Best Film Ever

“All you motherfuckers are gonna pay.”

Join Ian & Liam for our 347th episode as we climb into a beat-up car, head for Hollywood and return to the View Askewniverse for Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) — a film containing approximately seventeen thousand celebrity cameos, several decades’ worth of jokes that have aged with varying degrees of dignity, and considerably more discussion of internet commenters than anyone in 2001 could possibly have realised would become relevant.

Megs isn’t with us this week — Justice invited her to join the girl gang and she immediately decided their road trip sounded considerably better than ours. Kev has gone to Hollywood to hunt down everyone who’s ever said anything mean about him on the internet. We tried to explain the scale of the task in 2026. He went anyway.

This week we discuss:

Are Jay and Silent Bob actually big enough characters to carry an entire movie? They work brilliantly wandering through the background of Kevin Smith's other films, but what happens when the supporting act suddenly has to become the main event?

Is the road trip the worst part of this road trip movie? The strange thing about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is that it seems to get more entertaining the closer it gets to abandoning its actual plot. We ask whether everything involving getting to Hollywood is simply standing between us and the movie we really want to watch.

The more meta it gets, the more fun we're having — once Ben Affleck starts explaining the View Askewniverse, actors start playing themselves, Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season appears and Kevin Smith begins openly taking the piss out of his own career, the film suddenly finds another gear.

Kevin Smith celebrates his own cinematic universe years before Marvel made everybody obsessed with cinematic universes — characters, actors, locations and jokes from across his previous films all collide here. Is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back effectively the Avengers: Endgame of dick and fart jokes?

We've aged out of this movie. But is that actually the movie's fault? There are jokes here that probably would have destroyed us twenty years ago and now generate rather more complicated reactions. Does no longer being the target audience make Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back a bad film — or did we simply make a questionable choice reviewing it in our forties?

Jason Mewes finally gets the entire stage — Jay has always been loud, crude and ridiculous, but can Mewes turn that into a character we actually want to follow for 100 minutes?

And then there's Silent Bob — Kevin Smith gives himself considerably less dialogue but considerably more responsibility. Does the Jay/Bob dynamic still work when the film can't simply deploy them for five minutes and move on?

What exactly did they say to Carrie Fisher? Princess Leia turns up as a nun, picks up two hitchhikers and finds herself involved in exactly the kind of joke you imagine her agent having several questions about. We investigate how on Earth Kevin Smith got her into this movie.

The cameos become an entire storytelling language — Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Mark Hamill, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, Jon Stewart and seemingly everybody Kevin Smith had ever met. Which ones still absolutely kill, and when does recognising somebody become the joke?

Mark Hamill versus Cock-Knocker — because if you've somehow convinced Luke Skywalker to appear in your film, obviously you give him an enormous fist and make him fight Silent Bob.

The internet stuff has aged strangely well — the specific websites may have changed, but people anonymously saying horrible things about strangers online certainly haven't. Was Kevin Smith accidentally making a movie about the next quarter-century of internet culture?

The women of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back — Justice and the diamond thieves give the film something resembling an emotional storyline, but how well does that entire section survive a 2026 viewing?

Kevin Smith making a movie for Kevin Smith fans — there's almost no attempt to make this accessible to somebody walking into the View Askewniverse for the first time. Is that self-indulgence, or exactly why the film works when it works?

And finally, whether Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is the Best Film Ever — or a film we might have absolutely adored at 22 and have made the potentially catastrophic decision to revisit at 47.

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 34:30: Spoiler-Free Review with our See It/Skip It Verdict
AFTER 34:30: Full Spoiler Review

It’s another edition of See It or Skip It and this time Ian is joined by James as they head to The End of Oak Street — David Robert Mitchell’s strange new collision of suburban family drama, science-fiction mystery and dinosaur-filled survival adventure.

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the Platt family, whose perfectly ordinary neighbourhood suddenly finds itself ripped out of suburbia and deposited somewhere very, very different. But does throwing a family, their house and apparently their entire street into the impossible make for a thrilling original blockbuster — or is The End of Oak Street trying to cram too many different movies into the same 99 minutes?

Ian and James dig into whether Mitchell — the filmmaker behind It Follows — can make the leap into big-budget spectacle without losing the sense of unease and mystery that made his earlier work so distinctive. Does the film actually have something interesting to say about family, home and what happens when everything familiar is suddenly stripped away? Or are we really just here to watch Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor run away from dinosaurs?

How well do Hathaway and McGregor sell the central family dynamic? Do Maisy Stella and Christian Convery give the younger Platts enough personality of their own? And when the film finally starts explaining exactly what has happened to Oak Street, does the answer make the mystery more satisfying — or was wondering what the hell was going on more fun than actually finding out?

The pair also get into the film’s action, Michael Giacchino’s score, its use of IMAX-scale spectacle and that wonderfully odd mixture of Spielbergian adventure, creature feature and domestic drama. Is this the kind of original studio blockbuster people keep insisting Hollywood doesn’t make anymore — and, if so, will audiences actually turn up when somebody finally makes one?

Can a movie about a suburban family transported into the unknown balance genuine emotional stakes with the simple pleasure of DINOSAURS? Does David Robert Mitchell successfully go big without losing what makes his filmmaking interesting? And perhaps most importantly: once your entire street has been transported through space and time, does the homeowners’ association still have jurisdiction?

