Contra Zoom Pod

We are celebrating our 7th anniversary here at Contra Zoom, so we decided to continue our Better Know a Contributor series by getting the whole backstory of the pod from the creator himself. From the early days at Live in Limbo where finding a name was the most difficult thing in the world to the current highs of always striving for the heat possible show...

With the recent release of Pixar's latest film Turning Red, Toronto has hit the international stage. The city is home to one of the busiest filming hubs in the world, but very rarely gets to play itself...

With 2021 fully behind us, we begin to look forward to what new releases excite us the most for the rest of 2022. Rachel's picks include Men, The Phantom of the Open, Bullet Train, Nope and DC League of Super Pets. Dakota's picks include Thor: Love and Thunder, Don’t Worry Darling, Babylon, Blonde and Disappointment Blvd.

Check out episode 190: Top Ten Films of 2021.

Follow Rachel on Twitter and check out her website for more great reviews...

For the third year in a row, we cover the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which celebrates the best documentaries in the world. This year it ran from April 28th to May 8th and 225 movies from 63 countries were screened in-person in Toronto and online. We review and discuss Blue Island, Eternal Spring, The Thief Collector, Shooting War and Eskape. We each also recommend The Art of Silence and The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks...

We continue our series going through the entire catalog of A24's films. On this episode we are looking at 2014's Under the Skin directed by Jonathan Glazer. The film stars Scarlett Johnasson as a nameless woman who picks up lonely men in Scotland before bringing them back to a black void where their bodies are harvested as it turns out this woman isn’t human...

Make/Remake examines how two films that share the same story. Not to say what film was better or worse, but how they are similar and different while following the same arcs. This time we are looking at the 1962 J. Lee Thompson version of Cape Fear (a film celebrating its 60th anniversary this year) and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake also called Cape Fear. Check out our past Make/Remake's for more great comparison episodes and see the Letterboxd list...

We continue our series going through the entire catalog of A24's films. On this episode we are looking at 2014's Locke directed by Steven Knight. The film stars Tom Hardy as a man driving to a hospital as a woman prepares to give birth to his child. On this drive he has to fight potential consequences for making this decision, including telling his wife he cheated on her and his work that on the eve of a massive project he can not be there to oversee it...

With the recent release of Crimes of the Future, the newest film directed by David Cronenberg and his first in almost a decade, we are celebrating the auteur's proper return to the body horror in quite a long time. We look at how body horror helps move the story along and what it has to offer in helping to better understand his films themes. We are focusing on The Fly, Videodrome and Naked Lunch and how they influenced Crimes of the Future...

In lieu of a full episode this week, we bring you the sixth in our series of bonus episodes, Better Know a Contributor, where we ask frequent guests of the show 10 Contra Zoom Pod movie questions so you can learn more about your favourite voices. On this show is Jeff Bulmer, one half of the Classic Movies Live podcast...

In our third "A History Of..." series after the success charting the rise of NEON, A24 Films and The Criterion Collection we are looking at Laika Studios, a film studio that has revitalized the art of stop motion animation. The studio put out its first film in 2009 with Coraline and since then have released five Oscar nominated movies including Kubo & the Two Strings and ParaNorman. We trace their roots of the studio and how they grow out of another groundbreaking studio...