I’ve been in the UK for the last week, and I am exhausted in the best possible way. Spent time with family, went to a castle, went to a museum, went to the shops, found a few movies I’d been hoping to find — and one I figured I’d never get my hands on. So that’s been great. Less great is the heat, which may be dry but still melts you. I took three showers on Saturday. Or maybe it was Sunday. Possibly both.

I’m coming home today, and landing in time to introduce tonight’s Harbourfront Free Flicks screening of Chicago at 8:30 pm. That’ll be fun! But first you should listen to a brand-new episode of Someone Else’s Movie, in which Vancouver director Gloria Mercer joins me to talk about Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, a film that doesn’t directly inform her first feature, A Safe Distance … but it doesn’t not inform it, either.

Give it a listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you circle the block waiting for your pals to come strolling out of the local depository with big bags of loot.

And if you’re in the Montreal area you should go see A Safe Distance at Fantasia, where it’s having its Canadian premiere Thursday night, with a second screening Friday morning. It’s good!

Things have been a little quiet on the Shiny Things front, since I’ve been largely AFK over here, but paid subscribers did get my exclusive reviews of William Woods‘ The Outer Threat and the new Prime Video series Ride or Die; sadly I wasn’t provided with an advance look at the new season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds but I’ll get to that this week. Make sure you don’t miss it by upgrading that subscription! But if you just want the free stuff, I understand. Times are tough for everybody.

It’s a little chaotic around here, as I’m off to the UK tonight — heading directly to the airport after I introduce The School of Rock at Harbourfront, weather permitting. (And if the weather does permit, you should come down — last week’s season launch was packed, and Dirty Dancing always plays well with a crowd.)

But while I’m doing all my running around, you can kick back and enjoy a fresh new episode of Someone Else’s Movie, in which longtime producer William Woods, whose feature debut The Outer Threat opens across Canada on Friday, offering a surprisingly gentle contrast to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Will wrote his movie well before Spielberg’s came to light, but it’s a remarkable coincidence — and a nice demonstration of how a movie can turn its limitations into strengths.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Will wanted to talk about M. Night Shyamalan’s Unforgiven, another ground-level take on a fantastical story — and one that showcases all of Shyamalan’s strengths and reveals very few of his weaknesses. Really, the only flaw here is that something was wrong with my mic when we recorded the episode, and my voice has this weird buzz on it. I’ve since solved the problem, but it affected next week’s recording as well. Hopefully you can focus past it. My guests sound great, and that’s the important bit.

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 deadlift increasingly larger weights. Who knows what your top strength will be? Lift a car!

And then, get caught up on your Shiny Things reading! Last week’s releases The Christophers, Obsession, Mother Mary, Deep Water,  Fuze and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching dispatch for paid subscribers I reviewed The Odyssey, Lucky and Jesse Noah Klein’s Best Boy. Have you upgraded your subscription yet? C’mon! It’s a moral duty, probably!

Anyway, must dash, pip pip. I’ll be back next Tuesday in time to introduce Chicago. Wanna see how I look after a day of transcontinental travel? Of course you do!

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by the Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, who’s been making movies about the collision of the mundane with the uncanny formore than a decade now; if you’ve seen Bait or Enys Men, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. Shooting in 16mm, playing with sound in an immediately disquieting way, his cinema has a displaced quality that asks us to pay close attention and divine its meaning.

And with his new film, Rose of Nevada, Mark has upped his game considerably, spinning a seductive and subtly unnerving story of two young men who take jobs on a fishing boat and find themselves propelled into an impossible situation. It’s been rolling across North America since last month, and this Friday it pulls into theaters in Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver. (Paid subscribers to Shiny Things read my review last Friday.)

Mark surprised me by picking John Milius’ Big Wednesday for his SEMcast, which is … not a movie I would have thought he’d choose, let alone make a case for it as one of the last masterpieces of the New American Cinema. But he did, and he does, and I think you’ll enjoy listening to us talk about the Cornish attraction to surf cinema, the tragedy of Jan-Michael Vincent and the sheer weirdness of Milius’ career trajectory.

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 paddle out into the blue, thinking about how it’s the only place you’ve ever been happy. And special thanks to Simi Khosa of Route 504 PR for rescuing the episode when my recording failed. That was an awful few minutes.

Once you’re towelled off, go get caught up on Shiny Things, because last week I tackled the new releases of It Was Just an Accident, The Drama, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert and They Will Kill You and reviewed Rose of Nevada, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass and Mockbuster in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching dispatch for paid subscribers. Missed that one? Up that sub so this Friday’s edition comes straight to your inbox!

And if you’re in Toronto, come on down to Harbourfront Centre tonight as I kick off the 2026 Summer Free Flicks series with Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing. Show starts at 8:30pm, just as the sun starts to set; seating is limited this year so bring a chair or a blanket. What better way to beat this heat than to watch attractive people sweat?

… from all the dancing, I mean.

On the latest episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer-director Jesse Noah Klein, whose new film Best Boy is available on VOD this very day.

Best Boy is all about tangled familial relationships, with friend of the show Aaron Abrams, Caroline Dhavernas and Marc Bendavid  as three adult siblings trying to honor their dead father the way he would have wanted, in an increasingly absurd and punishing manner. It’s great, and you should watch it as soon as possible.

It is thus perhaps not a surprise that Jesse wanted to talk about Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 breakthrough The Celebration, which is also about siblings confronting the horrors of their upbringing — and a lot of other things besides. Best Boy is a very different film, but the two works are certainly in conversation with each other, and we have a really good conversation about that. I invite you to listen, perhaps while clutching a stress ball.

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 stare off into the middle distance, thinking about your own happy, unblemished childhood. I know that’s what I did!

And then, get caught up on your Shiny Things reading! Last week I wrote up the new discs of The Mastermind and Crime 101, and covered The Invite, Touch Me and Hold the Fort in Friday’s What’s Worth Watching dispatch for paid subscribers. Not one of those? Why not level up so you don’t miss this week’s? Don’t be a misser-outer! Be the Best Boy!

Oh, and if you’re looking for some fun, free outdoor entertainment next week: The Harbourfront Free Flicks series is back for 2026, and it’s a full run of musicals starting with Dirty Dancing next Tuesday, July 14th.  Show starts at 8:30pm; please be advised that for some reason there is no seating at the Concert Stage this year, so you should bring your own lawn chair or blanket or stool or whatever.

(Why am I telling you about this year’s series? No reason. No reason at all.)

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.