Welcome to The Movie Racket, a new Filmspotting production hosted by Michael Phillips.

Each week, we’ll test a so-called "law" of cinema — a bit of received wisdom about how movies work, or don’t. For our debut episode, actor Michael Shannon joins the show to examine a provocative claim from François Truffaut: that every film about war ends up being pro-war.

Is it true that a movie about combat, survival, and heroism can never escape the pull of spectacle and the way cinema inevitably renders violence compelling? Shannon reflects on that inherent tension and revisits his experience working on Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, a film that presents this question of representation head-on.

So: was Truffaut right? Or does cinema allow for something more complicated than a binary verdict? Join the conversation at movieracket@filmspotting.net.