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?

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer and director Tasha Hubbard, who shifts from documentaries to dramatic features with her new film Meadowlarks, opening across Canada this Friday.

It’s an adaptation of sorts of Tasha’s 2017 doc Birth of a Family (which is streaming at the NFB’s website), with Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush as adult siblings reuniting in Banff decades after being separated from their parents — and each other — in the Sixties Scoop.

Meadowlarks is small, quiet and profoundly felt, using the spectacular backdrop of Banff as a subtle way of reminding us about the colonial origins of Canada, and how much work still needs to be done to heal both the land and its people. And I wish I’d thought of that when we were recording Tasha’s episode, because the film she chose — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone — is similarly about using a specific landscape as an element of the story. In that film, it’s the sparse rural environment of the Ozarks, where Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree tries to save her own family by tracking down her missing father. The tension and urgency of Granik’s thriller couldn’t seem more different from Tasha’s more thoughtful cinema, but the two directors are connected in more ways than one, and we dig into that over the course of the episode.

(Except for the Banff thing, dammit.)

You’re gonna listen, right? 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 race from one house to another in search of an answer you don’t  really want to find.

There’s a lot of ground to cover over at Shiny Things, too; over the last week I’ve covered the new releases of Universal Language,  Splitsville,  Together,  Red Sonja and Him, as well as Criterion’s special edition of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels and Shout! Select’s 4K upgrade of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. All good stuff! (Well, except maybe for Him. That one’s a mess.) And there’s more coming … so why not subscribe and get each newsletter as soon as it’s released? It’ll save you all that clicking!

On this week’s Someone Else’s Movie I welcome a colleague and pal, film critic Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail. And here’s here for a book launch!

See, Barry’s spent a truly terrifying amount of his free time writing Welcome to the Family, a book about the evolution and cultural significance of the Fast & Furious franchise, and now that said book is coming out next week I couldn’t pass up the chance to have him on the show.

And what did he want to talk about? Fast Five, of course —  the 2011 chapter that took the series from low-level car stunts to actual spectacle, shunting our antiheroes into a heist plot that culminates in an almost absurdist set piece: It’s the one where they rob a bank by stealing the entire vault. Pure mayhem, and a glorious thing to experience with a crowd — and both the franchise and its fans have chasing that high ever since. I wish I’d thought of that line yesterday when I wrote and recorded the intro.

Anyway! Barry uses Fast Five as a way to put the entire series under the microscope, and it makes for a very fun episode. You should check it out! 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 practice saying “family” in a low growl.

And if you’re in Toronto, think about coming down to the Hot Docs Cinema next Tuesday for Barry’s book launch, or next Friday to see him introduce a screening of the 2001 Point Break knockoff that started it all, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious. A quarter-century later, can anyone still live their life a quarter-mile at a time? Barry knows the answer.

Also, there are new editions of Shiny Things to read; last week I wrote about the freshly released discs of  The Naked Gun, The Toxic Avenger, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Spinal Tap II — though only the first two are really worth your time — and Universal’s 40th anniversary edition of the Back to the Future trilogy, the oft-released property’s best package yet. C’mon, subscribe already! It’s good for the soul!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie offers a conversation I never thought I’d have: My guests, Australian filmmakers Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, wanted to talk about a kids’ movie. Or rather, a kids’ movie that they saw when they were kids and continue to love as adults beyond all reason. That film is Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

But honestly? As IP sequels from the early 2000s go, Monsters Unleashed is a lot better than it has any right to be — James Gunn’s script recaptures the energy of the animated series without overdoing it (and yes, it’s that James Gunn), the cast is having a great time and the CG Scooby doesn’t look like a weirdly animated piece of liver the way it did in Raja Gosnell’s first crack at the character. And there’s a streak of playful foolishness that Emma and Leela echo lovingly in their own debut, Lesbian Space Princess … a giddy animated sci-fi comedy that’s going to be a cult classic for a whole new generation, just you wait.

Check it out! You can find 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 running away from the ghoul, goblin or ghost of your choice. It’s good cardo, I hear.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, where in the last week I’ve tackled Imprint’s lovely Blu-ray set of Ang Lee’s Father Knows Best trilogy, and the new 4K editions of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from Shout! Studios and Warner, respectively. It’s really easy to subscribe — just click here and let it happen, man.

Someone Else’s Movie gets meta this week, as I’m joined by French actor Guillaume Marbeck, who plays French director Jean-Luc Godard in Richard Linklater’s delightful new movie Nouvelle Vague, to talk about Godard’s revolutionary debut Breathless … the film we see Marbeck’s Godard making in Linklater’s film.

It’s a house of mirrors, but a really fun one, and I’m indebted to veteran publicist Winnie Wong for coming up with the idea. Time constraints meant the episode is tighter than I would have liked, but that also rhymes with the circumstances in which JLG made his breakthrough, so let’s just pretend it was intentional.

I did trim one thing, though — an early moment where Guillaume asked if I wanted him to record the episode in character as Godard, which I admit I briefly considered. But you know what they say: Podcasts are supposed to be the truth at 96 kilobits per second.

