One of my favorite discoveries at TIFF last year was Sketch, an absolutely charming all-ages adventure movie about a little girl whose drawings come to life and start rampaging through her small town.

It’s also much, much richer and more grounded than its premise may sound, with a complex storyline about  a widowed father (Tony Hale, kinda brilliant) trying reconnect with his children offering some emotional weight in-between the inventive set pieces.

Writer-director Seth Worley describes his movie as “Inside Out meets Jurassic Park“, and that’s a great way to sell it; around the offices last year, I was telling people to see it as the project Stranger Things could have been if had been built on an original idea. Anyway, I loved it, our audiences loved it, and it’s coming back to theaters across the US and Canada tomorrow as the summer delight it was always intended to be.

And that’s why Seth is my guest on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, where we discuss a favorite film of his that brings no small amount of self-aware glee to a fantastical narrative: Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black.

Have you seen Men in Black recently? Because it is, almost thirty years later, a near-perfect confection — that rare popular entertainment with a sense of style, a point of view and a script absolutely filled with big ideas and snappy dialogue. I think this might also be the first time someone’s chosen a big movie where both the writer and director have done SEMcasts of their own, so that’s a fun little trivia note. Seth was impressed, anyway.

So join us for a really fun hour of insight, inspiration and full-on fanboying! 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 walk around Manhattan looking for incognito E.T.s, as one does.

And then you can get caught up on your Shiny Things reading, if you’re so inclined! Last week I wrote about Criterion’s terrific new 4K editions of Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, as well as A24’s Blu-ray of The Legend of Ochi and Paramount’s 4K steelbook of Joe Dante’s still-weird Small Soldiers, which aims for the same tone that Seth achieves in Sketch but didn’t quite get there. Subscribe right here to make sure you don’t miss the next edition, it won’t kill you.

And go see Sketch. It’s so great with a crowd.

It’s back-to-back Fantasia episodes on Someone Else’s Movie, as this week I welcome Ava Maria Safai, who’s bringing her first feature Foreigner to Montreal for its world premiere this Thursday night. It’s good!

And Ava picked a great movie to talk about: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes-honored, Oscar-nominated drama about an Iranian family cracking under a mixture of political and personal oppression. If you haven’t seen the film, by all means seek it out before you listen to the episode … or just seek it out anyway, because it’s outstanding. And you know what, do listen to the episode, because Ava has a great perspective on both Rasoulof’s story and its larger allegorical power. So there.

How to find it? Surely you already know. 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’re trapped with your family in the basement dungeon of your father’s childhood home. Or save it for your next jog, I don’t know your life.

After that, you can catch up on your Shiny Things, because I”ve been on a roll: Last week I covered the new releases of Final Destination: Bloodline, Friendship and All We Imagine As Light, and the very satisfying 4K catalogue titles High Society, To Catch a Thief and Clueless. There’s a lot more coming this week, so upgrade that subscription! The last thing you want to do is miss out.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writing and directing partners Ramsey Fendall and Deanna Milligan, whose first feature Lucid had its world premiere last night at the Fantasia film festival, and will be turning up at fests around the world over the next few months.

Shot on a mix of 16mm and 35mm, which immediately distinguishes it from a lot of other indie genre work right now, it’s a frenetic, grotty psychodrama about a young artist (Caitlin Acken Taylor) whose experiments with a dream drug give her direct access to her nightmares, with fairly intense results.  Check it out when you can.

(Ramsey was also the cinematographer on Seymour: An Introduction, and thus at least partially responsible for me starting the podcast in the first place. Neat, right? I wish I’d known that before we recorded the episode.)

Anyhow, Ramsey and Deanna wanted to talk about a very different sort of nightmare: Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness, the 1971 Euro-horror about newlyweds who drift into the clutches of an aristocratic monster (Delphine Seyrig) and her devoted companion one foggy evening in a very fancy hotel.

If you think you know what’s coming … well, you probably do. But the plot of Daughters of Darkness is less important than its mood and its various subtexts: Pitched as a story of sexy vampires stalking the innocent, it turns out to be a complex, elliptical study of class dynamics, gender roles and toxic masculinity; as Deanna points out, it’s dealing with stuff its audience wouldn’t even have a language for until decades later. And that makes for a fascinating conversation that still has room for how weird some of Kumel’s choices were … and, yes, whether or not Delphine Seyrig is actually knitting that bizarre project she’s shown with at one point or just holding it a prop.

