Welcome to the dinner party download. This is your icebreaker.

Okay, there's a knock at the door and this man opens the door, looks around, there's no one there.

He's about to close it when he notices the snail.

He looks at the snail, what the heck is this?

Heaves it out to the street. He closes the door.

Three years later, there's a knock of the door. He

opens the door. He looks down and he sees the snail. The snail says, hey, what was that about?

I'm Rico Gagliano. I'm Brendan Francis Nune. And from American Public Media, this is the

dinner party download, the culture show that helps you win

your dinner party.

You just got a joke from Brian Cranston.

That'll break the ice.

He's star of TV's Breaking Bad, but also of movies like Argo, which is more germane to

today's show.

That's because this is our super special all-movie episode.

That's right.

It's an hour of evidence that movies do matter,

something even New Yorker film critic David Denby agrees with. He actually wrote a book-length

indictment of modern big studio films called Do the Movies Have a Future? Nonetheless, he told us

the following. I haven't given up on the idea of movies as our national theater. I know that

when there's a movie

that's relevant to the way we think about our lives, like the social network, it really does

...