This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Tracie Laymon, the writer and director of the indie charmer Bob Trevino Likes This — a small movie about an unexpected connection that is so much richer and more lovely than anyone has the right to expect, powered by exquisite performances from Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo and a quiet sense of wonder at the simplicity of human connection.

So maybe it’s not surprising that Tracie wanted to talk about Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, another very delicate construction that asks a lot from its audience … but gives so much back. I’m starting to think it might be Burton’s best film, even with the Johnny Depp of it all, and Tracie is definitely on board for a conversation about loneliness and meaning and conformity and how the specific eccentricity of an artist’s vision can burn a movie into your heart forever. It’s a good one.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you work on your latest topiary masterwork. Just be careful fitting those earbuds.

And then you get to catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about my love for all things Star Trek — specifically Lower Decks and Prodigy and Galaxy Quest, all available in sparkling new editions from Paramount, and Severin’s new 4K editions of Antiviral and Delicatessen. But of course you’re already a subscriber and you knew all about them. Wait, you’re not? It’s cool, go get caught up.

Finally, if you’re in Toronto on Thursday evening, I’m hosting a screening of Jamie Kastner’s new documentary The Spoils at the Lightbox, and Jamie and U of T law professor Mayo Moran will be joining me for a Q&A afterwards. It’s a good movie! You should come, you’ll learn stuff!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie offers a really nice pairing of guest and feature, if you’re keeping track of such things.

My guest is Naomi Jaye, a Toronto writer-director whose excellent new psychodrama Darkest Miriam opened the Canadian Film Fest last night in advance of starting its Canadian theatrical run this Friday, and she chose Krzysztof Kieslowski’s magnificent Three Colors: Red, the crowning chapter of his trilogy on the French flag … and, sadly, the film that now stands as the final cinematic statement of a master filmmaker we lost far too soon. Kieslowski died 29 years ago this month, aged 54.

We talk about all of it, and Darkest Miriam as well — which is an exceptionally creepy drama featuring a terrific lead turn from Severance breakout Britt Lower that you’re not going to want to miss. No spoilers, though. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the ferry ride as you contemplate the interdependence of our lives.

And then go get caught up on Shiny Things, because I covered a lot of ground last week! I wrote about the new releases of Wolf Man, Werewolves and Y2K, and the 4K restorations of Deep Blue Sea, Tommy, Godzilla Vs. Biollante and Night Moves. (It was a really good week for monsters.) C’mon, subscribe already! Think of what you’re missing!

I guess March is a time for musicals. Just two weeks after Atom Egoyan tackled Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie, here comes Ali Weinstein — whose wonderful, melancholy documentary Your Tomorrow was one of our world premieres at TIFF last fall — with Jewison’s other big studio musical, Fiddler on the Roof!

Made two years before Superstar, it’s a much more ambitious picture in terms of scale, a properly epic transposition of the Broadway musical shot on location in the former Yugoslavia with a cast harvested from various stage productions and the Yiddish theater. It was a critical and commercial hit, it was nominated for eight Oscars and won three (including John Williams’ first), and it’s endured for more than half a century among the Jewish diaspora as a treasured cultural artifact, which is how Ali and I were both exposed to it as children.

And weirdly enough I do manage to find a link to Your Tomorrow … which is also ultimately about preserving the memory of a time and place to which we can no longer return. It’ll be streaming as of 9am ET this Friday, March 21st, on the TVOntario YouTube channel, and it’s airing on the old-school TVO at 9pm ET on Sunday the 23rd. It even ends with a musical number. Don’t miss it.

And don’t miss the podcast, either! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy our weirdly personal reflections as you make your rounds and await a sign — any sign — that your god is listening.

And then why not check out the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I spun up Arrow Video’s truly incredible new release of William Friedkin’s Cruising — a movie that never really clicked with audiences, for all sorts of reasons, but now plays like one of his most complex and fascinating pictures. But surely you’re already  a subscriber. Aren’t you?

