There must be something spooky about April. Last week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie tackled Nicolas Roeg’s landmark horror story Don’t Look Now, and this week the film under discussion is M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 breakout The Sixth Sense, the one where Bruce Willis is a therapist trying to make a connection with a troubled little boy who sees … well, you know.

My guests, writer-directors Austin Abrahams and Andrew Holmes, are pretty well-versed in genre movies that aren’t quite genre movies, having just released the eerie drama The Island Between Tides, a loose adaptation of a forgotten J.M. Barrie play that stars Paloma Kwiatkowski as a young woman who effectively haunts her family, despite being very much alive.

It’s a mood piece more than anything else, and an engaging one, and after a run out west earlier this year it’s playing at the Carlton in Toronto and the Mayfair in Ottawa through Thursday, May 1st. If you’re looking for something a little different, you should check it out. Listen to the episode, you’ll get the idea.

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 look for the keys to your study. I’m sure they’re around somewhere.

And after that, you should check in on Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about the pleasures of practical, goopy ’80s monster movies — specifically Roger Corman’s Alien knockoff Forbidden World and Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, both of which were restored and released in 4K last month by the maniacs at Shout! Studios. Glorious fun, those. And of course if you had a subscription you’d already have read it! So you should subscribe, is what I’m saying.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a little shorter than usual, owing to the demands of a press day. Or maybe it’s just a Nicolas Roeg thing, since Clio Barnard’s episode on Performance was recorded under similar constraints.

But having to speedrun a movie like Performance has its benefits, I suppose, since it forces the guest to drill into the things they love most about it and the impact it had on their artistic development. And it’s much the same with Sam Rice-Edwards and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, the miasmic 1973 thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as an English couple trying to recover from a tragic loss by losing themselves in Venice, only to discover their grief continues to stalk them … along with something else.

Sam, who’s an editor by trade — and whose latest project, the archival documentary One to One: John & Yoko, is in theaters now — was struck by the film in a very specific way, and we get into that, as well as Roeg’s remarkable ability to guide us through what should have been an incomprehensible narrative and That Ending. I know I say this every time, but if you have yet to see the movie, please watch it before you listen to this episode. It’s kind of crucial, really.

Won’t you join us? 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 work on that big cathedral restoration you’ve been planning for years.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, why not? Last week, I celebrated Arrow Video’s preposterous new 4K edition of Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight — which might be his best movie, as it turns out? — and there’s a lot more coming because for some reason everything comes out at the end of the month nowadays. Feels inefficient somehow, but that’s the business for you. Have you subscribed yet? Feels like something you ought to do.

Happy National Canadian Film Day! This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie features the return of Ingrid Veninger, a singular filmmaker whose work carves out a profoundly personal path.

She first appeared on the show in 2015, tackling John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; this week, with her new film Crocodile Eyes screening at VIFF Centre Thursday afternoon as part of their Canadian Film Week series, she’s back to talk about David Lynch’s 2006 experiment Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern as “a woman in trouble” and pushing both actor and audience further than Lynch ever had before. Now that it stands as the last feature he ever released, it has a slightly more melancholy reputation … but it’s a great topic for discussion, and Ingrid has plenty to say about its impact on her own creative development.

You know how this works: 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 watch the rabbits do … whatever it is they’re doing.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, why not? Last week I covered A24 and Elevation Pictures’ slightly different discs of Babygirl and The Brutalist, as well as Via Vision’s excellent new Blu-rays of Man Bites Dog, In the Bedroom and Shattered Glass. If you were a subscriber you already knew that, of course. And if not, there’s a pretty simple fix. See you there.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a bit of a wild swing, since the movie that my guest Samir Oliveros discusses so eloquently is suddenly very hard to find.

Now, when Samir pitched me Ildikó Enyedi’s Of Body and Soul for the podcast, it was streaming on Netflix in North America; by the time we got around to recording the episode, it had vanished from the service, and it’s not currently available on any domestic VOD services as far as I can tell. I would blame the tariffs, but that’s silly; in any case, there’s a Mubi Blu-ray in the UK and if you’ve got a multi-region player you should definitely seek this out.

You should also seek out Samir’s new film, The Luckiest Man in America, in theaters in the US and Canada right now after a well-received premiere at TIFF last fall. It’s a stranger-than-fiction psychodrama about an Ohio man who won $110,000 on the game show Press Your Luck in 1984, an amount that should have been impossible to win … except that Michael Larson did it. Paul Walter Hauser plays Larson, so you can get a sense of how this might play out. (If you’re in Toronto, you can still catch it at the Lightbox.)

So soldier on! 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 to tune out the awful sounds of your workplace. Sorry it doesn’t help with your other senses.

And then you can shift over to Shiny Things, where I wrote about the new 4K editions of the Valentine’s Day releases Companion and Love Hurts, one of which feels like an instant classic. So that’s nice. You’ve subscribed already, right? Of course you have, you’re not a monster.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Tracie Laymon, the writer and director of the indie charmer Bob Trevino Likes This — a small movie about an unexpected connection that is so much richer and more lovely than anyone has the right to expect, powered by exquisite performances from Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo and a quiet sense of wonder at the simplicity of human connection.

