It’s the final Someone Else’s Movie of 2025, and my impromptu celebration of Rob Reiner’s cinema concludes with Allana Harkin‘s delightful hour on When Harry Met Sally … which is actually a New Year’s Eve movie, so there.

I hadn’t listened to this one in a while — it’s been eight and a half years since we recorded it — and I’d forgotten all about the rainstorm that arrived about halfway through, and can be heard hammering the roof of my old studio. It’s weirdly nice to be reminded of a time when doing the show in person was the custom rather than the exception, and where you could just enjoy a conversational dynamic without fear of stepping on someone’s thought or losing the rhythm to sync drift. Maybe I’ll try to do more live recordings in the new year. That’d be good.

… and also, how sharp is When Harry Met Sally, anyway? That script is airtight, building character details and tics into the fabric of the narrative while still leaving room for improvisations and unexpected bits of business. I’m, ah, developing something that skews very heavily in the direction of a rom-com, and Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner basically perfected it with this one. It’s the genre template for the rest of eternity, and you always find yourself coming back to it.

So enjoy it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on that long car ride from campus to New York. Embrace the truth of baby fishmouth, by the way; you’ll save yourself so much agita.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just run down the best movies and discs of this miserable year. And there’s one more piece coming before the calendar rolls over, as well as the weekly What’s Worth Watching dispatch for paid subscribers. You should be one of those by now, surely? No? Maybe make it a new year’s resolution, then.

Happy 2026, everybody. Things have got to get better.

A couple of weeks back, I had Globe & Mail film critic Barry Hertz on Someone Else’s Movie to talk about his book on the Fast & Furious movies; for this week’s episode, I welcome another Toronto film friend with a movie project of his own.

The friend is Eric Veillette, a journalist, programmer and cinema archivist whose new documentary Emmanuelle in Ontario looks at the censorship of Just Jaeckin’s adult-cinema smash Emmanuelle, and the extremely mild controversy that shook the province for a few weeks in December of 1974.

Emmanuelle in Ontario was produced to accompany the new 4K restoration of Jaeckin’s film, which comes to disc next week as part of Severin Films’ elaborate Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection, an 11-disc boxed set that collects the original Emmanuelle trilogy — the ones with Sylvia Kristel — and throws in an earlier Italian adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, I, Emmanuelle. I’ll be tackling the set in Shiny Things next week, so consider this a preview — an exhaustively researched preview, with all sorts of fun digressions into the cinematic landscape of the ’70s, and the specifically weird ways Ontario complicated its transition from film to video. It’s a fun one! Even if Emmanuelle itself isn’t quite as entertaining as it was cracked up to be.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you lie listlessly in one of those hammock chair things, thinking about all the pleasures that await you or whatever.

And speaking of Shiny Things: I’ve been gorging on year-end stuff for the upcoming TFCA awards, but I did make the time to write about The Conjuring: Last Rites, and how this purportedly final chapter is almost certainly not the last we’ll see of James Wan’s ridiculously successful horror series.

And of course paid subscribers got my weekly What’s Worth Watching newsletter on Friday. Be one of them! Sign up right here, or upgrade your existing subscription to the paid tier! You have room in your inbox, right? That thing goes on forever!

It’s Halloween on Friday, and I have the perfect episode of Someone Else’s Movie for the occasion.

My guest is Bryn Chainey, whose creepy first feature Rabbit Trap stars Dev Patel and Blue Jean’s Rosy McEwen as a 1970s couple who retreat to rural Wales to record environmental audio and wind up opening a gate that shouldn’t be opened.

And Bryn, who’s very fond of tales of the uncanny, wanted to talk about a similar production: Jonathan Miller’s television adaptation of Whistle and I’ll Come to You, which transmitted into British homes by the BBC in the spring of 1968. They weren’t ready for its immersive, almost experimental take on M.R. James ghost story, starring Michael Hordern as a fusty academic who opens a gate of his own while wandering around the beaches of East Anglia … and 57 years later there’s enough to talk about that my conversation with Bryn actually runs longer than the film he chose. That’s always fun.

Join us, if you dare! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you trudge around the unforgiving landscape, looking for curious artifacts.

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things, because I’ve been busy: Last week I tackled the new releases of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Eddington and Weapons, and the beautiful 4K restorations of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (from Criterion) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, the Vampyre (from Shout!). A nice balance for the spooky season, I should think. Subscribe now so you don’t miss the next edition … because you never know what’s coming.

UPDATE: It went up right after I posted this, but if you ever wanted to hear the story behind my undying pull-quote on every physical release of I Know What You Did Last Summer — from VHS to UHD — I tell on the latest episode of the Springfield Googolplex podcast, where hosts Adam Schoales and Nate Storring are doing very particular explorations of cinema referenced on The Simpsons. It’s an epic conversation, but I had a blast and hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. And then you can dig into the show’s truly terrifying back catalogue! There’s seven seasons of it!