The answer may surprise you! Find out by subscribing to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen while you sit in the hotel parlor, waiting for your hot rum. This is not a euphemism, unless you want it to be.

And then, on to Shiny Things! Last week I finally made good on my promise to tackle Arrow’s recent 4K special editions of Dark City and Swordfish; it took long enough that I got to their new 4K release of Cobra, too. And Warner’s Lethal Weapon showed up, so I got that in as well. Also I rounded up the new releases of Warfare and Death of a Unicorn from A24, and Elevation’s The Monkey, because I’m conscientious like that. Are you a subscriber? You should be a subscriber. Subscribers are the best.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Winnipeg filmmaker and artist Noam Gonick,  whose latest documentary Pride: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance is now streaming free across Canada at the National Film Board website.

And Noam wanted to talk about an old favorite of his, which also happens to be an old favorite of mine.

That would be Uli Edel’s 1988 adaptation of Last Exit to Brooklyn, a film that made a fairly big splash on the art-house circuit back when it was first released, but then just sort of slid away down the memory hole once its DVD and Blu-ray editions went out of print. (And it continues to play hard to get: The film can be streamed on various platforms in the US, but not here in Canada.)

Even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a pretty good conversation and an excellent read of the film from Noam, who’s clearly been carrying it with him for decades. And if you have seen the film, you’ll be even more invested. So check it out!

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’re stomping down the street trying to inject some happiness into your neighbors’ miserable lives.

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things! I still haven’t published the reviews of Dark City and Swordfish I promised you all last week — I’m combining them with some other catalogue releases, you’ll see — but  I did take a good long look at Warner’s exquisite 4K edition of Sinners. Subscribe now so you don’t miss the next thing!

Oh, and speaking of newsletters, I turned up in Alex Goudge’s Dreams of Analog Sheep newsletter — talking about physical media, which I seem to be doing fairly often these days. John Hodgman was right: It’s fun to be a resident expert! Now I just have to wait for The Daily Show to come calling, I guess.

Last September, one of the highlights of my stint at TIFF was landing the world premiere of RT Thorne‘s 40 Acres, and watching his powerhouse dystopian allegory bring the house down for two straight nights. Today, with the movie in theaters across North America, I finally get RT onto Someone Else’s Movie — something I’ve been trying to do for years. He’s really busy, as you can imagine.

RT chose another bravura debut:  Blood Simple, the 1984 neo-noir that introduced the world to a couple of film nerds named Joel and Ethan Coen — along with an actor named Frances McDormand, a DP named Barry Sonnenfeld and a composer named Carter Burwell — and American art-house cinema would never be the same. Also, the movie’s pretty good, you should catch it sometime. (I understand the Criterion edition is pretty cheap at Barnes & Noble right now.)

And then you can enjoy RT’s episode! 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’re driving out to that place nobody goes to get rid of an inconvenient corpse.

After that, if you’re still on the fence about seeing 40 Acres on the big screen, I did an episode of CBC’s Day 6 arguing that very point! So listen to that too, and get going.

Once you’re back at home, cozy up with a nice glass of lemonade or whatever and get caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I rounded up the recent releases of Drop, Opus and The Wedding Banquet, and I’ve got a look at Arrow Video’s new 4K editions of Dark City and Swordfish coming up in the next day or so. If you subscribe now you’ll get it as soon as it’s published! Won’t that be fun?

Happy Canada Day, everybody! Today’s Someone Else’s Movie is all about celebrating our own, with writer-director Nik Sexton — whose Newfoundland culture-clash drama Skeet was one of my picks for last year’s TIFF Industry Selects lineup — tackling Incendies, the picture that set Montreal’s own Denis Villeneuve on the path to the superstar career he’s enjoying now.

If you haven’t seen it, Incendies is Denis’ very cinematic 2010 adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s stage play, which follows a brother and sister whose investigation of their late mother’s past ends up drawing a map of their own history. It was acclaimed on the festival circuit and parlayed that success into an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film, bringing Denis to Hollywood’s attention  and now he’s directing the next Bond picture. Wild, right? But totally deserved, and it’s nice to be able to celebrate it a decade and a half later.

So giddy up, eh? 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 flight over to the country of your mother’s birth, wondering what you’ll find.

And then you can get caught up on your Shiny Things reading, not that there was that much of it last week; between one thing and another, I was only able to review Criterion’s new 4K editions of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Francois Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould — two long-neglected masterworks that are brought back to vivid life in these new releases. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next edition! It’s good for you, probably!

