We’re back with an all-new season of Guide for the Film Fanatic! In each episode, Jason Bailey and Mike Hull invite a guest from the world of film (including filmmakers, authors, critics, actors, and more) to select one of the 1600+ “must-see movies” collected in Danny Peary’s seminal 1986 book, Guide for the Film Fanatic. Bailey, Hull, and their guests deep dive on each film, discussing its history, themes, style, performances, initial reception, and legacy, taking a fresh look at some of the most beloved titles in cinema history.

This week, the Edgar award-winning author of Everybody Knows and She Rides Shotgun joins us to discuss his new novel A Violent Masterpiece, as well as John Milius’s 1981 adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s pulp classics Conan the Barbarian — the movie that made a movie star of an Austrian bodybuilder with a complicated name.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve partnered up with One Heat Minute Productions on this show, so we’ve migrated over to their feed; subscribe now if you haven’t already. 

We’re also putting our new episodes up on YouTube! Watch the show on our YouTube channel, @guideforthefilmfanatic, for visual accompaniment and bonus stuff and who knows what else:

Conan the Barbarian is available for digital rental or purchase; you can also get a gorgeous 4K of it from Arrow Video. You can read the New York Times review here, the Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times review here, the TIME review here, and the Variety review here.

For further reading and listening, check out our discussion of The Shining here and Jason’s review of the new Blu-ray of Mike’s “Double It Up” pick Iphigenia here. And amazingly, after we recorded this episode, word broke in the trades that a new Conan movie in the works; read about that here.

You can buy A Violent Masterpiece here, check out Jordan’s Substack here, and follow him on Bluesky and Instagram. If you’d like to check out the YouTube page for Mike’s other podcast, “Black Diplomats,” it’s here. And Jason’s book Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend is OUT NOW, and you can order it from MZS Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your hardbacks, ebooks, paperbacks, and/or audiobooks. 

Last but not least, if you’d like to make a little donation to support us and the show, you can do that at Ko-fi!