Best Film Ever

Angels & Demons or Thor? Interview with the Vampire or The Rock? What happens when some of our favourite films fall just short of the standards required to qualify for a regular Best Film Ever review? To be eligible for the BFE, a film needs to score either 85% or higher on Rotten Tomatoes OR 8.0 or higher on IMDb — which leaves an awful lot of beloved, ridiculous, divisive and occasionally brilliant movies stranded on the outside looking in.

So this week, we're giving the rejects their moment.

Joined by some of our Friends of the Podcast — Synthia, Paul Komoroski, Ariannah, Shai Bergerfroind and Hermes Auslander — we've assembled a field of the best films officially ineligible for review by the BFE and thrown them into a winner-takes-all knockout tournament. Expect films we can't believe aren't eligible, films whose scores suddenly make perfect sense, brutal head-to-head choices, questionable taste, furious campaigning and at least one result that will have somebody demanding an immediate change to the BFE constitution.

They may never qualify for a proper episode — but one of them is about to be crowned The Best Film Ineligible for Review by the BFE.

“Call me Snake.”

Join Ian, Liam & Kev for our 344th episode as we cross the wall, try not to get killed by the locals, and discover that in the distant dystopian future of 1997, the entire island of Manhattan has become America's maximum-security prison. It's John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981), where Kurt Russell has one eye, Donald Pleasence is somehow the President of the United States, and absolutely nobody seems particularly concerned that they've sent one bloke in to rescue him.

Megs isn't with us this week — she landed on Manhattan while attempting to evacuate Air Force One and has informed us that she'd actually rather take her chances with the inmates than record with us.

This week we discuss:

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken — one of cinema's coolest antiheroes, but how much of Snake is actually a character and how much is simply Kurt Russell walking around being impossibly cool?

John Carpenter's vision of 1997 — crime has exploded, America has become a police state, and Manhattan is a prison. It didn't quite work out that way... but how much of Carpenter's dystopia still feels surprisingly relevant?

The extraordinary world-building — Carpenter gives us remarkably little information about how any of this works. Is that restraint part of the film's brilliance, or are there questions we'd really quite like answered?

Ian gets into the film's narrative construction — because Escape from New York might have one of the cleanest movie premises imaginable. You've got a man, you've got a mission, you've got a ticking clock. What more do you actually need?

Snake Plissken's reputation precedes him everywhere — everybody has heard of him, everybody thought he was dead, and we're left wondering exactly what this man did before the opening credits to become such a legend.

Lee Van Cleef's Hauk — pragmatic authority figure or complete bastard? And is putting explosives inside the neck of the only man capable of completing your mission really the motivational strategy you'd go with?

Donald Pleasence as the President — accent notwithstanding, does the film deliberately make the most powerful man in America one of its least impressive?

Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York — he's A-Number-One, but does the Duke live up to the incredible introduction the film gives him?

The supporting cast is ridiculous — Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau and more. Who makes the most of surprisingly limited screen time?

The film looks considerably bigger than it actually was — miniatures, matte paintings, abandoned locations and some ingenious low-budget filmmaking. How does Carpenter create an entire ruined Manhattan without actually having one?

The pacing — at barely 100 minutes, Escape from New York gets in, establishes its world, completes its mission and gets out. Have modern action films forgotten how to do this?

That ending. Snake has one final opportunity to do something heroic for the United States of America... and makes perhaps the most Snake Plissken decision imaginable instead.

And finally, whether Escape from New York is the Best Film Ever — or simply one of the coolest B-movies ever elevated into cult-classic immortality.

Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at
https://www.patreon.com/BFE

We are very thankful to the following Patreon backers for their generous support:

Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM

Hermes Auslander

James DeGuzman

Synthia

Shai Bergerfroind

Ariannah Who Loves BFE The Most

Paul Komoroski

Duane Smith (Duane Smith!)

Andy Dickson

Aashrey

Chris Pedersen

Randal Silva

Nate The Great

Rev Bruce

Richard

Ryan Kuketz

Dirk Diggler

Stew from the Stew World Order podcast

NorfolkDomus

John Humphrey's Right Foot

Timmy Tim Tim

Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank

Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/.

Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of Mistake by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor, at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor

Also, massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/

“I’m not a one-man woman.”

Join Ian & Megs for our 343rd episode as we head to Brooklyn for Spike Lee’s audacious, provocative, micro-budget debut She’s Gotta Have It (1986). It’s sex, independence, competing egos, and three men absolutely convinced they should be the answer to a question Nola Darling never asked. Liam isn’t with us this week — Nola told him she wasn’t interested in exclusivity and he’s been drafting a rebuttal ever since. Kev? He heard Mars Blackmon say “Please, baby, please” and has disappeared to practise his technique.

This week we discuss:

Who exactly are we supposed to like in this film? Nola, Jamie, Greer, Mars — everyone gets their moments, but are there actually any genuinely likeable characters in She’s Gotta Have It?

Tracy Camilla Johns as Nola Darling — independent, sexually confident, complicated and occasionally deeply frustrating. How radical was this protagonist in 1986, and how does she play almost forty years later?

That Thanksgiving dinner. Inviting all three men you're sleeping with to the same Thanksgiving meal is certainly a choice — but is Nola being liberated, honest and refusing to hide, or is she actually being unnecessarily cruel?

