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!

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome indie filmmaker Pete Ohs, whose new film Erupcja has been getting a lot of attention because it’s the dramatic debut of the singer Charli XCX. And that’s good, because she’s great in it, but also because it means people are paying attention to a Pete Ohs drama while it’s in theaters rather than discovering it on a streaming service and feeling like they missed out.

Pete makes very good movies, is what I’m saying, and you should check them out. He frequently collaborates with Friends of the Show Callie Hernandez and Albert Birney — they all worked together on Birney’s lo-fi VR drama OBEX — and while Erupcja is  a little more conventional in nature than Jethica or The Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick, it’s just as tangled and authentic. I really liked it, and you will too. See it with a crowd.

And Pete chose a great movie for his episode: Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s evocative, meditative look at the collision of traditional and modern ways of life in a Japanese mountain village. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly why it might appeal to someone who specializes in small, delicate cinema — and if you haven’t, I strongly suggest you check it out before listening to the episode. It’s really great, and not at all as heavy as the title may lead you to believe.

So get on 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 contemplating the deer in the snowy glade behind your home / setting up the projector for your pitch session at the town hall.

And then go catch up to the latest Shiny Things dispatches! Last week I reviewed the new discs of Die My Love, Primate and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — two of which are very, very good movies, all of which are great discs. There was also Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter for paid subscribers, where I tackled Erupcja, Buffet Infinity and the new Apple series Margo’s Got Money Troubles. All good stuff, and if you missed it you can always click the 14-day free trial and catch up to months of these exclusives online. I want you to be happy! Don’t you want to be happy too?

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.

Not a paid subscriber? Consider the 14-day free trial! That’s what it’s there for!

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.