On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome back an old friend: Writer-director Sophy Romvari, who first visited the show in 2018 and now returns to mark the theatrical release of her quietly devastating debut feature, Blue Heron, which has been enjoying an incredible run on the festival circuit, racking up prizes since its world premiere at Locarno last summer.

It’s a masterful picture, translating the ache of personal loss into universal drama, and I’m so glad it’s being embraced by critics and audiences … and, of course, it gives me an excuse to bring Sophy back onto the show, this time talking about Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture, the 1975 hybrid documentary examining her teenage sexual assault that still plays like a hand grenade half a century later, with the director restaging her own trauma with a small group of actors — one of whom is an assault survivor herself — and keeping the camera rolling as they discuss their feelings about the work. It was unprecedented at the time … and really, it still is. But Not a Pretty Picture influenced generations of women to confront their own trauma, and Sophy has a lot to say about that. I’m so glad we got to do this.

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 think about how rotten it is that we’re still talking about every single cultural issue Coolidge raised here.

And then you can get caught up on your Shiny Things! Last week I reviewed Criterion’s splendid 4K release of Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, and paid subscribers also got Friday’s What’s Worth Watching, an all-pals-all-the-time package featuring my reviews of Blue Heron, Chandler Levack‘s Mile End Kicks and BenDavid Grabinksi‘s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. All good people, all good movies. That’s nice.

It’s National Canadian Film Day tomorrow, and it just so happens that this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie fits that bill perfectly.

Well, almost perfectly. My guest, Auden Thornton, may not herself be Canadian, but she co-stars in the East Coast thriller Little Lorraine, which is opening across the country on Friday, and she picked a very Canadian drama for our conversation: Sarah Polley’s first feature, Away from Her, starring Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple whose marriage is ended — quietly but brutally — by the onset of dementia.

Twenty years old but no less potent in its precise understanding of pride, love and loss — and a little more powerful now that both Pinsent and co-star Olympia Dukakis are no longer with us — it’s a spare but devastating film, an actors’ showcase made by someone who understands how much drama can be found in a close-up of a person’s face. And its depiction of cognitive decline is painfully on point: This was a tough one to revisit in the wake of the last decade, and I think you can hear that in my voice.

And yet, I still want people to hear it. Weird, huh? 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 in a futile attempt to distract yourself from the crushing guilt of dropping your partner at the care home. I did say this one was cruel.

But hey, there’s always Shiny Things! And last week I wrote about Mercy and Randy and the Mob, two very different movies about people who find themselves in hells of their own making. It’s just that one of them has a pretty computer lady!

Of course, paid subscribers also got to enjoy Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter, featuring my reviews of The Christophers, Exit 8 and Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, consider taking the 14-day free trial so you don’t miss this week’s roundup.

And happy NCFD for tomorrow! Go see something! If you’re in Toronto I recommend the 6:30pm show of Backspot at the Scotiabank, with D.W. Waterson and Devery Jacobs in attendance. That’ll be a blast.

Yep, the 600th episode of Someone Else’s Movie went out this morning. For something I more than started eleven years ago out of spite, it’s become the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done — hundreds of hours of conversation with artists about art, all preserved for posterity and my own perverse sense of pride. (Start stuff out of spite, kids. It’s the only way to heal.)

This week’s episode is a fun marriage of guest and inspiration, as director Jonny Campbell — whose goofy all-star contagion thriller Cold Storage came out earlier this year and freshly available on digital and on demand, with a physical release expected next month — picked Mike Hodges’ Get Carter, which in the 55 years since its release has become a monumental work of British cinema. And it’s all the more resonant for Jonny, as a Northern kid. We get into that, and much more. It’s a good chat.

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 as you seethe quietly in your room, thinking of all the people standing between you and the truth.

And then it’s time to catch up on your Shiny Things, innit. Last week I wrote about the disc debuts of Marty Supreme, Lurker and We Bury the Dead, and of course there was Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter with my exclusive reviews of The Drama, Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story and the new season of Daredevil: Born Again. If you’re curious about the stuff on the paid  tier, you can always check out the 14-day free trial and see if it appeals.

(Spoiler: It will! Because I’m fun!)