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 while you race around the streets of Paris with a camera, a girl and a gun. That’s all you need, really.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, if you’ve fallen behind; last week, I wrote about Relay and Clown in a Cornfield and A24’s coffee-table-friendly release of Ti West’s X Trilogy, and took a moment to savor the stunning Warner Archive Collection release of The Curse of Frankenstein, which reached me just a little too late for Halloween but belongs on your shelf whenever you can grab it.  If you aren’t already a subscriber … well, you should be! So subscribe!

Oh, and Dick Cheney is finally dead. That’s nice.

I’ve been trying to land Bryan Fuller for an episode of Someone Else’s Movie ever since I started the podcast; in addition to being a creator of endlessly fascinating television, he’s a genre fiend whose love of the strange and unusual rivals that of Guillermo Del Toro’s, and I knew he’d bring a wealth of insight to any movie he brought to the show.

So imagine my delight when the arrival of his first feature Dust Bunny gave me the chance to book him, and I found out he’d picked Philip Kaufman’s brilliant 1978 adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — as rich a text as any film of its era, and one that only grows more complex and prophetic as the decades pass. We’re also about the same age, and the discovery that we had very similar experiences of the film gave us a great starting point.

It’s a good one! 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 walk expressionless through your environment, trying very hard not to give yourself away. And if you’re in Brooklyn, think about braving the rush line for Thursday night’s screening of Dust Bunny; it’s a blast with a crowd, and everybody else has to wait until December.

And then, there’s Shiny Things. For some weird reason the first half of the month is the busy part, release-wise, so I’ve spent the last few editions catching up to the new arrivals. Over the last week I reviewed F1, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and Nobody 2, and an edition that tackles Eddington and Weapons is going out later today. Subscribe now and be ahead of the curve!

Also! This weekend, I’ll be down at the Windsor International Film Festival, introducing movies and moderating Q&As and industry panels on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and celebrating the winner of the festival’s $25,000 WIFF Prize in Canadian Film on Sunday. I am debating whether or not to wear a Jays hat for the length of my stay.

It’s my first time at the festival, so if you run into me there feel free to say hi and give me directions to your favorite coffee place. I will definitely need a latte or twelve.

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has gone dormat of late, and not without reason; it’s kind of a master class in the law of diminishing returns. But the first one, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was an unexpected pleasure, and that’s why writer-director Elliott Hasler chose it for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie.

See, Elliott — whose new movie  Vindication Swim opens in US theaters this Friday, and will be on Canadian screens pretty soon — was three years old when the movie came out, too young to see it in theatres. But it made a massive impression on him when his parents brought the DVD home the following year … to the point that he credits Gore Verbinski’s swashbuckling fantasy adventure with inspiring him to make movies.  And that unconditional love gives this week’s podcast rather a different energy.

You’ll see! 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 as you stand in front of your wardrobe, trying to determine the perfect number of scarves to wear to work.

After that, feel free to catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just covered Warner’s seven-disc 4K upgrade of the original Nightmare on Elm Street cycle — which includes the first release of Freddy’s Dead‘s climax in the original 3D format — and Paramount’s 20th anniversary 4K release of Aeon Flux, which I must admit I did not see coming. Plenty more coming this week, assuming the supply chain works as it ought to. Subscribe now so you don’t miss any of it!

Also! My pals at Hollywood Suite just released two new episodes of their Cinema A to Z series, which gathers a couple dozen film folks — myself included — to shuffle through some favorite films, always with a specific theme in mind. This time around it’s Ghosts and Perfect Pairs, exploring what happens when two actors are perfectly matched — or perfect opposites — in a given project. Abbott and Costello, Lemmon and Matthau, Grodin and De Niro, you know the deal.

Check ’em out! And if you’ve missed the other episodes, they’re all right here, free to stream in perpetuity. Watch them out of sequence and see my weight go up and down depending on which job I was working and whether I’d just had COVID! That’s always fun!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie risks creating a little bit of a paradox, as I’m joined by Daniel Bernhardt — who stars in Steven Kostanski’s endearing Deathstalker reboot, opening everywhere on Friday — to discuss a film that’s near and dear to his heart: The Matrix.

Why is this one spacey-timey? Because Daniel has dozens of action-movie credits, and one of them is The Matrix Reloaded … which let him stomp around in the world the Wachowskis created four years previous. I think that’s cool; Daniel thinks that’s cool. So we talked about it a little. But mostly we talked about The Matrix, because it’s still pretty awesome.

Join 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 as you eat the best steak of your life.

Also, if you’re curious to hear more from Team Deathstalker, you can and should check out Steven Kostanski’s 2021 SEMcast on Mortal Kombat, and co-star Conor Sweeney’s 2024 episode on Alien; these are people who love weird creatures and strange environments, and they’re very savvy about why they love them. Never a dull moment.

And then you can catch up to the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I dug into Decal’s new Blu-ray release of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck — which turns out to be a lovely package for one of the best films of the year.

Subscribers to the paid tier also got my reviews of Play Dirty, All of You and V/H/S Halloween on Friday as part of the weekly What’s Worth Watching newsletter; if you want to be among the elite and informed, it’s awfully easy to upgrade that subscription! So maybe do that? I bet you’ll be a lot happier.