Rafer Guzman is the film critic for Newsday and a former rock critic for the paper. He was previously a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Blender, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and the late, great Option magazine.

Kristen Meinzer is an associate producer with The Takeaway and co-host of The Takeaway's Movie Date podcast, along with Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday.

Prior to working with The Takeaway, Kristen was a development producer for CBS News Productions; an associate research scholar with the Center for Media, Culture and History; and a freelance producer and blogger for WNYC's Soundcheck, VH1's The Fabulous Life, and The Discovery Channel's Anatomy of a Pandemic (in which she also got to play a dead person). Kristen has seen the Sound of Music over twenty times and has hugged both Dolly Parton and Betty White, on separate occasions.