Also, if you’re reading this on Tuesday the 18th there are still a few tickets available for tonight’s Secret Movie Club, which is a good one and promises to have a very lively Q&A afterward. Come on down!

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome actor and filmmaker Jeremy Schuetze,  whose first feature Anacoreta — in which he stars opposite Antonia Thomas and screenwriter Matt Visser as a director trying to make an experimental horror movie in increasingly stressful circumstances – just dropped on digital and on demand. 

And Jeremy’s choice, given his own project, makes a certain sort of sense: He picked American Movie, Chris Smith’s beloved documentary about Wisconsin auteur Mark Borchardt, whose attempts to make a horror short called Coven after stalling out on his folk-horror opus Northwestern develop a certain epic quality as he and his eccentric friends and family –  the kind-hearted Mike Schank being the most loyal – push through one obstacle after another to bring his vision to the screen. I don’t think it’s a spoiler, 26 years on, to note that Coven did not have the cultural impact Borchardt hoped for … except that I guess it kind of did.

You know how this goes: Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while waiting to watch the dailies from yesterday’s shoot.

And then you should catch up on Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about the new Criterion editions of Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy — two character studies from the late ’80s that marked a turning point in the way “smaller” movies would be approached in American cinema, even if no one knew it at the time. You can subscribe at any time, you know.

I try to have at least one Oscar nominee  on Someone Else’s Movie every year, and this time around I’m delighted to have Mortiz Binder, whose nomination for Best Original Screenplay (shared with director Tim Fehlbaum and co-writer Alex David) is the sole nod for the excellent journalistic thriller September 5. It’s up against some pretty heavy hitters, but that’s irrelevant; it’s a really good movie, and you should see it. It’s on Blu-ray today, in fact!

Mortiz picked a film that couldn’t be more different than his own: Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the wildly ambitious spaghetti Western that disassembled the genre and reconfigured it into a sweaty, desperate epic. I love this movie, and so does Moritz — and his story of discovering it as a kid, and rediscovering it over the decades, is a great one. Also we talk about September 5, of course.

Go get it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the long ride through the badlands. It’s not like there’s anything to look at.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things! This week I wrote about Arrow Video’s new editions of Alice, Sweet Alice (now in 4K!) and Kazuo Mori’s new-to-me ’60s thrillers A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key, which were a very welcome surprise. And that’s in addition to the weekly What to Watch recommendations I send out to the paid tier. Gotta give them a little something. But you’re already a subscriber, right?

Oh, and the Toronto Film Critics Association gala is coming up on Monday — when we award the great big prizes for Best Canadian Film and Best Canadian Documentary — so I had a conversation with Matthew Rankin, whose Universal Language is one of our finalists, for the TFCA website. That’s a good read, if I do say so myself.

Are you reading this on Tuesday the 18th? A handful of tickets are still available for tonight’s Secret Movie Club, which I’ll be hosting at 7pm at the Lightbox. It’s good. You should come. I will say nothing further.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is, I fear, the most fun I will have all month.

That’s because my guest is Jacob Anderson, the almost distressingly charismatic actor you’ll recognize from Game of Thrones, Broadchurch, Overlord, the titular role in the HBO series Interview with the Vampire … and he wanted to talk about Hot Rod.

Hot Rod is a movie we both love, and no one else seems to — or at least that was how it felt when the movie arrived in the summer of 2007 — but honestly, I’ll embrace any chance to talk about what the Lonely Island guys are up to, how well the story of unproven stuntman Rod Kimble holds up almost twenty years later, and the film’s place in a kinder, more absurdist cycle of comedy that arrived as a response to the meaner, Farrelly-driven brand that dominated Hollywood in the ’90s.

The reason for our conversation, by the way, is that Jacob co-stars in Alice Lowe’s delightfully bizarre historical romance Timestalker, opening in US theaters and dropping on digital for Valentine’s Day on Friday. The Canadian release is still being worked out, and this is why you should come to Secret Movie Club whenever you have the opportunity. (There’s another edition coming up next Tuesday, by the way.)

