Podcast Revisits Neglected Movie Gems: Flashback with Dana Stevens and K. Austin Collins

Slate’s wonderful movie critic, Dana Stevens, has a new podcast with Vanity Fair’s K. Austin Collins. It’s called “Flashback,” and it’s a conversation about terrific older films today’s audiences might have missed. The first few episodes included “Gaslight,” “Wanda” and “The Straight Story.”

Every other Sunday, Kam and I will take one older movie and talk about what it meant in its time and what it might mean today. Older in this context might mean anything made between 1895 (the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat? Two thumbs up!) and, say, the last year of the 20th century (does David Cronenberg’s Existenz hold up as a vision of the future of virtual reality?). The idea is not to plod chronologically through film history but to treat it as a mysterious storage chest with endless drawers to open, so we’ll skip from era to era and genre to genre, following our instincts and curiosity as well as whatever parallels we find in the movies and headlines of the present day.