L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week's Voice Film Club podcast with that movie before moving onto Crimson Peak, the dreamy and dark ghost story from director Guillermo del Toro.

Also this week:

• After wishing her small roles in movies this year were bigger, we finally get Judy Greer fulfillment with Addicted to Fresno.

• Sicario is a movie about the Mexican drug war, which struggles to find a story in its bleakness.

• Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek calls in from the Venice Film Festival in Italy, which felt a lot like Boston because of two films: First up, Black Mass, the Whitey Bulger biopic in which Johnny Depp plays the nasty Boston gangster. (Oh, and those Boston accents? They're OK.)

• Staying in Boston, Zacharek praises Spotlight, the movie about how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed a system of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. “I really loved it and I'm really excited for people to see it,” she says.

• Also on this week's pod, the trio talk about the return of Dakota Johnson, whose character wreaks havoc in Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash. The movie also features a rock-star Tilda Swinton, who wears a sequined jumpsuit straight out of Bowie's closet.


Read all of our film reviews, interviews, and essays at villagevoice.com/movies
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