So jump in, and lose yourself in the giddy joys of two guys talking about a ridiculous favorite.  The show awaits you on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice … and of course you can download the episode directly from the web and listen while you practice your fighting skills in your stepfather’s basement. His time will come.

(And obviously, we missed the obvious point of connection between The Lonely Island and Lord/Miller: The guys back up Tegan and Sara on The LEGO Movie‘s magnificent earworm “Everything is Awesome!!!” That’s on me.)

Then go catch up on Shiny Things, why don’t you? Last week I wrote about the contrast in the way Universal and Warner treated Wicked and Juror #2, and I’m queuing up a piece about some deep catalogue cuts from Arrow Video as you read this. All you have to do is subscribe, and it will be yours!

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, film editor Anna Catley — who cut Karen Knox’ We Forgot to Break Up and Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It, which is currently rolling through Canadian theaters –dives into Todd Haynes’ 1998 glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, and I am delighted to jump in alongside her.

Is it a great movie? Not necessarily; the mystery aspect of the narrative feels tacked-on, and the fact that Haynes originally wanted to make a David Bowie biopic but had to pivot to a fictional stand-in when Bowie refused to participate means the film can’t help but feel like a pale copy of the real thing.

That said, Velvet Goldmine is an endlessly fascinating watch on its own terms, because Todd Haynes is incapable of making a movie that isn’t interesting or artful, and because Ewan McGregor’s Not Iggy Pop seems deliberately styled to resemble the late Kurt Cobain, which opens up a whole other meta level within the storytelling. Also, we fold in The Phantom Menace somehow. You should listen!

The show is available at all the usual places:  Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts, your podcatcher of choice … and of course you can download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you do your makeup and think about your next stage persona.

And then, of course, you can catch up on your Shiny Things. Last week I wrote about the new releases of My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock and Heretic (from Cohen Media Group and A24, respectively), and there’s some very flashy stuff coming up, including a giveaway! Subscribe now so you don’t miss anything.

And speaking of not missing stuff, don’t forget to check out my latest piece for Toronto Today about how Sook-Yin Lee re-created the Toronto of the late ’90s to make Paying for It … and how making the movie inevitably led her to think about her own history, too. That was a fun one.

Right! Back to not thinking about the collapse of humanity for another week. Hope you’re doing well.

How are things going for you? Still grim? Yeah, I thought so.  Maybe this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie can offer a little hope.

I’m joined by writer-director Lowell Dean, who made the Wolfcop movies and has two films coming out in 2024; one of them,  the horror-wrestling mashup Dark Match, is dropping on Shudder in the US and opening in Canadian theaters this Friday.

And we talked about Superman.

Sure, Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster defined the superhero movie narrative that now dominates mainstream American cinema. But it also endures because it’s a goddamn great movie, a film that wears its heart on its sleeve and understands its characters on every level. Christopher Reeve’s performance connects directly to kids and helps them be better adults. Margot Kidder is having the best time. Gene Hackman! Ned Beatty! Valerie Perrine! Jackie Cooper! What more could anyone ask?

Anyway, it’s a wonderful picture and Lowell and I both love it. We talked about the big-screen treatment of the Man of Steel over the last half-century — and how Reeve’s performance casts a long, long shadow over every subsequent interpretation of Clark Kent — as well as our admiration for what Donner accomplished cinematically and the stones it must have taken to deliver a movie that argues for hope over cynicism in the post-Watergate era. Because that’s Superman; it’s even more of a miracle than you think it is.

Come listen! Find the show in all the usual places:  Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts, your podcatcher of choice … or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on your morning commute to the Daily Planet.  It’s swell.

And then catch up to Shiny Things, where I’ve just written about the new releases of Conclave and We Live in Time and Imprint’s exceptionally curated 4K special edition of The Longest Day, which took almost two months to reach me but was entirely worth the wait. You’re already a subscriber, right? Otherwise why am I even doing this?