This week on Someone Else’s Movie,  I welcome the mother-daughter team of Sheila McCarthy and Mackenzie Donaldson to the podcast, on the occasion of the theatrical release of All the Lost Souls, which Mackenzie produced and directed and in which Sheila co-stars. (It’s playing at Toronto’s Carlton Cinema through Thursday, at least, and streaming on Paramount Plus on Friday the 13th.)

Sheila and Mackenzie wanted to talk about a movie they both love, so they went with The Wizard of Oz, the beloved MGM musical that defined a certain kind of live-action fantasy for generations — and, obviously, continues to delight and enthrall audiences of all ages nearly a century later.

Join us, won’t you? Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you run through the poppy fields trying to avoid the asbestos.

And then get caught up on your Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour and Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice coming to disc, and the new 4K editions of A Simple Plan, Hush and Bones and All that just hit the shelves. But of course you’ve long since subscribed, so you know this stuff already.

Oh, and if you’ll be in Toronto this month, here are a couple of dates you should write down: At 6:30pm next Tuesday, December 10th, we’re throwing 2024’s last See the North screening at the Lightbox, and we’re showing Molly McGlynn’s excellent first feature Mary Goes Round. It’s free, and it’s funny, and its wintry setting and spiky family narrative makes it perfect holiday viewing. And it’s free! So come view it!

Not free, but also screening at the Lightbox and involving me, is the next edition of Secret Movie Club, which is happening at 7 pm on Tuesday the 17th. Obviously I can’t tell you what the film is or who’ll be joining us for the screening, but … well, you might want to grab a ticket while you can. See you there.

Greetings from the Calgary airport, where I’m waiting on a connecting flight after spending the weekend at the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival! They were kind enough to invite me to do a panel, I spent a couple of days talking to very nice people and even sat on a short-film jury. (We gave our prize to Alexander Farah’s One Day This Kid, which you should see at the earliest opportunity.)

But I do other stuff, so here’s this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, in which I welcome the actor and filmmaker Ben Petrie as his first feature The Heirloom rolls into its Toronto theatrical release this week. I’ve been acquainted with Ben for a while now, through his work with his real-life partner Grace Glowicki (herself a friend of the show), and I’m delighted to have him on, especially since he’s the first person in almost ten years to pick a Charlie Chaplin movie.

Specifically,  City Lights, Chaplin’s 1931 masterpiece — and perhaps the biggest gamble of his career, since he chose to make a silent film three years after The Jazz Singer rendered them obsolete almost overnight. He knew what he was doing, though, and the result is one for the ages — literally. It’s almost a century old, and that final shot still brought me to tears. If you’ve never seen the film, consider this your motivation; it’s on the Criterion Channel, and the Criterion BD looks as good as a 35mm print. And if you have seen it, enjoy the conversation. It’s warm and comforting.

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 listen to it while you dodge the punches of your opponent in the ring. And then go see The Heirloom! Ben and Grace will be at the Lightbox on Thursday night for a Q&A with Kaz Radwanski — also a friend of the show — and they’ll be making other appearances at the Revue Cinema when the film moves there on Friday. But the TIFF screening will be the best one, I just know it.

After you’ve secured your ticket, please catch up to the latest editions of Shiny Things. Last week I wrote about Severin Film’s massive second volume of the folk-horror anthology All the Haunts Be Ours and the 4K anniversary editions of Seven Samurai (Criterion) and North by Northwest, Blazing Saddles and The Terminator (Warner). Plenty more to come, so subscribe right now so you don’t miss anything. If you’re reading this, you probably already have, but … well, just in case.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time … because I’ve been trying to book Mark McKinney forever.

The once and future Kid in the Hall and I used to live a few blocks from each other, and we’d run into one another at the occasional thing, and when I launched SEMcast he was one of the first people I reached out to. He was totally up for it; he just had to shoot this pilot first.

The pilot turned out to be Superstore, which ran for six seasons on NBC. And then there was the Kids reunion series, and a bunch of other stuff, and yadda yadda yadda it’s nine and a half years later. But with Mark having two projects landing more or less at once — his new CTV series Mark McKinney Needs a Hobby and a role in the very messy horror comedy Scared Shitless, which has its Toronto premiere this Saturday at the Blood in the Snow Film Festival — we finally carved out an hour to talk.

And Mark picked a doozy: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, George Miller’s prequel to Fury Road that rolls back the clock on the apocalypse to show us what Charlize Theron’s formidable Imperator went through to become the greatest warrior the wasteland has ever known. (Max Rockatansky is more of a strategist, really.)

It’s a wide-ranging conversation about Miller’s directorial genius, the glory of the big screen, my own Lorenzo’s Oil boosterism and, yes, the gonzo pleasures of Hundreds of Beavers. Mark’s an omnivore, and yeah, this episode was worth the wait.