The acting is... a moving target. From genuinely effective performances to line readings that wouldn't survive an amateur theatre rehearsal, the quality fluctuates wildly — so why does the film somehow remain completely compelling?

Spike Lee’s extraordinary debut — made with virtually no money and enormous ambition. Does the roughness actually become part of the film's charm rather than something we need to forgive?

Jamie, Greer and Mars — three wildly different approaches to masculinity, yet all three ultimately want Nola to change for them. Does any one of them actually understand her?

Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon — annoying, hilarious, insecure, endlessly quotable and somehow destined to become bigger than the film itself.

Megs explores Nola’s agency — is the film genuinely celebrating a woman refusing to conform to expectations, or can Nola's independence occasionally become an excuse for treating other people badly?

Ian questions the film’s internal logic — particularly that ending. Nola and Jamie's final scene seems constructed exactly like the climax of a romantic comedy: she's lost the guy, walks away, he calls her back and gives her another chance. Everything about the cinematic language tells us this is the outcome we're supposed to want... until the film suddenly tells us it wasn't.

The final confessional — previous confessionals lead into events that we actually witness. So why does the most important one simply tell us that everything went differently without ever showing it?

And what about Nola's vow of celibacy? Is it genuine growth, or such a rejection of her defining characteristic that it feels like the film suddenly lost confidence in its own ending?

Does the finale feel rewritten? There's no smoking gun proving that it was, but Ian makes the case that the internal logic, characterisation and sudden reliance on “tell, don't show” make those final minutes feel suspiciously like a late attempt to change what the audience takes away from the film.

The film’s sexual politics in 2026 — what's still strikingly progressive, what's become considerably more complicated, and how does one deeply troubling sequence change our relationship with Jamie and everything that follows?

The black-and-white photography and that sudden explosion of colour — necessity becoming aesthetic, and the first signs of the extraordinarily confident visual filmmaker Spike Lee would become.

And finally, whether She’s Gotta Have It is the Best Film Ever — or a messy, inconsistent, sometimes infuriating debut that somehow shines brighter than many considerably more polished films.

Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at
https://www.patreon.com/BFE

We are very thankful to the following Patreon backers for their generous support:

Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM

Hermes Auslander

James DeGuzman

Synthia

Shai Bergerfroind

Ariannah Who Loves BFE The Most

Paul Komoroski

Duane Smith (Duane Smith!)

Andy Dickson

Aashrey

Chris Pedersen

Randal Silva

Nate The Great

Rev Bruce

Richard

Ryan Kuketz

Dirk Diggler

Stew from the Stew World Order podcast

NorfolkDomus

John Humphrey's Right Foot

Timmy Tim Tim

Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank

Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/.

Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of Mistake by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor, at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor

Also, massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/

FIRST 54:00: Spoiler-Free Review with our See It/Skip It Verdict
AFTER 54:00: Full Spoiler Review

It’s another edition of See It or Skip It and this time Ian is joined by JDG, Juleen and Hermes as they swing headfirst into Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Tom Holland’s latest outing as Peter Parker and the beginning of a very different chapter for the MCU’s resident wall-crawler.

But can Spider-Man really have a brand new day after No Way Home changed everything? Ian, JDG, Juleen and Hermes suit up to explore whether this fresh start finally gives us the more grounded, street-level Peter Parker fans have been asking for — or if the wider MCU once again proves impossible to escape.

Does Brand New Day make good on the emotional consequences of Peter being forgotten by everyone he loves? Is Tom Holland finally being allowed to stand on his own as Spider-Man, or does a supporting cast featuring Hulk and Punisher threaten to turn his movie into another Marvel crossover?

The gang dig into Holland’s performance, the new status quo, the villains, the action, and whether the film remembers that the best Spider-Man stories aren’t really about saving the world — they’re about Peter Parker desperately trying to hold his own life together.

What should a Spider-Man film look like after multiverses, returning villains and three generations of Spider-Men? Can Marvel genuinely go smaller again, or has the franchise become too big to ever truly return to the neighbourhood?

All this and more in this week’s See It or Skip It review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day — and of course, Ian, JDG, Juleen and Hermes will let you know if you should SEE IT or SKIP IT.

You know we love our wrestling here at the BFE—or, at least, some of us do.

Join Ian from Best Film Ever and JDG as we once again break the traditional BFE format to review all two nights of WWE SummerSlam 2026.

Did CM Punk and Cody Rhodes deliver in their battle for the Undisputed WWE Championship? Was Roman Reigns versus Seth Rollins a worthy main event—or have we seen these two fight one time too many? Did Oba Femi finally cement himself as WWE’s next great monster by stepping inside Hell in a Cell with Brock Lesnar, and was this really the end of the road for The Beast?

Ian and JDG also discuss whether Liv Morgan and IYO SKY lived up to expectations, the chaotic Interim Women’s Championship ladder match, Kevin Owens’ big return, and the increasingly bizarre world in which Danhausen is competing in a “Human Monies on a Pole” match at one of WWE’s biggest shows of the year.

Which matches stole the weekend? Which results left us scratching our heads? Did SummerSlam justify being stretched across two nights—and, most importantly, was it actually the biggest party of the summer?

All this and more as BFE swaps cinema for suplexes and breaks down WWE SummerSlam 2026.