So maybe it’s not surprising that Tracie wanted to talk about Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, another very delicate construction that asks a lot from its audience … but gives so much back. I’m starting to think it might be Burton’s best film, even with the Johnny Depp of it all, and Tracie is definitely on board for a conversation about loneliness and meaning and conformity and how the specific eccentricity of an artist’s vision can burn a movie into your heart forever. It’s a good one.

You can 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 work on your latest topiary masterwork. Just be careful fitting those earbuds.

And then you get to catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about my love for all things Star Trek — specifically Lower Decks and Prodigy and Galaxy Quest, all available in sparkling new editions from Paramount, and Severin’s new 4K editions of Antiviral and Delicatessen. But of course you’re already a subscriber and you knew all about them. Wait, you’re not? It’s cool, go get caught up.

Finally, if you’re in Toronto on Thursday evening, I’m hosting a screening of Jamie Kastner’s new documentary The Spoils at the Lightbox, and Jamie and U of T law professor Mayo Moran will be joining me for a Q&A afterwards. It’s a good movie! You should come, you’ll learn stuff!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie offers a really nice pairing of guest and feature, if you’re keeping track of such things.

My guest is Naomi Jaye, a Toronto writer-director whose excellent new psychodrama Darkest Miriam opened the Canadian Film Fest last night in advance of starting its Canadian theatrical run this Friday, and she chose Krzysztof Kieslowski’s magnificent Three Colors: Red, the crowning chapter of his trilogy on the French flag … and, sadly, the film that now stands as the final cinematic statement of a master filmmaker we lost far too soon. Kieslowski died 29 years ago this month, aged 54.

We talk about all of it, and Darkest Miriam as well — which is an exceptionally creepy drama featuring a terrific lead turn from Severance breakout Britt Lower that you’re not going to want to miss. No spoilers, though. 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 on the ferry ride as you contemplate the interdependence of our lives.

And then go get caught up on Shiny Things, because I covered a lot of ground last week! I wrote about the new releases of Wolf Man, Werewolves and Y2K, and the 4K restorations of Deep Blue Sea, Tommy, Godzilla Vs. Biollante and Night Moves. (It was a really good week for monsters.) C’mon, subscribe already! Think of what you’re missing!

I guess March is a time for musicals. Just two weeks after Atom Egoyan tackled Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie, here comes Ali Weinstein — whose wonderful, melancholy documentary Your Tomorrow was one of our world premieres at TIFF last fall — with Jewison’s other big studio musical, Fiddler on the Roof!

Made two years before Superstar, it’s a much more ambitious picture in terms of scale, a properly epic transposition of the Broadway musical shot on location in the former Yugoslavia with a cast harvested from various stage productions and the Yiddish theater. It was a critical and commercial hit, it was nominated for eight Oscars and won three (including John Williams’ first), and it’s endured for more than half a century among the Jewish diaspora as a treasured cultural artifact, which is how Ali and I were both exposed to it as children.

And weirdly enough I do manage to find a link to Your Tomorrow … which is also ultimately about preserving the memory of a time and place to which we can no longer return. It’ll be streaming as of 9am ET this Friday, March 21st, on the TVOntario YouTube channel, and it’s airing on the old-school TVO at 9pm ET on Sunday the 23rd. It even ends with a musical number. Don’t miss it.

And don’t miss the podcast, either! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy our weirdly personal reflections as you make your rounds and await a sign — any sign — that your god is listening.

And then why not check out the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I spun up Arrow Video’s truly incredible new release of William Friedkin’s Cruising — a movie that never really clicked with audiences, for all sorts of reasons, but now plays like one of his most complex and fascinating pictures. But surely you’re already  a subscriber. Aren’t you?

Also, if you’re reading this on Tuesday the 18th there are still a few tickets available for tonight’s Secret Movie Club, which is a good one and promises to have a very lively Q&A afterward. Come on down!

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome actor and filmmaker Jeremy Schuetze,  whose first feature Anacoreta — in which he stars opposite Antonia Thomas and screenwriter Matt Visser as a director trying to make an experimental horror movie in increasingly stressful circumstances – just dropped on digital and on demand. 

And Jeremy’s choice, given his own project, makes a certain sort of sense: He picked American Movie, Chris Smith’s beloved documentary about Wisconsin auteur Mark Borchardt, whose attempts to make a horror short called Coven after stalling out on his folk-horror opus Northwestern develop a certain epic quality as he and his eccentric friends and family –  the kind-hearted Mike Schank being the most loyal – push through one obstacle after another to bring his vision to the screen. I don’t think it’s a spoiler, 26 years on, to note that Coven did not have the cultural impact Borchardt hoped for … except that I guess it kind of did.

You know how this goes: 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 waiting to watch the dailies from yesterday’s shoot.

And then you should catch up on Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about the new Criterion editions of Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy — two character studies from the late ’80s that marked a turning point in the way “smaller” movies would be approached in American cinema, even if no one knew it at the time. You can subscribe at any time, you know.