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.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie feels a little rushed, because I only had half an hour with Joan Chen and we were talking about a movie we both love, throwing ideas and feelings back and forth, each of us really listening to what the other was saying.

That’s the sort of engagement  this show often invites, and it’s wonderful. But there was also a slight delay on the Zoom, which made the conversation a little more careful than I think either of us wanted it to be. I’ve tried to edit out the stops and starts for a more natural rhythm, but if you sense some hesitation, that’s what it was.

Hopefully, though, you’ll be as swept up in our conversation about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as we were, because while the film has faded from memory in the decades since its Cannes premiere, it deserves your attention. Julian Schnabel has made a lot of movies about artists — I think Miral is the sole exception? — but this is by far his most empathetic and immediate work, and one that lays me out every time I watch it. Joan hadn’t seen it in a while, but key moments came flooding back to her as we spoke. That’s always fun too.

Anyway, give it a listen. 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 somewhere peaceful. And go see Montreal, My Beautiful when it opens across Canada on Friday; Joan is incredible in it, and the movie’s pretty damn good as well.

There was only one edition of Shiny Things last week, covering the new Blu-ray of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and the 4K edition of Oz Perkins’ Keeper, but I think you’ll find it worth your time; there’s also the Friday What’s Worth Watching newsletter for the paid tier, and if you’re curious about that the 14-day free trial is right there waiting to be, um, tried. C’mon! I’m good at this, you should be reading me.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by filmmaker Blake Rice Edwards, who’s followed his charming short film Tea with a somewhat more intense work, Disc, that premiered at TIFF last year and is currently at Clermont-Ferrand. If you enjoy watching Jim Cummings panic — and truly, who doesn’t? — you’ll want to keep an eye out for this one.

Blake picked Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the Shakespearean drama that’s been pulling all the Oscar buzz basically since it was announced — and that’s not surprising, because Zhao has pulled out all the stops to make her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel as immediate and emotional as possible. And it mostly works, if you can ignore the machinery.

So give it a listen! 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 as you wander the fields waiting for someone to understand the exquisite beauty and singular nature of your suffering.

And then go catch up on Shiny Things, where you’ll find me catching up to Roofman, Wicked: For Good, Afterburn, Fackham Hall, Shelby Oaks and A24’s edition of The Smashing Machine, which has one of the niftiest extras I’ve seen in a while.

I also wrote a little about Catherine O’Hara’s incredible career in the wake of her untimely death. That sounds like something you’d want to read, right? Well, if you were a subscriber  you’d have read it already … so go subscribe! Jeez!

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Emmanuel Kabongo, an actor who’s been a near-constant presence in Toronto productions for a decade and a half, turning up in everything from Ingrid Veninger’s The Animal Project and Joey Klein’s The Other Half to episodes of Frankie Drake Mysteries, Hudson & Rex and Star Trek: Discovery.

Emmanuel gets a starring role in the microbudget thriller Sway, which opens this week and also marks his first outing as a producer, and that seemed like a great reason to have him on the podcast — especially since he wanted to talk about Training Day, which features Denzel Washington in that Oscar-winning performance — but also got Ethan Hawke his first Oscar nomination, and 25 years later he’s looking like the favorite for his own Best Actor win. So that’s nice for everybody.

Want to check out 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 very still and try to figure out what was in the joint you just smoked. That might be important.

And then go get caught up on your Shiny Things columns! Just yesterday, I wrote about Criterion’s exquisite new special edition of John Huston’s The Dead, and last week I tackled Warner’s 4K releases of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and One Battle After Another. All good stuff, and there’s more on the way; all you need to do to read it is be a subscriber! So go do that, why dontcha?

Last week’s episode fell apart at the very last second — sorry to leave you all hanging, by the way — but Someone Else’s Movie is up and running today with a really fun conversation.

That’s because my guest is Oscar and Emmy nominee Hubert Davis, who’s releasing two dramatic features this year: This Friday,  his dystopian drama The Well opens in Toronto and Montreal before rolling out across the country, and this spring we’ll it’ll be followed by his remake of Youngblood, which premiered at TIFF last fall. Hubert’s a lovely guy with a wide range of interests, and he wanted to talk about Tony Scott’s Top Gun.

Yep, Top Gun. The super-slick, magic-hour Reagan-era blockbuster that defined American commercial cinema for the next decade, and Tom Cruise for a lot longer than that; the movie that reimagines An Officer and a Gentleman through a John Hughes lens, sort of, and somehow managed to launch the careers of a dozen young actors. The one that brings the MTV sensibility of Flashdance and Footloose to the Navy. Forty years after its arrival, it still has a pretty massive footprint, and Hubert was excited to explore its themes, its legacy and what it did for — and to — Tom Cruise.

So suit up! 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 while you sit in the ready room, waiting for the green light to engage The Enemy.

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things, which also got off to a slow start this year due to everyone else’s release schedules. Last week I covered Lionsgate’s 4K release of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, speaking of war movies, and Sony’s new 4K edition of Thunderheart, which of course stars Top Gun‘s Iceman, Val Kilmer. And there’s a slew of new releases to dig into this week, so if you’re not already a subscriber you should get on board right away. Membership has its privileges, after all.

