Podcast Corner: Mission Accomplished is a great listen for film fans 

Brian Raftery digs into the making of some significant films in the 2000s

No Country for Old Men is one of the films discussed in Mission Accomplished. 

We’re big fans of the Big Picture, one of the best movie/criticism shows around. Over the month of August in the past few years, as hosts Sean Fennessy and Amanda Dobbins take breaks that usually coincide with a lull in film quality, Brian Raftery has stepped in with a limited series. From Gene & Roger in 2021, about the critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, to Did We Win This Time?, focused on Hollywood’s output around the Vietnam War, to last summer’s The Hollywood Hack, exploring the fallout from the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, Raftery has proven an affable host who takes a widescreen view of events both on and off screen.

Over the past month, he’s been hosting Mission Accomplished, a six-part series examining the making of 12 significant films from the 2000s, exploring how Hollywood and America evolved during the Bush years. He lists multiple traumatic events that we associate with the turn of the millennium, such as 9/11, the subsequent War on Terror, and Hurricane Katrina.