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!

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.