It’s a new year, but I’m reaching back to 2015 for this week’s Someone Else’s Movie in honor of Alan Zweig‘s new podcast Tubby being named one of last year’s best podcasts by Apple and Amazon. Album titles to the contrary, we love it when our friends become successful, and I’ve been really glad to see Tubby find its audience.

And Alan recorded one of the best episodes of SEMcast’s first year, tackling Peter Yates’ 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle — the one starring Robert Mitchum as an aging gangster being pressured to flip on his much more powerful associates. It’s one of the great character studies of the ’70s, which is really saying something, and it’s a pleasure to revisit it this week. I also promise I’ll have a fresh new episode next Tuesday; it’s just the way things shook out, man.

You know how this works: 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 surreptitiously at the Bruins game. Your friends will never notice.

And then check out the newest editions of Shiny Things, because I’ve been catching up to a bunch of December releases, specifically Black Phone 2, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I’m Still Here, Seeds, The Smashing Machine and Timestalker. All good stuff, and there’s more on the way! Just sign up and it’ll come straight to your inbox, and you can skip this part of the post with a clean conscience. If you go for the paid tier, you’ll also get my weekly Friday roundup of recommendations! That’s worth five bucks a month, right? Of course it is.

We are in desperate need of some seasonal cheer around these parts, so I’m dedicating the Christmas-to-New Year’s run of Someone Else’s Movie to celebrating Rob Reiner’s most-loved films — partly because they’re both great episodes, and partly because I needed to do something, anything, to address that horrible loss. I don’t have a lot left, you guys. This has to help.

So today, I’m re-releasing Kristin Booth‘s lovely episode on The Princess Bride, and next week it’ll be followed by Allana Harkin on When Harry Met Sally, because that’s actually a New Year’s Eve movie and how could I pass that up.

Get on it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web, round up the Brute Squad to storm the castle, and enjoy.

Fun fact: It turns out this episode was released in April of 2022, days after I left NOW for TIFF. The whole world is different now.

Oh, also, the usual heads-up about Shiny Things: This week I’m dropping my lists of the year’s best discs and movies (coming soon), and the Christmas Day What’s Worth Watching is gonna be crammed solid with big-screen recommendations. Gift yourself a present and subscribe so you don’t miss out!

And even if you don’t, I hope you get some peace during the holidays. The storm has to end sometime, right?

Aimee Carrero has been in a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. The Americans, Blindspot and Your Friends and Neighbors; Mack & Rita, The Menu and Spirited. She’s the voices of She-Ra and Elena of Avalor!

And most recently, she co-starred with Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery in Christopher Leone’s snappy, cynical paramedic comedy-drama Code 3, which I programmed in TIFF’s Industry Selects series last year. And now that it’s available on Blu-ray, and coming to VOD on Friday, this felt like a perfect time to invite Aimee onto Someone Else’s Movie. So we did that!

Aimee did not disappoint, delivering the most enthusiastic, informed take on Mike Nichols’ adaptation of The Birdcage that I could have asked for. (She even had Mark Harris’ biography of Nichols by her side; I love it when people show up with reference materials.) However you feel about the film, the episode offers a welcome distraction from all the truly horrible shit that’s been going on this year. I needed it, and maybe you do too.

So make a mai-tai, switch on your sunlamp and give yourself a little pleasure! 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 while you get your wig just right.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, because last week’s column was a doozy: I tackled Severin Films’ expansive, exhaustive Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection, an eleven-disc set that assembles the original Emmanuelle trilogy in pristine 4K restorations — the better to see what all the fuss was about — along with hours of extras and even a whole other feature. The perfect last-minute stocking stuffer? Very possibly!

What’s that? You haven’t susbcribed? Jeez! Go take care of that, and  maybe consider trying out the paid tier, where you’ll also get my weekly What’s Worth Watching dispatches. Otherwise you might end up wasting two hours on something that doesn’t deserve you.

I’m here to help, you know.

If you were paying any attention to the Toronto Film Critics Association’s awards on Sunday, you might have seen Eephus appear as a runner-up for our Best First Feature award, alongside Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby. Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron was the winner, but honestly all three are excellent debuts, and Eephus has been turning up in that conversation all over the place this month.

That’s because with Eephus, director  and co-writer Carson Lund creates a beautiful little pocket universe of melancholy, following a group of men in 1990s Massacheussets who’ve assembled to play their last ballgame at a local stadium that’s about to be demolished. They don’t want to talk about it, exactly, but it’s very clearly on their minds, and Lund lets us share the impending sense of loss that settles over the field as the innings roll by. It’s a small but potent ensemble drama, and if you missed it during its very modest theatrical run you could certainly do worse than pull it up on Mubi or VOD tonight.

And for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie, Carson wanted to dive into the existential grindhouse vibe of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, the one where James Taylor and Dennis Wilson challenge Warren Oates to a race across America, for reasons none of them fully understands. Hell of a picture, as they say, even if Roger Corman didn’t see the appeal.

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 your 8-track player while you roll on endlessly down the highway.

And then get yourself caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I spun up the new 4K releases of I Know Where I’m Going! and Howards End — one a Criterion release, the other a former Criterion release now available from the Cohen Entertainment Group — and found them both entirely beguiling.

Go check that out, and maybe think about upgrading to the paid tier so you can get the weekly What’s Worth Watching edition; this Friday, I’ll be writing about Bryan Fuller’s delirious Dust Bunny among others. You don’t want to miss that, do you?