WKGC Public Media

It isn’t often anymore that we experience a movie that reminds us why we fell in love with the movies in the first place. Not because it reinvents the wheel… but because it understands how the wheel works.
Project Hail Mary is that kind of film.
It’s big, bold science fiction—filled with cosmic stakes and dazzling visuals—but at its core, it’s built on something far simpler and far more enduring: character, friendship, and sacrifice. It’s a story about an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances, forced to confront not only the fate of his world, but the measure of his own courage.
And in many ways, it feels like a throwback. Not nostalgic, exactly—but classical. A film that trusts storytelling fundamentals: clear stakes, emotional investment, and a hero who doesn’t begin as heroic at all. He begins as frightened. Reluctant. Human.
That’s not to say the movie is perfect. The translation from page to screen brings with it some uneven pacing, and a few plot mechanics that feel compressed or occasionally clunky.
You can sense the weight of Andy Weir’s dense scientific storytelling pressing against the boundaries of cinematic time.
But when the film works—and it works often—it works because it remembers something essential.
Spectacle may draw us in…but emotion is what keeps us there.
In this episode, we’re talking about a movie that embraces old-fashioned Hollywood storytelling in the best possible sense—a film that reminds us that sincerity is not weakness, that optimism is not naïve, and that sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that bring people together rather than push them apart.
Joining me once again is returning guest and friend of the show, film critic Gino Sassani.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots features singer/songwriter Steve Monce.

There’s a good movie somewhere inside The Bride!—perhaps several. The irony is that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious reimagining of the Frankenstein mythos feels almost as stitched together as the monster at its center. The film clearly springs from a place of imagination and artistic ambition, drawing inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s immortal Bride of Frankenstein from 1935.
But ambition alone doesn’t always produce cohesion.
Gyllenhaal’s picture is an unusual mix of gothic romance, crime drama, musical spectacle, and monster movie. And that mixture is both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest challenge.
There are moments of genuine cinematic electricity here—particularly in the performances, the cinematography, and the surprising nods to classic Warner Bros. song-and-dance spectacles. But the screenplay struggles to unify its many influences. What we get is a film assembled from fascinating narrative parts that never quite fuse into a single organism.
Still, there is much here worth discussing—from the performances of Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, to the film’s unusual tonal mixture of gothic romance, crime drama, and musical fantasy.
Joining me today is returning guest and friend of the show Brad Biewer, host of the Cinema Speak podcast.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots invites Mitch Pierson and Alex Napier into Studio 314 to delight you with a tiny desk concert and talk about their careers in music. 

There is a difference between resurrecting a franchise and reviving its pulse. Scream 7 understands that distinction. This latest installment does not attempt to eclipse the peerless 1996 original, nor does it double down on the tonal divergence introduced in entries five and six. Instead, it recalibrates. It restores the whodunit spine. It re-centers Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and a classically-derived Ghostface. It reasserts consequence in a franchise that had begun flirting with narrative immunity.
In my review, I argue that Scream 7 aligns more closely with Scream 2–4 than with the reboot-era entries. If Scream 4 ushered the franchise into the digital age—interrogating celebrity culture, victimhood-as-currency, and the corrosive influence of social media—then Scream 7 feels like a cultural correction. It gestures back toward authenticity, toward analog suspense, toward a slasher that trusts structure over spectacle.
And yet, the film’s release has not been judged solely on its craftsmanship. The production circumstances surrounding Melissa Barrera’s departure shaped both the creative reset and the critical climate. But separating controversy from craft is essential if we are to evaluate the film honestly.
Joining me today is returning guest and friend of the show—FandomWire Editor, film critic Sean Boelman.
Sean is also a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Critics Association of Central Florida, of which I too am a member.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots invited Haunted Like Human into Studio 314 to entertain you with a tiny desk concert and talk about what's going on in their music journeys.

How to Make a Killing is ostensibly a crime drama about financial ambition and ethical compromise, but what lingers after the credits is less a plot and more a portrait—a character study of how obsession can warp morality and justify itself in the believer’s own mind. Films about money are rarely just about money. They are about desire, identity, and the narratives we tell ourselves to rationalize decisions that eventually define us.
In this film, we are invited into the psyche of Becket, played by Glen Powell, a man whose intelligence and drive are initially admirable, but whose fixation on the promise of wealth becomes the lens through which he interprets love, loyalty, justice, and even self-worth. The story reminds us, with quiet inevitability, that the love of money doesn’t simply corrupt—more often, it rationalizes corruption, wrapping unethical choices in the language of necessity and vision.
There are striking parallels here with films like The Big Short, where financial systems are shown not just as mechanisms of profit but as moral minefields. How to Make a Killing doesn’t have the structural cleverness of that film, but it shares its fatalistic interrogation of ambition and ethical elasticity.
And because this movie is as much about psychological descent as it is about financial ascent, conversations about obsession, leverage, and self-justification aren’t just thematic — they become personal.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots is joined by the bank Lucky Mud to play some of their latest songs in a tiny desk concert and talk about updates in their musical career.

Is Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights a bold, thoughtful reinterpretation of a literary classic—or a grotesquely self-indulgent fever dream? You be the judge. That question may sound hyperbolic, but it feels unavoidable.
Fennell is undeniably a visionary director. Her eye for composition, texture, and tonal immersion is extraordinary. The production design, cinematography, and costuming are exquisite—gothic romance rendered through contemporary sensibilities with remarkable visual confidence. This is, without question, one of the most visually striking adaptations of Brontë ever mounted.
And yet, the screenplay is another matter entirely.
Where Brontë constructed a narrative architecture built on decay—of estates, of relationships, of moral order—Fennell often rearranges or redistributes character traits in ways that undermine that structural collapse. Characters are flattened. Motivations shift. Symbolism loses its arc. When Fennell adheres to the novel, the film finds footing. When she diverges, it falters.
This is not a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down conversation. It’s about interpretation. About authorship. About whether contemporary sensibilities illuminate classic texts—or impose upon them.
And because this story, at its core, concerns gender, power, agency, repression, and emotional violence, I am especially pleased to welcome Melissa Watts—a longtime friend and former graduate colleague—whose perspective will bring a necessary female lens to this adaptation and conversation.

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots welcomes back singer-songwriter Todd Sparks into the studio for a tiny desk concert adn conversation about what's going on in his performance career. From Florida's panhandle to the Tampa Bay region, he is all over the place.