On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome the gifted French genre auteur Lucile Hadžihalilovic, who’s been making beautifully realized and profoundly disquieting studies of children and corruption for more than twenty years now. Those films — Innocence, Evolution, Earwig and The Ice Tower — have been collected into an impressive Blu-ray boxed set, The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilovic, which is out today from Severin Films and Yellow Veil Pictures.

But first, you should listen to Lucile on Alain Resnais’ 1961 masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad, which is eerie and claustrophobic in ways that are very different from her own work but casts the same unsettling hold over the audience. I’m surprised no one has brought this movie onto the show before, given its stature in avant-garde cinema … but I can’t really complain, since the delay led to this wonderful conversation. I invite you to join us … but just be warned, you might never leave.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen while you try to find a safe space on the grounds of the grand estate where you appear to be trapped. But of course there is no safe space, is there.

Fortunately, you’re safe as houses over at Shiny Things, where there’s plenty to enjoy — last week, I spun up new discs of The Late Show, Eraser, 50 First Dates and Slither, and  this week I’ve already dropped reviews of The Mastermind and Crime 101, with more new releases to come. (Lucile’s collection gets its own spotlight next week. There’s a lot to go through.) And if you’re a paid subscriber, last week you got my reviews of Among Us and new stand-up specials from Patton Oswalt and Kumail Nanjiani.

Not on the paid tier? Up that sub! It’s five bucks a month and you get all this glorious copy!

Anyway, it’s Canada Day tomorrow and we’re looking at a record heat wave. Go have some ice cream, and I’ll see you on the other side.

You know how it took eleven years for Night of the Living Dead to make it to Someone Else’s Movie? Well, it must have unlocked a gate somewhere because we have another zombie classic for you this week: Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, which used George A. Romero’s 1978 sequel as a jumping-off point for a hyper-adrenalized take on the apocalypse, as screenwriter James Gunn remixed Romero’s characters and setting to create something new and brutally efficient. Plus, Sarah Polley’s in there!

My guest is writer-director Alex Noyer, a documentarian turned feature filmmaker whose new movie Love Is the Monster — about a couple whose trip to a Finnish retreat threatens more than their intimacy — debuts on VOD today. And he absolutely loves what Gunn and Snyder did in their Dawn, leading to one of the liveliest episodes of the podcast in a while. Which is great, because horror can be fun too!

Wanna listen? 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 board up those mall doors. It’s fine, you’re not going anywhere.

After that, why not catch up on Shiny Things? Last week I wrote about the new releases of Scream 7 and Undertone, which offer two very different takes on modern horror, and paid subscribers also got my exclusive reviews of Toy Story 5, Leviticus, Maddie’s Secret and Over Your Dead Body because there’s a lot of good stuff out there right now. Didn’t get it? Upgrade your subscription so you don’t miss the next one! Jeez!

Oh, and speaking of Toy Story 5, I was on CBC’s Day 6 over the weekend, talking about where that film fits on the Pixar trauma continuum. (Surprise: It’s actually quite sweet and not at all designed to punch you in the heart!) If you missed it you can listen to the segment right here.

Eleven years into Someone Else’s Movie, there are still a lot of films that haven’t been tackled. Which isn’t surprising, given the sea of options available to a guest, but sometimes someone picks something that feels like it must have been covered before, and when I check I’m shocked to see it just … hasn’t.

So, Taxi Driver. I guess it’s nice that we didn’t get to Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s revolutionary character study until the year of its 50th anniversary, then? And I’m glad that Jan-Ole Gerster was the guest who chose it, because the story of how he came to the film is such a fascinating one … and also because Jan-Ole’s new film Islands rhymes so well with Schrader’s idea of the isolated, disconnected protagonist searching for purpose in a world that no longer offers it.

You should see Islands. But you should also listen to this episode. And you know how: 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 drive through the hellish Manhattan night, trying to drown out all the babbling and the sobbing. That’s a healthy way of coping, right?

Also: There wasn’t a lot of activity on the Shiny Things front last week, as I was finishing up this contract thing and didn’t have enough to write about … but there’ll be plenty this week, just you wait. And my paid subscribers did get a thousand words on Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching mailing, so if you want to read that all you need to do is upgrade that sub! The free trial is right there waiting for you, too.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a really fun conversation about a pretty dark movie. Which isn’t unusual, I have to admit, but it is especially delightful when the guest is as enthusiastic as Courtney Summers, the author whose book This Is Not a Test is now a Major Motion Picture from Friend of the Show Adam Macdonald … whose 2015 episode on The Devil’s Rejects is currently only available in the SEMcast Year One bundle, regrettably.