All this and more in this week’s See It or Skip It review of The End of Oak Street — and of course, Ian and James will let you know if you should SEE IT or SKIP IT.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.”

Join Ian, Liam & Megs for our 346th episode as we head into the bleak, terrifyingly plausible Britain of 2027 for Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). Humanity hasn’t produced a child in eighteen years, society is collapsing, Britain has become an authoritarian state, and Clive Owen would really just like everyone to leave him alone. Kev isn’t with us this week — he attempted to enter the country without the correct paperwork and is currently enjoying the hospitality of the British government's immigration system.

And stick around for the Endgame, where we're joined by BFF of the BFE Synthia to help decide whether Children of Men deserves a place among the Best Films Ever.

This week we discuss:

How many screenwriters does it take to make Children of Men? Five credited writers had a hand in adapting P.D. James' novel. Does the finished film feel like the product of that many voices, or is Cuarón's vision strong enough to make it feel completely unified?

Clive Owen as Theo — an excellent actor giving a wonderfully understated performance, but was he a big enough movie star to carry a film this ambitious at the box office?

Michael Caine's Jasper becomes our most debated performance of the week — warm, funny and providing some desperately needed humanity... or playing in a completely different film from everybody around him?

How much world-building should the audience have to do? Children of Men famously refuses to stop and explain its dystopia, instead burying information in news reports, advertisements, background details and production design. Is that masterful "show, don't tell" filmmaking, or does the movie occasionally expect us to construct too much of its world on its behalf?

Ian digs into the screenplay — for a film with an enormous premise, why is the actual story remarkably simple, and does that simplicity allow the themes to become much bigger?

Liam explores hope in a hopeless world — when civilisation has effectively accepted its own extinction, what does the existence of one child actually represent?

Megs examines Kee's place within the story — is she given enough agency of her own, or does her importance as a symbol sometimes overwhelm her importance as a character?

Alfonso Cuarón's direction — those extraordinary long takes aren't simply technical flexes. How does keeping us trapped alongside Theo change the way we experience the violence around him?

The car sequence. We discuss how one seemingly impossible shot transforms from casual conversation to absolute nightmare without giving the audience a moment to escape.

The politics of Children of Men — refugees, nationalism, terrorism, state violence and fear of outsiders. Nearly twenty years after its release, has the film become even more uncomfortable to watch?

The production design — perhaps the film's greatest world-building weapon. From advertisements and graffiti to cages and buses, how much storytelling is happening in the corners of the frame?

The ceasefire — one of the most powerful sequences in the entire film. Does that brief moment of silence earn its enormous emotional impact?

And finally, with BFF of the BFE Synthia joining us for the Endgame, whether Children of Men is the Best Film Ever — or an extraordinary piece of filmmaking whose technical brilliance sometimes asks the audience to fill in more blanks than we'd like.

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/

“This is Africa. We do things differently here.”

Join Ian & Liam for our 345th episode as we head to 1970s Uganda for Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland (2006), a film that puts us terrifyingly close to Idi Amin through the eyes of a fictional young Scottish doctor who discovers that getting into the dictator’s inner circle is considerably easier than getting back out. Megs isn’t with us this week — Amin has appointed her Minister of Something He Just Invented and she's sensibly keeping her head down. Kev? He mentioned that he disagreed with the President once and, well... nobody seems entirely sure where Kev is now.

This week we discuss:

Forest Whitaker’s extraordinary, Oscar-winning Idi Amin — charming, funny, frightening and capable of changing the temperature of a room in seconds. Is this one of the great performances of the 21st century?

James McAvoy’s Nicholas Garrigan — naïve, arrogant, selfish and frequently infuriating. How important is it that the fictional character through whom we experience this story isn't particularly likeable?

Fact versus fiction — Garrigan never existed, but Amin certainly did. Does inserting a fictional white protagonist give audiences an effective route into Ugandan history, or unnecessarily place him at the centre of somebody else's tragedy?

Ian breaks down the film's construction of Amin — how does the film make us understand his charisma without ever asking us to excuse what lies beneath it?

Liam explores the seduction of proximity to power — Garrigan sees the warning signs remarkably early, so why does he keep finding reasons to stay?

How much did we actually know about Idi Amin and Uganda before watching the film? We explore the history behind the story and how closely the broad trajectory of Amin's dictatorship matches what we're shown.

The tonal transformation — the first act occasionally feels like an exciting adventure for a young doctor abroad. How effectively does the film tighten the screws until that same world becomes absolutely terrifying?

Amin the man versus Amin the monster — are the moments of humour, insecurity, paranoia and apparent warmth what make Whitaker's portrayal so frightening?

Garrigan's decisions — there's being naïve, there's making mistakes, and then there's Nicholas Garrigan. At what point did we stop sympathising with him and start shouting at the screen?

The women in Garrigan's story — does the film recognise the consequences of his behaviour toward them, or are they too often used to propel his journey?

The violence — much of the film holds back before suddenly refusing to do so. Does that restraint make the moments when Macdonald finally shows us the horror even more effective?

The final act — The Last King of Scotland eventually becomes almost unbearably tense. Does turning historical atrocity into thriller mechanics enhance the film's impact or risk trivialising the reality behind it?

And finally, whether The Last King of Scotland is the Best Film Ever — or a deeply uncomfortable historical drama elevated by one absolutely towering central performance.

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/

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.