Surely at this point you know what to do: Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and get the Doof Warrior to blast it from his amp. They have podcasts in the wasteland, surely.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote up Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger and the new 4K releases of Born on the Fourth of July and Drag Me to Hell from Shout! Studios, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and The Invasion from Arrow Video.

There’s a lot more to come, and if you feel like you’re missing out you can always subscribe. I mean, I would.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie was recorded the day after the US election — in fact, Kamala Harris conceded while we were talking — so politics were an intrinsic part of the conversation.

Fortunately, the movie under discussion welcomes a political lens. My guest, writer-director Gillian McKercher — whose tense new drama Lucky Star makes its Toronto bow this Saturday in the Reel Asian Film Festival — chose Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello’s bold and brawny reinterpretation of Jack London’s novel about a roughneck sailor who decides to get an education, ultimately reinventing himself as a strident individualist as Europe hurtles towards war.

It’s a hell of a picture, as the kids say, and the perfect movie for the moment, so Gillian and I found plenty to talk about. You should listen to it! Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you feverishly work on your latest manifesto. We’ve all been there.

And then you can read my latest manifesto, disguised as a new edition of Shiny Things! Last week I spun up a trio of new releases: M. Night Shyamalan’s maddening Trap, Zoë Kravitz’ brilliant Blink Twice and Steven Kostanski’s delirious Frankie Freako. Something for everyone, even the masochists. Have you subscribed? There’s a free option, you know.

… oh, and I was going to remind you all about tonight’s See the North screening of Winter Kept Us Warm, but it appears to be sold out. Sorry about that! Next month’s will be announced shortly. Keep an eye out!

It’s election day in the US, and while I am pretty confident that Kamala Harris will beat Donald Trump very soundly on Dobbs alone, one can never be sure. But it’s good to hope for things. It’s literally all we can do at this point.

So this week, because it’s the perfect episode to pull out of the archives and because Lauren Collins has a new show on Crave, My Dead Mom — which is written and produced by Wendy Litner and directed by Chandler Levack — I’m reposting Lauren’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, in which we discussed Gillian Robespierre’s 2014 dramedy Obvious Child and Jenny Slate’s breakout performance as a standup trying to plan her abortion around her gigs.

It’s a really fun episode, and I’m happy to have a reason to put it back into circulation. If you missed it nine years ago, enjoy it! And try not to think about how the timbre of my voice has changed. That’s weird.

Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re sitting in your bathroom waiting for life-changing news. I hope you get the answer you want.

If you’re in need of further distraction, there’s always Shiny Things; last week I wrote about Arrow’s 4K release of Trick ‘R Treat and their J-Horror Rising Blu-ray box, and Severin Films’ resurrections of The Red Light Bandit, The Mad Bomber and Don’t Change Hands, so that’s a lot of weird stuff to go through. It’ll take your mind of some of this, at least.

We’ve done what we can. See you on the other side.

Oh, and also! Tickets are still available for next Tuesday’s free See The North screening of David Secter’s seminal queer drama Winter Kept Us Warm, which we’re presenting in a new 4K restoration from Canadian International Pictures.

It’s a lovely, quietly observed picture and a fascinating time capsule of what downtown Toronto looked and sounded like sixty years ago. You should join us! November 12th at the Lightbox, 6:30 pm.

Halloween is finally here, and I have a seasonally appropriate episode of Someone Else’s Movie for you!

This week, I’m joined by writer-director Zach Clark — whose striking contribution to the body-snatcher genre The Becomers arrives on Blu-ray today from Dark Star Pictures by way of Vinegar Syndrome — who was very excited to unpack his lifelong fascination with Jack Hill’s grindhouse novelty Spider Baby.

If you’ve seen Spider Baby, you can understand why a thoughtful horror buff would be fascinated by it: Hill’s exploitation quickie about a family of weirdos somehow prefigures both Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and in the casting of both an aging Lon Chaney Jr. and a young Sid Haig it does offer a weird sense of torches being passed, and used to set the previous older alight. It’s relentlessly, unapologetically strange, and there’s a lot to discuss. Also, you should see The Becomers; it’s really good.

Want to join us? Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you endlessly ride the dumbwaiter up and down between the dining room and the dark, dark basement.

And once you’re done with that, we have such Shiny Things to show you! Last week, I wrote about Lee Isaac Chung’s surprisingly engaging Twisters and Arrow’s new 4K release of the first four Hellraiser movies, the Quartet of Torment, and how no one has been able to equal Clive Barker’s original accomplishment … not even Barker himself, really. Subscribe right here, and let me help you make better choices.

Happy Halloween, everybody. You could do worse  than locking yourself inside on Thursday night with a black-and-white CinemaScope double-feature of The Innocents and The Haunting. Go on, be classy.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie went places.  I had hoped it would.

That’s because my guest, Michael Greyeyes, is a fascinating individual — an actor, a teacher, a dancer; a writer, director, choreographer. He’s charismatic and capable and really funny — and as we proved at TIFF last month with RT Thorne’s 40 Acres, when you find a role that lets him incorporate all of his skills he’s absolutely amazing.