It’s the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, and since writer-director Jules Koostachin‘s new film Angela’s Shadow is now streaming across the country on Hollywood Suite, it felt like a great time to have her on an episode of Someone Else’s Movie.

Jules wanted to talk about Flashdance, the 1983 blockbuster credited with bringing the aesthetics of MTV to American movies, though it’s equally possible Adrian Lyne, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer gave their film a manic style that influenced every music video that followed its release. However it worked, Flashdance feels like the first movie of what we’d come to know as ’80s commercial cinema — though when I revisited it a couple of years ago I was pleasantly surprised to find it had a lot more character and texture than I remembered. And Jennifer Beals is wonderful, of course. So that gave us a lot to talk about.

Join us! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you work your welder and think about how you’ll stage your next big dance number.

And then you should check out the newest edition of Shiny Things, which is going up later this afternoon and features a look at Canadian International Pictures’ excellent new Blu-ray of Cold Journey, Martin Defalco’s 1975 dramatization of the tragic story of Chanie Wenjack, which exposed the failures of the residential school system to a generation of Canadians. And if you’re wondering how that generation responded, I’ll remind you most Canadians were shocked by Chanie’s story all over again when Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire retold it in 2018 in their collaboration Secret Path, so … yeah. The work never ends.

I also wrote about Superman, M3GAN 2.0 and Sorry, Baby, and the 4K restorations of The Girl Who Leapt Through TIme and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. It’s good stuff! You should read it all! And you have, because you’ve got a subscription, right?

C’mon, subscribe. I write good!

There’s no new episode of Someone Else’s Movie today, but don’t panic; I’m just letting the last TIFF episode stay up a little longer, so more people can hear Sophy Romvari‘s excellent 2018 take on Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson.

And further congratulations to Sophy, because her first feature Blue Heron won the  TIFF’s Canadian Discovery award on Sunday! I had a feeling that might happen.

You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download it directly from the web and listen as you contemplate the passage of time, and wonder what intangible things your job has taken away from you without your even noticing. Or maybe don’t do that; it feels a bit grim.

SEMcast will return to its regular schedule before you know it, and until then you can check out the latest editions of Shiny Things; just yesterday, I published a look at three excellent boxed sets from the Warner Archive Collection, and last week I reviewed the new releases of Jurassic World Rebirth and Materialists. You can subscribe right here if you’re so inclined.

And pour one out for Robert Redford. The man was a force.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome Liz Cairns, award-winning production designer of Never Steady, Never Still and The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open and now the writer-director of the unsettling new drama Inedia, which is now  available on digital and on demand in Canada — just as star Amy Forsyth is on screens in Shook, which is also nice. Also, if you’ve been wondering what Susanne Wuest has been up to since Goodnight Mommy … well, you’ll see.

Liz wanted to talk about Rosetta, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 1999 breakout starring teenage Emilie Duquenne as a young woman struggling to keep herself and her alcoholic mother afloat after being laid off at the local factory — another film I was shocked to discover hadn’t been covered on the podcast before. But just means Liz gets to dig into it now, and find an unexpected kinship with the Dardennes’ work that threads its way into her own cinema. I’m just along for the ride, really.

You know how this goes. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you cart a waffle iron around town, looking for an outlet.

If you’re not sick of my voice after that, you can catch up to my appearance on the Day 6 summer movie panel last weekend, where I chatted about the safe bet of family-friendly blockbusters with Rachel Ho and Dana Stevens and still wound up advocating for Sketch as the PG entertainment of the summer. Look, I am who I am.

And if everything proceeds as scheduled, I’ll be back on CBC tomorrow morning at 10am ET for a conversation about the perpetual appeal of Jaws on Commotion, because it turns out if you spend decades telling people you’re an expert about a thing they eventually believe you. I’ll post a link to the podcast version when it goes up.

Also! There’s more Shiny Things to read! Last week I tackled the new 4K releases of Warner’s The Accountant 2 and Universal’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake, and discovered that one of them was, surprisingly, a lot better than it needed to be. You’re a subscriber, right? C’mon, be a subscriber.

Oh, and since someone always asks, I do feel older. Creakier, anyway. I ache in the places where I used to play, as the poet said. But on we go.

The great thing about doing a film podcast is that you never run out of classics. Case in point: This week, Someone Else’s Movie finally tackles Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the picture I believe might be Coppola’s single best work — and remember, he made The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II on either side of it.

Fortunately, Self Driver writer-director Michael Pierro holds the same opinion, so our conversation could expand to appreciations of Coppola’s filmography and the career of the late Gene Hackman, who does such a good job as Coppola’s paranoid hero Harry Caul that you could come away thinking this was the actor’s finest hour … until you saw him in literally any other movie, and realized how brilliant and versatile he was in, well, everything.

