“I don’t think one time in seven years have we picked the same film.” Brian Saur have recommended to each other, and to listeners, since they started podcasting together in 2017. 

Saur and Kane met at a backyard film screening in Los Angeles and instantly bonded over their adoration of Danny Peary and his 1981 book Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird and the Wonderful, which details 100 cult-status films. It’s the first of a trio of Peary tomes that serve as the source of truth for many a midnight cinephile. When Saur described his ion project—a long-gestating documentary on Peary—to Kane, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  

Both hosts were already known to enthusiasts of overlooked cinema: Saur for his Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog and Just the Discs podcast; Kane for his Killer POV podcast. “I’d been horror podcasting for about six or seven years and I was really missing general movies,” Kane recalls. “So I said I was thinking about doing a podcast, maybe we should do it together?”

“It’s been a really interesting, organic friendship,” Saur says of the Pure Cinema Pod partnership. Kane agrees: “A lot of the show was getting to know each other, and our tastes intersect, but we’ve almost never picked the same movies.”  

Pure Cinema Pod is now regularly included in film podcast top-tens; its devoted fans tune in for deep-cut recommendations, and enthusiastically share their own recs in return (New Beverly Cinema, the podcast features monthly line-up episodes that run through the theater’s programming (here’s the June episode featuring Letterboxd’s own Mia Lee Vicino as the special guest). There’s also the occasional special Tarantino appearance, but mostly Kane and Saur unearthing film after film that deserves to be seen.  

“The most exciting thing on our show has been the amount of times we talk about something you can’t find, and a DVD company goes and finds it and puts it out. It’s nice when you can be a part of that,” says Kane. “When we started the show, After Hours was under-seen, but the world has caught up.” (A 4K Blu-ray of the 1985 Martin Scorsese-directed film was released last year.) 

Seven years in, Kane and Saur estimate they have recommended around 2,000 movies. To celebrate the occasion, they’ve created “a killer list”: Pure Cinema Recommends 101 Films, which they reveal in a bumper summer double-episode this month. 

Turns out, even after a couple of thousand movies, there are yet more to add to our watchlists. “These are still 101 more movies that we think need to be recommended and keep in the conversation,” says Kane. “They may not be streaming but they’re at least available on physical media.” 

“I think it’s great, I think it’s a great way to start,” Saur concurs. 

Also on the list: Goodbye Pork Pie, a rambunctious eighties road-movie from Kane’s New Zealand birthplace; John Frankenheimer’s highly rated The Train; A Scene at the Sea, Takeshi Kitano’s 1991 summer-of-love film about a deaf garbage collector who takes up surfing; and David Lean’s 1949 conversational stunner The ionate Friends, about a love triangle in which, in my opinion, “Claude Rains’ speeches… are the best speeches in any film ever.” (Anyone seriously considering a tenth rewatch of Challengers should pop this in the queue first.) 

I’m keen to know if there’s a film that each has introduced to the other during the course of Pure Cinema Pod that they can’t stop thinking about. Saur instantly answers with a 1981 documentary featuring stuntmen Ken Carter and Evil Knievel: “The Devil at Your Heels. We love American Movie and this has similar energy. This is about a guy who’s trying to build a ramp to jump the divide between Canada and America in a rocket car. It’s one of those where it’s just like ‘what is going to happen?! What is his deal?’.”  

For Kane, it’s Rollercoaster, a 3.2-out-of-five star 1977 film also starring George Segal. “[Brian]’s been talking about Rollercoaster over a couple of years and it can be years of him talking about a movie before I’ll give it a go. It’s a ’70s disaster movie about a guy putting bombs on rollercoasters. It was not available outside of DVD. Now it has a Blu-ray but it still is not very widely watched on Letterboxd and it’s not available streaming.” 

Saur and Kane conclude our conversation with a shout-out to Letterboxd, which has been an essential tool for their work. Saur creates lists specific to each podcast episode, and has them open in front of him while he records. Kane goes deep into community activity for show ideas: “I’m thinking about this period of time, I’m thinking about this genre, just flipping through the lists, there’s so much stuff in there. It’s an incredible rabbit-hole generator. It’s really been so helpful for us after seven years. We’re not running out of movies, we’re not saying that. It’s about ‘what am I missing here?’ Letterboxd always comes through for me, every time.”