(And hey, if you’re in Toronto today, you can see him at his most kinetic in TIFF’s memorial screening of Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, screening tonight at 9pm as part of a mini-retrospective of Jeff’s films.)

Having seen Michael champion Station Eleven for CBC’s Canada Reads project last year, I knew he’d be a great guest for the show — and he was, bringing his whole heart to Wong Kar-wai’s magnificent, melancholy In the Mood for Love … a movie, it turns out, he’d only recently discovered, and fallen for completely.

So this is a good one. We talk about drama, we talk about staging, we talk about the eternal allure of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, and we also talk about The Light Before the Sun, the short film Michael’s premiering at the Hamilton Film Festival on Saturday, because that’s interesting  as well. It’s a slower conversation than usual, but that works for the film: Wong’s a meditative director, after all.

Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re sitting very still, too terrified to speak your heart.

And then go catch up on your Shiny Thingses! Last week I wrote about the new 4K restorations of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, and how they fit into the filmographies of their respective directors. And there’s more coming this week, you’ll see. Subscribe right here so you don’t miss a post.

Halloween is right around the corner, so in this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, we turn sadism and mutilation into a pretty fun time.

That’s because my guests are Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, partners in life and filmmaking whose first feature, the found-footage chiller It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This was a berserk highlight of TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, It’s continuing to terrify audiences across North America as we speak: Here’s a list of upcoming playdates. (Nick and Rachel plan to be in attendance at most of them.)

Rachel and Nick are goofy, cheerful people who love horror in all of its forms … even the torture-porn genre, as exemplified by their pick for the podcast, Eli Roth’s Hostel. You know, the movie where a bunch of American bros go to Slovakia for a promised sex romp, only to discover that truth in advertising laws are very, very different in the EU.

Are they right? Is Hostel an underrated classic of splatter cinema? Listen and find out!  Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while strapped to a gurney, thinking about the choices that brought you to this moment.

And once you’ve done that, there’s plenty of Shiny Things to catch up on; last week, I wrote about the disc debuts of Exhuma and A Quiet Place: Day One and the new Criterion double-bill of Val Lewton’s horror classics I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim, and subscribers to the paid tier got my latest list of weekly recommendations, Want to see what they see? Sign up right here, and get to reading!

… and if you’re reading this on Tuesday morning, there are still tickets available for tonight’s TIFF Lightbox screening of The Void, part of our free monthly See the North series celebrating Canadian cinema. And this one’s in Cinema 3, which is a nice big room for all the Lovecraftian weirdness. So come join us, won’t you?

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Halifax filmmaker Tara Thorne — another veteran of the alt-weekly grind who switched careers later in life to find fulfillment as a writer and director. (I like the sound of that.)

Tara’s first feature, Compulsus, opens across Canada this Friday, and her second, Lakeview, is currently doing the festival circuit, so this felt like the perfect time to have her on the show — and she came in hot with Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s ceaselessly entertaining 2019 true-crime drama about the women of Scores, and how they dealt with being exploitated by rich assholes by exploiting them right back.

Okay, it was illegal and whatever, but it was a really fun ride while it lasted, and that’s the fizz that Scafaria brings to the story. Plus, The Dutch has a cameo and that’s all a movie requires to go in the canon nowadays.

Wanna join us? Subscribe at all the usual places — Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it after you and friends hunker down to get your story straight.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, which last week featured reviews of Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs and the new Ultimate Cut of Bob Guccione’s Caligula, which labors very, very mightily to convince you there’s something serious and honorable in the wreckage of Tinto Brass’ 1979 epic. (There is not, but it’s an interesting proposition.)

I also did another What’s Worth Watching column for paid subscribers, and if you want to know what’s in it, well, there’s a really easy way to find out. See you there!

I truly don’t know why it took so long for someone to bring Alien onto Someone Else’s Movie. We’ve had episodes on Aliens and Alien 3, and there were a couple of times I came close to having to tackle Alien Vs. Predator, but in nine and a half years, no one ever picked the original … until now.

Conor Sweeney, a member of the Astron-6 collective and the star of Steven Kostanski’s retro fantasy comedy Frankie Freako — which opens across Canada this Friday, and is a ridiculous amount of fun — finally chose Ridley Scott’s genre-defining 1979 masterpiece, and we had a really great time talking about it, the franchise it spawned, our mutual loathing of Scott’s dopey prequels and a few other things. You should give it a listen.

So, you know, do that! You can subscribe at all the usual spots — Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you argue with your ship’s computer about decoded distress signals and distressing corporate priorities.

And then you should catch up on Shiny Things, because I’ve been busy! Last week I launched a new recommendations column for paying subscribers, and I covered Via Vision’s lovely double feature of Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face, as well as some very weird new releases from Severin Films. Not subscribed yet? Just click here and I’ll get you set up.