Sounds like something you want to hear, right? Get to 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 while you strip your apartment to the studs in a doomed attempt to figure out where everything went wrong.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where — as promised — I’ve spent the last week catching up to the Blu-rays of Queer, The Woman in the Yard and The Alto Knights, and diving into Warner’s glorious new 4K collection of the Connery Bond films. There’s more coming soon, and subscribers to the paid tier also get my weekly list of recommendations, so maybe try that out? I bet you like it.

Also, if you weren’t up to listening to me yammer on about the 50th anniversary of Jaws for an hour and a half on Eric Marchen’s Untitled Cinema Podcast last week, Eric just posted a half-hour version of our conversation on his Rogers TV show, Cinema Seen. It’s got film clips and everything! So that’s nice too.

I have trouble believing it myself, but this week marks the tenth anniversary of my starting Someone Else’s Movie — which is ridiculous, right?

But here we are, and for this very special episode I’m joined by Felix-Antoine Duval, a brilliant young actor who just won the TFCA’s award for Outstanding Performance in a Canadian Film for his role in Sophie Deraspe’s excellent Shepherds. (After premiering at TIFF last fall and returning for a Canada’s Top Ten screening in February, it’s back at the Lightbox right now in regular release.)

And Felix picked another recent Canadian knockout, Pascal Plante’s disquieting psychological thriller Red Rooms, which stars Juliette Gariepy as a young woman who spends her days attending a murder trial in Montreal and her nights online, doing … stuff. We don’t exactly spoil it in our conversation, because I don’t think you can spoil what Plante and Gariepy (and Laurie Babin, and Max McCabe-Lokos) accomplish with this movie … but you haven’t seen the film, please seek it out before you listen.

Suitably intrigued? Join the celebration! 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 quietly in court, waiting for your moment.

And then you can catch up to last week’s Shiny Things, which was just one edition about Paramount’s new 4K release of Gladiator II — a stunning presentation of a very hollow film. There’s a lot more coming down the pike, though, so please subscribe if you haven’t already.

Oh, and I’m doing stuff in public this week! On Saturday the 15th I’ll be at Toronto Comicon for an edition of Aaron Reynolds’ Bootleg Safari panel, trying to determine the best and worst knockoffs of Alien; it’s at 6 pm in Theatre 2, come watch me talk about secret genre treasures with the man who makes birds swear about politics. (Where does XTRO fit in? Take a guess!)

And Tuesday, March 18th, is the next edition of TIFF’s Secret Movie Club, where once again I’ll be presenting the Toronto premiere of an upcoming picture that we think is quite good. You should come! It’d be great to see you.

You know Atom Egoyan, right? Double Oscar nominee for The Sweet Hereafter,  sure, but I’ll still make the case for his prior film, Exotica, as one of the best films to ever come out of this country.

Anyway, I programmed Atom’s latest feature Seven Veils at TIFF 2023, and now that it’s finally opening across Canada on Friday, I finally bagged him for an episode of Someone Else’s Movie.

And we knew exactly what film he’d tackle: Jesus Christ Superstar, Norman Jewison’s 1973 screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s concept album turned stage show. Atom had brought it up at our Canada’s Top Ten Q&A for Seven Lives last year, in tribute to Jewison, and even sung a few bars of it for the audience. He’s a little more restrained this time around, which is a shame. He knows his stuff.

And yes, Cara Gee tackled the film in the first year of SEMcast, but given that a full decade has passed I figured Atom’s take would be different enough to warrant doubling up.

You decide! 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 drive out to the desert.

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about the new releases of Paramount’s September 5 and Sony’s Venom: The Last Dance and Warner’s terrific 4K restorations of Amadeus and Constantine; of course, if you’re a subscriber you already know this! (And if you’re not a subscriber there’s an easy fix for that.)

Also, if you’re in Toronto and excited about the 20th anniversary edition of the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival kicking off this week, my latest piece for Toronto Today may be of interest. Enjoy it!

David Lynch died last Thursday. I wrote a little about him over at Shiny Things, but there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said by so many other people. Universally beloved and respected, consistently weird, able to alienate a cinema full of retired dentists and their wives in the space of three hours — honestly, what better way to be remembered?

So this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie pays the tiniest of tributes to him, bringing back Rick Roberts‘ September 2017 episode on Eraserhead. It’s a celebration of the film, of course, but it’s also conversation about an artist discovering another way to make art, and the cracks that can open when you least expect them. So yeah, it’s hopeful. I like that.

You can find the show in all the usual places:  Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts, your podcatcher of choice … or you can download the episode directly from the web and play it loud to drown out the cries of that weird baby in the next room. Assuming it is a baby, of course.

And then, get on board with Shiny Things! In addition to Lynch, last week I wrote about Criterion’s new 4K editions of The Mother and the Whore and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling — two auterist knockouts I never thought would be rescued from limbo — and Arrow’s new 4K limited edition of Inglourious Basterds, which, meh. Subscribe now if you haven’t already so you don’t miss the next thing!