I revisit a lot of films for Someone Else’s Movie — some of which I haven’t seen, or even thought about, in a very long time. Usually they’re just as I remember them; I have a pretty good memory for movies and TV, it’s just the way my head works. But watching Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm for this week’s episode was a whole other thing.

Writer-director Jeremiah Kipp chose Coscarelli’s 1979 breakout in part because he borrowed some of its DNA for his new film The Mortuary Assistant, which is now streaming on Shudder. But mostly he chose because he’s loved it since childhood, and couldn’t wait to talk about the film that introduced him to to weird cinema and left him wondering whether he might be able to make some of his own. Even if you’re not a fan of the Tall Man and his weird flying spheres, our conversation is well worth your time.

So 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 while you snoop around the local funeral home, trying to avoid whatever it is that’s slithering around in there.

And then go check out the new edition of Shiny Things, where I wrote about two new Warner Archive Collection collections (I know, they need to work on that) and pointed people in the direction of the 17th anniversary sale that’s wrapping up tonight (Tuesday, March 31st) at the US retailer MovieZyng. And of course paid subscribers got my exclusive reviews of Bait and the new seasons of Deadloch and Last One Laughing UK in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter. Not a paid subscriber? Maybe check out the 14-day free trial! That’s what it’s there for!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie features more of my voice than I usually prefer, but I think I’m okay with it. Over the years, I’ve learned to tell when an interview subject needs to be coaxed out a little, and in this case talking about my own connection to beloved, bygone movie houses was the key that got us rolling.

This is not a knock on Anita Doron, this week’s guest; she’s a pretty open person, really, and she’s spoken at length about her own work in the past — like the films The End of Silence and The Lesser Blessed, and her script for the Oscar-nominated animated feature The Breadwinner. And her new film Maya and Samar just launched its Canadian theatrical run on Friday, which gave me the opportunity to book her for the podcast.

But Anita picked Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a minimalist and largely dialogue-free drama of the final night of a Taipei movie theater, and talking about a film one loves very much can be a little intimidating. So I offered that I’d basically grown up in a second-run movie theater, and she asked about that, and then there were more questions, and while that got us onto a whole thing about what was lost when digital fully replaced celluloid as the medium on which motion pictures are both shot and distributed, and I guess I have a lot of opinions about that, too. So if you’re sick of my voice, feel free to jump to the second half of the episode … but if you’re sick of my voice, I suspect you’re not even reading these words.

Anyway! I’m probably making it sound worse than it is, so just go listen and see how you like it. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice — though surely you did that years ago, right? — or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you wander around an ancient city, looking for inspiration and/or a quick hookup.

And once you’re … done … you can catch up on the newest editions of Shiny Things! Last week I spun up a recent Blu-ray restoration of Diane Keaton’s only documentary, Heaven, and of course there was Friday’s What’s Worth Watching for paid subscribers, where it was all genre all the time as I tackled Project Hail Mary, Ready or Not: Here I Come and Shudder’s new documentary 1000 Women in Horror. You can always check out the 14-day free trial, if you’re curious. It’s good!

And now, because it’s sunny out, I shall ride a bicycle to this afternoon’s meeting. That’ll be good too.

This week marks the eleventh anniversary of Someone Else’s Movie, a preposterous milestone I never imagined I’d reach when I launched the podcast back in 2015. But here we are, and Episode 600 is coming up next month, and honestly? It’s still the thing I most love doing.

Case in point: This week I spent an hour talking to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, one of the foremost scholars of genre cinema, about Abel Ferrara’s Ms. .45, a film on which she literally wrote the book — and recorded the audio commentary, too! The episode is tied to the release of a documentary based on her book 1000 Women in Horror, which drops on Shudder this Friday after spending months gathering acclaim on the festival circuit. (It’s directed by Donna Davies, but Alexandra is front and center in the doc, supported by half a dozen other voices in a dive into representation over more than a century of genre cinema.)

And while Ms. .45 may not be everyone’s idea of a horror movie, Alexandra argues for the rape-revenge subgenre as an entirely valid subgenre, and not that far removed from the slasher films that were exploding in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th. It’s just that Zoe Tamerlis’ merciless Thana is both the killer and the final girl of the story … up to a point, anyway.