Courtney picked a movie from another Friend of the Show, writer-director-actor Jim Cummings: The Wolf of Snow Hollow, an ingenious horror comedy starring Jim as a deputy sheriff in a small mountain town trying to balance his personal responsibilities and professional ineptitude while trying to solve a spate of violent murders that seem to have been the work of a werewolf. But werewolves don’t exist, right?

It’s a lively conversation about a film that fascinates us both, and you will definitely enjoy it. So bundle up and dive right in! 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 sit in a room by yourself for five goddamn minutes and try to figure out what a grown-up would do in your current circumstance. (Fun fact: This is the first time that bit works for both the movie being discussed and the project the guest is promoting!)

And then, you should get caught up on Shiny Things, because last week I tacked the new releases of Twinless and How to Make a Killing as well as the US release of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and of course subscribers to the paid tier got my exclusive reviews of Cape Fear, Carolina Caroline and the new season of Deli Boys. Didn’t get them? Upgrade that subscription and see what you’ve been missing! Come on! It’s five bucks a month, and I get some delicious, delicious validation! Don’t leave me hanging, man!

It’s finally summer, and I get to drop an episode of Someone Else’s Movie that’s been waiting to go since March.

My guest is Rob Grant, a writer-director who established himself with a trio of genre-adjacent movies that play with their audiences’ assumptions and expectations in really interesting ways: The found-footage of Fake Blood, the barely-disguised Frankenstein riff of Alive and the seafaring three-hander Harpoon.

Rob’s new film, This Too Shall Pass — freshly available on streaming — is a different sort of picture. Set in 1989, it’s a coming-of-age picture that follows a sheltered Mormon teenager in Syracuse who convinces his buddies to join him on a road trip to Ottawa to see a girl he likes. It’s a tricky coming-of-age story with an underlying sweetness, dead-on period detail and solid work from Maxwell Jenkins, and Friend of the Show Katie Douglas shows up halfway to steal the picture. It’s good, you should see it.

Rob wanted to talk about another coming-of-age picture, from another Rob: Stand By Me, the 1986 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella “The Body” that let Rob Reiner pivot from comedies to more layered storytelling, and properly introduced the world to River Phoenix, Will Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell. Probably Kiefer Sutherland, too. It’s been forty years since Reiner’s movie first screened, and it still plays … though now it’s even more melancholy than it used to be, of course.

Don’t miss out! 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 take that long, long bus ride into Canada.

And then you get to catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve reviewed the new discs of Sir?t, The Bride! and recent Canadian Screen Award champion Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie — all of which would make pretty good additions to your collection, even if Sir?t is burned rather than pressed.

What can I say? We live in a flawed world. But you can make it less flawed by upgrading your subscription to the paid tier, which puts you on the list for my weekly What’s Worth Watching newsletter! (Most recently reviewed: Backrooms, Pressure and Netflix’ Mating Season!) Give the 14-day free trial a shot! It’s painless!

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, it’s my pleasure to welcome writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias to the show.

Lucía’s debut feature Forastera, which won the FIPRESCI prize at TIFF, is kicking off its North American theatrical run this Friday at Film Forum in New York — and Lucía will be present for Q&As after the 7pm shows on Friday and Saturday night, so if you’re in town you should make it a priority to catch one of those screenings.

Forastera is an eerie, understated drama about a family coping with the death of their matriarch, and so I was very happy to learn she’d chosen Celine Sciamma’s beguiling 2021 drama Petite Maman, which explores similar ground through the eyes of eight-year-old  Nelly, who’s just lost her grandmother and doesn’t really know how to feel about that yet. But then she meets another eight-year-old in the forest behind her grandmother’s house, a new friend to play with and maybe even talk to. Her name is Marion, which is also Nelly’s mother’s name. There’s a reason for that.

I really love this movie, and I’m very happy I got to talk about it at length with someone who experienced it at least as intensely as I did. (And if you haven’t seen it, the Criterion Blu-ray is on sale right now!)

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 wait for your new friend to return from … wherever it is she goes when you’re not around. It’s probably fine.

And then catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about the new 4K releases of Speed Racer and George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey and Criterion’s release of Ira Sach’s The Delta, and subscribers to the paid tier got my exclusive reviews of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and Silent Friend in the weekly edition of What’s Worth Watching. All good stuff, really; if you missed it, maybe consider upgrading, or at least checking out the 14-day free trial? That’d be really cool.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I finally get to talk about the Muppets.

Now, I have discussed  them in the past — The Muppet Christmas Carol comes up on Kristian Bruun’s holiday episode, and Paul Sun-hyung Lee and I tackled it on Jeremy LaLonde’s Black Hole Films episode about it almost a decade ago.*

But incredibly enough this is the first time I’ve dedicated an episode of my own show to a Muppet movie, and I’m very glad I got to do it with Nicole Bazuin, whose new movie Modern Whore does let star Andrea Werhun pull a couple of faces Miss Piggy would appreciate. (Modern Whore just came out on VOD, but the film has one more screening this Thursday night at the Lightbox — catch it with a crowd if you can.)

