It’s my birthday tomorrow, but … well, if you’ve been keeping up with Shiny Things you know we’re dealing with a lot of stuff, not the least of which is moving across town on Friday.

Don’t worry, we’re managing! Other than the usual existential terror that comes from boxing up nearly seven thousand discs and a very complicated AV system, everything’s been going pretty well. I even had time to release an episode of Someone Else’s Movie this morning.

The guest is director Morrisa Maltz, whose new drama The Unknown Country stars Lily Gladstone (of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon) as a young woman driving from South Dakota to Texas after her grandmother’s death, and encountering a series of family members and strangers along the way. And the movie Morrisa picked is Where Is the Friend’s House?, the 1987 breakout of Abbas Kiarostami, a filmmaker who specialized in stories of unlikely journeys.

We unpacked the interesting connections between Kiarostami’s first international success and Morrisa’s movie — which is really good, by the way, and coming to VOD in a few weeks.

So give it a listen! You can find the show on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download it directly from the web and burn it to a CD so you can play it in your car.

And then you can catch up to Shiny Things, which I’m hoping to update this week with reviews of Blackberry and Fast X at the very least. I still owe everyone that deep dive into the Mission: Impossible films, but it turns out rewatching six movies with a cumulative running time of nearly fourteen hours is a little tricky right now. Go figure.