It’s a great episode, and you don’t want to miss it. Go grab it on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re touching up your eyeliner for a night on the prowl. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all that.

Oh, and this isn’t the only episode I’ve released this week — I dropped a bonus episode on Saturday with Alison McAlpine, whose experimental 2024 short perfectly a strangeness was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the Oscars on Sunday!

It didn’t win, but the idea that this odd little charmer about the intersection of nature and scientific research — which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel — getting a global showcase this way is something to celebrate all the same. And it gave me the opportunity to talk to Alison about Maren Ade’s marvelous Toni Erdmann, and unpack as many of its themes as we could in a 45-minute episode. That’s good too. You should check it out.

And then go catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about the new 4K restorations of Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler and Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, from Shout! Studios and Imprint Films, respectively. Both exceptional presentations of two very different films, but you gotta go with what the calendar gives you. And of course there was Friday’s What’s Worth Watching  for paid subscribers; if you’re on the fence about upgrading to that tier, maybe consider the 14-day free trial? I’m pretty happy with the work I’m doing over there, too.

Finally, if you’re going to be attending Toronto Comicon this weekend, carve out some time Friday afternoon to catch me returning to Aaron Reynolds’ Bootleg Safari, where this year we’ll be facing off about the worst Jaws knockoff. You will never guess which one I picked.

It’s in Room 202CD at 5:15pm, which I am led to understand is an entirely different room from the one where we did it last year. Come for the convention, stay for the silliness! It’s all we know!

It took almost eleven years and 595 episodes of Someone Else’s Movie for someone to bring Night of the Living Dead to the podcast. None of George A. Romero’s other Dead films has made it onto the show, either, despite plenty of opportunity. Maybe it’s just that the series looms too large in people’s minds, and no one wants to come up short when discussing such a landmark.

Fortunately, Jon Blair — one of the sharpest comic minds I know, and who’s bringing his one-man sketch show A Comedy at the End of the World to TO Sketchfest this Friday, March 13th (8pm at the Theatre Centre, tickets should still be available) — was more than happy to wade in. And there’s plenty to talk about, since with this one movie Romero gave us the zombie as we know it, redefined what was permissible on American movie screens and — not for nothing — spawned an entire subgenre of nightmares that’s still going strong after six decades.

I didn’t think of this until after we’d wrapped, but Night of the Living Dead is nearly as old as Star Trek, and maybe even more culturally important. The buy-in is much lower; it just takes a bite.

So jump in! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you board up those doors and windows. Don’t forget the upper floors!

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things, where last week I spun up the new releases of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man … and reviewed André Is an Idiot,  Sweetness and Hair of the Bear in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching column for paid subscribers. Are you a paid subscriber? Would you like to be? It’s not hard!

Finally, if you’ve been following the trades you might have read that the Toronto Film Critics Association lost a number of members last week over the editing of Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ acceptance speech to remove statements supporting Palestine. I was indeed one of the cohort that resigned, and while I’m not really discussing it publicly I will allow that being referred to as a “former Toronto fest film picker” by the Hollywood Reporter was a highlight in this whole sorry mess. Top of the world, Ma. Top of the world.

As Someone Else’s Movie approaches its eleventh anniversary — with its 600th episode not far behind! — the choices are getting more eclectic, and guests are showing a willigness to bring out the big guns. It’s really fun! People don’t seem to be intimidated by the classics any more; I’ve got some episodes coming up on movies you’ll be shocked to learn hadn’t been covered a decade ago.

For example! This week, Toronto comedian and sketch performer Tiyawnda, who’s performing her new show One Butthole After Another at TO Sketchfest this Saturday and next Thursday,  picked Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, easily one of the most influential thrillers ever made. We wouldn’t have Seven without it, or literally hundreds of television procedurals, including The X-Files and everything that followed in its genre-bending wake*.

I’ve been waiting a really long time for someone to pick this, and it’s a fun conversation that starts with Tiyawnda’s entirely inappropriate discovery of the film and spirals out to the various other adaptations of Harris’ books, up to and including Bryan Fuller‘s brilliant Hannibal series. We also throw around our picks for a new Starling, should someone decide to take another run at the property.