So have at 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 pretending to be your identical twin brother to thwart Charles Grodin. We’ve all been there.

And then get caught up on your Shiny Thingses! Things were a little busy last week but I did have time to experience Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”** and Albert Birney’s OBEX, both of which place us alongside their characters in fully realized artificial realities … though only one of them is actually, you know, good. And of course paid subscribers got my exclusive reviews of Obsession, The Wizard of the Kremlin and The Punisher: One Last Kill in Friday’s edition of What’s Worth Watching, so that was nice.

… what’s that? You didn’t get it? Perhaps you should upgrade your subscription! I mean, I’ve been asking you to for years at this point. Take the hint!

*speaking of Paul, by the time you read this I’ll have seen The Mandalorian and Grogu, in which I fully expect him to have a cameo. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.

**the quotes are not as much of an affectation as I expected

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome Travis Wood and Alex Mallis, the directors and co-writers of the indie charmer The Travel Companion, which is currently rolling through US theaters after a stint on the festival circuit. And, incredibly enough, the film they’ve chosen is aligned perfectly with Bretten Hannam’s pick in Friday’s episode.

It’s The Day He Arrives, a meditation on work-life balance — or on happiness in general — from Hong Sang-soo, the Korean master of slow cinema. Following a filmmaker as he wanders around the city of Bukchon, encountering the same people over and over, it’s got a gentle, beguiling Groundhog Day vibe that echoes what Apitchatpong Weerasethakul did in Tropical Malady, though it uses that vibe to very different ends. And Travis and Alex, in turn, find their own way to tell a story about stasis without being static themselves. Watch it all, is what I’m saying!

But first, listen to the podcast. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen while you sit alone at the bar, sipping soju and waiting to see who comes through the door.

And after that, Shiny Things! My next dispatch should land tomorrow, featuring “Wuthering Heights” and OBEX, and there’s more to come after that, as well as Friday’s What’s Worth Watching for paid subscribers. You can be one of them! The newsletter marks its fourth anniversary this week, no better time to upgrade yourself and catch up on all the stuff you missed.

So much stuff! So much!

Bretten Hannam’s At the Place of Ghosts is opening across Canada today, and it’s very good. A genre-shifting, quietly moving exploration of mood, memory and trauma set largely against a stunning East Coast backdrop, it’s the sort of picture that signals a major step forward for an artist. You should check it out.

So not only am I glad to have Bretten on the podcast for this special Friday bonus, but I’m doubly happy for their film choice: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, a beguiling experiment that may also unlock certain things about At the Place of Ghosts.

Let yourself get drawn in! 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 the jungle, while you hunt the mysterious creature. Don’t forget your headphones.

And of course there’s always Shiny Things. Today being Friday, subscribers to the paid tier just got this week’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter, featuring my exclusive reviews of At the Place of Ghosts, Omaha, Roommates and Pizza Movie. You didn’t get it? Maybe consider signing up? The free trial is right there! Be foolish not to give it a shot, really.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome Arnaud Desplechin to the podcast — direct from Brussels, where he’s shooting his next movie. And this one was a fun one, partly because he’s a filmmaker I’ve long admired (and his new film, Two Pianos, is very good), and partly because the film he chose was absolutely not what I expected.

That’s because Arnaud picked Funny People — and not the Soviet drama from 1976, but Judd Apatow’s deeply personal and dare I say wildly misunderstood 2009 dramedy. The one where Apatow pivoted from scabrous comedy to something more introspective, putting himself into both Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler’s characters and confronting ideas of creativity, fragility and mortality. The one that critics and audiences rejected as too long and too lumpy, though in retrospect that’s obviously deliberate. And the one that hit Arnaud at just the right moment in his life. (He’s also a massive fan of Superbad, if you were wondering.)

So here it is! We only had half an hour and the connection wasn’t the best, but I think it turned out pretty well. 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 wait for your test results to arrive.

… sorry, that was a little dark. But so is the movie!

Also, I covered a lot of ground at Shiny Things last week, reviewing the new 4K editions of Highest 2 Lowest and Dust Bunny, checking in on Warner’s 4K upgrade of Sleepers and Imprint’s releases of The Fabulous Baker Boys, Wrong Is Right and The Magnificent Seven Collection. All good stuff, and paid subscribers also got Friday’s exclusive What’s Worth Watching newsletter, featuring my reviews of Widow’s Bay, This Is a Gardening Show and the new series of Taskmaster. Want to read that? Upgrade your sub or help yourself to the 14-day free trial! Five bucks a month gets you all this extra goodness, why wouldn’t you go for it?

Seriously! Go for it!