This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a gentle one, as befits both the film selected and the work of the guest who selected it: That’d be Michael Clowater, a Fredericton commercial filmmaker who, in his mid-fifties, has written and directed his first feature, Drive Back Home. It’s a small drama, set in the winter of 1970, with Alan Cumming and Charlie Creed-Miles as estranged brothers forced back together when one is arrested on sodomy charges in Toronto and the other has to bail him out and chauffeur him all the way home to New Brunswick.

It’s a gentle, warm character piece, and so it makes a lot of sense that Michael would bring Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent to the podcast; it’s similarly deeply rooted in character and relationships, with established actors given an opportunity to be seen a little differently. And any conversation about McCarthy’s work is going to open up all sorts of interesting avenues; I hope you enjoy the ride.

You know how this works:  Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and play it on repeat as you make that thousand-mile run to the east coast.

And then you can catch up on your Shiny Things reading: Last week, I tackled Shout! Studios’ releases of Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God — which looks infernally beautiful in a new 4K restoration — and Severin’s jam-packed special edition of Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s Scala!!!, which is the best documentary about rep cinema you’ll see all year. Of course, if you’re a subscriber you already know that. (And if you’re not, there’s an easy fix.)

More housekeeping: If you’re reading this today (Tuesday, December 10th), there are still a few tickets available for tonight’s last See the North screening of 2024: Molly McGlynn’s excellent first feature Mary Goes Round. Show starts at 6:15pm, fuzzy scarves entirely optional.

And I’ll be back down at the Lightbox next Tuesday, the 17th, for the December edition of Secret Movie Club, which is going to be a good one. There were about thirty tickets left this morning; grab one while you can. See you there.