You don’t want  to miss it, so dive right in! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it in your memory palace while awaiting an interesting conversation. It’s a good one.

And feel free to revisit our sixth anniversary episode, where Come True director Anthony Scott Burns tackled the first film to bring Hannibal the Cannibal to the big screen: Michael Mann’s Manhunter. It’s a pandemic episode, but weirdly enough that suits the vibe.

Over at Shiny Things, I’m back to full strength with reviews of  new releases Song Sung Blue and Deathstalker and Warner’s 4K upgrades of All the President’s Men and Ben-Hur, as well as shout-outs to three new Warner Archive collections. And subscribers to the paid tier can look forward to Friday’s What’s Worth Watching recommendations, so don’t forget to upgrade!

Also, welcome to March! It gets warmer now, right?

*Yes, I know Chris Carter was mostly ripping off The Night Stalker, but Dana Scully wouldn’t exist without Clarice Starling; he even gave her an episode where she interviewed an incarcerated serial killer!**

**Yes, it was technically a mash-up of Lambs and William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III. Chris Carter has never had an original idea in his life.

If my intro to this week’s Someone Else’s Movie sounds a little rough, that’s because I’m  recovering from a wicked head cold — but don’t worry, I’m fine now. Even rode a bike yesterday! Look at me, all healthy!

You’ll find my voice at full strength in the episode as well, though it might crack a little here and there because it’s a pretty emotional conversation.

My guest, the very talented writer and director Sophie Hyde — whose new film Jimpa opens this Friday at the Lightbox, and whose last movie, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, was covered on the podcast not too long ago by Vanessa Matsui –picked Andrew Haigh’s devastating All of Us Strangers … and it turned out that neither of us was quite ready to talk about that one just yet.

That’s because All of Us Strangers — while ostensibly a cautious love story — is really about the ghosts we carry with us, and the things we need from the past to get to the future. Maybe it’s not a love story at all, or not the one you think it is. Whatever it is, it’s got Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy doing things I’ve never seen them do, and it’s one of the most profound and moving experiences I’ve had in a movie theater for years. Sophie feels the same way, and it leads to a really special conversation about a really special picture. One note: You’re definitely going to want to watch the movie before you listen, because the episode will be incomprehensible otherwise. 

So get on board! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the train to … wherever it is you’re going. It’s probably a beautiful ride.

And then you can get into this week’s Shiny Things — I was off sick last week, though I did manage to get a What’s Worth Watching column out to paid subscribers on Friday, but I’m back on the horse now, having just published a piece on Warner’s splendid  4K upgrades of All the President’s Men and Ben-Hur, with a further tip of the hat to three excellent new Warner Archive Collection … collections. And there’s another edition coming later this week, complete  with a giveaway, so if you’re not a subscriber you should really get that taken care of. And then I’ll be in your inbox before you know it.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by veteran television director Paris Barclay, who chose what some might see as an especially antiquated title for the episode: Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the 1967 dramedy of manners  about white liberal parents struggling with their daughter’s engagement to an upstanding Black doctor.

Sidney Poitier plays that character, and the joke of the film that that Poitier is the world’s most charismatic and considerate person, so of course racism is the only reason people couldn’t like him. And the context in which Kramer made his movie is essential to understand why it needed to be made — which Paris is more than happy to explain in the time we have together.

Another, far more challenging Black entertainer was emerging around the same time: Billy Preston, whose life Paris explores in his documentary Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It, which kicks off its theatrical run in New York on Friday and is technically the reason he’s on the podcast this week. Keep an eye out for that one, it’s good.

Wanna hear the conversation? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you sit nervously in your study, trying to figure out if your kid is the problem, or you are.

And then get on to Shiny Things, where you’ll find my review of Criterion’s exquisite 4K edition of the visual feast that is Jacques Tati’s PlayTime. There’s a lot more coming this week, including two very different views of American journalism and a surprisingly deep drama about a Neil Diamond interpreter. And there’s Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter for subscribers to the paid tier. Not a paid subscriber? Would you like to be? It’s easy! Just sign up for the free trial, and I’ll see you there.