It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it's shaped our thoughts in a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here again with...

Natasha Robinson.

Genevieve Kasky.

And Keith Phipps, who's normally with us is on vacation this week, he'll be back.

Next time.

After talking about Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, today we're bringing in Midnight Special, the new sci-fi drama from Jeff Nichols, director of shotgun stories, take shelter, and mud.

Both movies essentially follow the same structure. Various groups of people, in this case, a family, a religious cult, and government officials, follow the same set of coordinates to an alien encounter.

But the way they get there and the tone both movies set are markedly different.

Midnight Special concerns an eight-year-old boy with special powers who is a lot like the alien

in Spielberg's E.T. He's very vulnerable to the Earth's environment, particularly sunlight.

Michael Shannon plays the boy's father, who along with a friend, played by Joel Edgerton,

keeps him away from religious cult and government agents, all of whom are pursuing him,

towards some larger destiny.

What do you know about Alton Meyer?

I wouldn't know where to start.

He would have fits.

Things would break.

It was like a feeling.

...