentially, “We can’t skip a month. Also I found a movie.” That movie is Mercy, a slick, noisy, deeply committed screenlife thriller where Chris Pratt wakes up strapped into a futuristic execution-chair-courtroom and has 90 minutes to prove he didn’t kill his wife. The judge is an AI who looks like Rebecca Ferguson. Which is frankly unfair to every other AI.From there, it’s a full-spoilers sprint through a world where justice is software, surveillance is just “normal life,” and every single camera on Earth is apparently pointed at exactly the wrong moment. The panel fights over what Mercy thinks it’s doing (a cautionary tale about AI and institutions) versus what it actually does (a pulpy, coincidence-powered ride that occasionally forgets its own premise and wanders off toward terrorism and explosions).Andy is… not having it. Steve is torn in the way only a lover of scrappy sci-fi concepts can be: “It’s messy, but I’m intrigued.” Tommy—who walked in expecting bargain-bin January nonsense—ends up delighted, especially after an accidental 3D screening turns the whole thing into a theme-park attraction where the chair is the main character. Pete tries to keep the court metaphor alive long enough to pronounce a verdict, but keeps getting distracted by the movie’s most dangerous idea: not the AI, but the assumption that the only way to get “justice” is if the system can see literally everything.Also: yes, we talk about the wind. The screens have wind.Watch & DiscoverWatch Now: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
Original Theatrical Trailer

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year
Join our Discord community of movie lovers
The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements
The Film Board
Movies We Like
The Next Reel
Sitting in the Dark
Connect With Us:Main Site: Web
Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart
Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest
Your Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean 
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Originals: Source material from our episodes
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This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright sits down with Tommy Metz III and Steve Sarmento to wrestle with a question that keeps resurfacing throughout Avatar: Fire and Ash: how can a movie built with such extraordinary care feel so strangely forgettable?James Cameron’s return to Pandora is, once again, a monumental technical achievement. The scale is enormous. The craft is meticulous. The effort behind it is undeniable. And yet, as the conversation unfolds, the panel keeps circling the same uneasy feeling—that the film never quite gives its spectacle anything meaningful to serve.The discussion ranges from Cameron’s latest performance-capture and adaptive frame-rate experiments to the franchise’s growing habit of mistaking motion for momentum. There’s real admiration for the artists who built this world, paired with frustration over a story that repeatedly rushes past its most interesting ideas. Themes of environmentalism, colonialism, faith, and family surface again and again, only to be flattened by familiar beats, unresolved questions, and a narrative that seems unwilling to slow down long enough to let any of them land.By the time the conversation reaches ratings, the outcome feels less like judgment and more like inevitability—the natural endpoint of trying, and failing, to locate the film’s emotional center.🎬 Watch & Discover🍿 Watch Now: Apple TV | Letterboxd
📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year
Join our Discord community of movie lovers
The Next Reel Family of Film Podcasts:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements
The Film Board
Movies We Like
The Next Reel Film Podcast
Sitting in the Dark
Connect With Us:Main Site: Web
Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart
Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest
Your Hosts: Pete | JJ | Steve | Tommy | Andy | Ocean 
Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & more
Watch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussed
Originals: Source material from our episodes
Special offers: Letterboxd Pro/Patron discount | Audible