“Takes a lot more to scare people these days. Too much competition.” I’ve watched a bunch of movies during the pandemic specifically because of their resonance to our current moment. I rewatched this one for the first time since I was a kid to get away from all that —…

Matt Singer

Matinee is an absolute gem! Easily my favorite movie about watching movies. If someone were to ask me why I love movies so much, I would just tell them to go watch Joe Dante's Matinee. Probably the most under-rated, under-valued, and criminally under-seen film in existence.…

Evan

Joe Dante's love letter to the power and joy found in cinema. There is one scene in particular that I keep thinking about today. After her husband has been sent off to potentially defend the United States (there's criticism of the military industrial complex in here, like…

Willow Maclay

"Castle’s theatrical exploitation methods—most famously employed with The Tingler—blurred where cinema ended and reality began. Dante makes this explicitly political, with Woolsey both exploiting and revealing the terrors of the atomic age. By the time a bomb explodes on…

Peter Labuza

I've known Joe Dante since the spring of 1974 when we met at Roger Corman's editing room. Matinee is to me his most personal picture. There are so many things in it- jokes, themes, homages, lines of dialogue, shots and stock shots and recreations of scenes out of the…

Allan Arkush

What a delightful movie, and the movie within the movie, Mant, just might be my favorite fake movie. The first time I ever watched Matinee was on cable in the mid 90’s—fiittingly enough it was on a family trip to Key West, Florida. Everyone went out but I pretended to be…

Ian West

At the end of the world, all we can ask for is to be surrounded by the ones we love. For Joe Dante, his “one”  is the movies. B movies.  “Matinee,” set at the height of global atomic annihilation paranoia, stars John Goodman as a schlock impresario, who brings his new…

theriverjordan

Movies will always be extremely important to me, but in a time of straight-up national crisis I suppose it is inevitable that they will feel less important. I'm a nervous, anxious person by nature, and it's bad voodoo when the national mood is able to match, and surpass, my…

Joe

That "shopping cart" movie-within-a-movie is the best comedy of '93.

Justin LaLiberty