The thing about programming is, it’s a lot of clicking and waiting. You start the next thing on the submissions pile, and then you wait for it to grab you. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. And every now and then — maybe half a dozen times, in my experience so far — you get to make a discovery.

That was the experience I had last year with Do I Know You from Somewhere?, a beautiful independent drama that marks the feature debut of Fredricton director Arianna Martinez. Built around an incandescent performance by stage actor Caroline Bell — her first time on-screen, incredibly enough — it’s a multiverse movie without a single special effect, unless you count the cast. (I may have used that in my TIFF note.) It’s on VOD now after a modest theatrical run, and you really ought to see it.

The VOD release was also my excuse to grab Arianna for the episode of Someone Else’s Movie that drops today. And she did not disappoint, choosing Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness, the creepy Gothic nightmare that flopped fairly spectacularly in early 2017, but has enough going on inside it that it … kind of deserves a reappraisal, maybe? So let this be the first salvo in that battle.

The sanitorium awaits you. 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 stare at the eel tank in the basement, watching the rhythms of their movement. What secrets do they hold? Or are they just eels? No, that can’t be it.

Also, you can get caught up on Shiny Things, because last week I caught up to another trio of new releases — The Shrouds, Last Breath and A Working Man — and went long on Universal’s magnificent 50th anniversary edition of Jaws, because of course I did. (If you subscribe you’ll get all the good stuff delivered right to your inbox and you can skip past this graph every week! Won’t that be fun?)

Oh, and also here’s that TIFF Original we made about Jaws in 2023, when I programmed it on the digital platform. Still proud of that one.

Want to feel old? On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome Rob Michaels, whose charming new comedy Please, After You is now available on digital and on demand in Canada, to discuss his favorite comedy: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the charming Judd Apatow production that vaulted Jason Segel out of second-banana status and launched Nicholas Stoller’s directorial career.

It’s a delightful movie — sweet, funny and unpredictable, and even with the whole Russell Brand thing it holds up very well after … seventeen years.

THAT’S RIGHT, SEVENTEEN YEARS. JESUS CHRIST, WHERE DOES THE TIME GO.

Sorry. (But seriously.)

It’s a fun conversation and I don’t think you can hear my gasp when Rob mentions he saw the film when he was in Grade 10. Rob’s movie is fun, too. You should check it out!

But first, listen to the podcast! 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 working diligently on your elaborate puppet musical about the secret heart of a mythological character who’s now in the public domain.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things! Which won’t be difficult, because I only published the paid edition last week (a revew of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, which I adored), but there’s a lot more coming up in the next few days. So if you’re not already a subscriber, maybe get on board?

Also, if you’re not yet sick of hearing me talk about how much I love Jaws, go watch my epic conversation with Eric Marchen for his Untitled Movie Podcast, in which we spend far too long indulging our mutual love for Steven Spielberg’s genre-defining blockbuster.  It’s also available as an audio podcast, if you’d rather not stare at my big shiny head for 87 minutes.

Also also! SEMcast is on Blu-ray! The cheery elves at Canadian International Pictures reached out to ask if they could include Becky Shrimpton’s episode of the podcast on their new special edition of Robert Fortier’s The Devil At Your Heels, and I was delighted to be part of the package; CIP does terrific work, and their service to Canadian cinema is currently unmatched.

Which reminds me, I really need to pick up their Roadkill BD.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I finally welcome Chloé Robichaud to the show. I’ve been a fan of Chloé’s work ever since Sarah Prefers to Run arrived in 2013; a decade later, I got to introduce the world to Days of Happiness at TIFF, which was something of a highlight.

But it wasn’t until now — with Chloé’s new film Two Women on screens in Toronto and Montreal, and opening in Vancouver on Friday, following its Canadian premiere at Secret Movie Club earlier this winter — that I was able to get her on the podcast. And even though we didn’t have a lot of time, we had a really great conversation because Chloé picked Jean-Marc Valleé’s Café de Flore, the deeply personal 2011 drama that looks more and more like his masterpiece. And you can’t discuss Valleé without engaging with creativity, inspiration, structure, and life itself — so yeah, this was a good one. Christ, I miss him.

Anyway, you know what to do. 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 as you sleepwalk through your life, waiting for your soulmate to find you.

And then you can dig into some jam-packed editions of Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, The Informant!, Presence and Black Bag, which all arrived in 4K over the last few weeks, and Shout! Studios’ glorious Blaxploitation Classics, Vol. 1 boxed set. Have you seen Across 110th Street recently? It really holds up. Anyway, they’re free to read but if you felt like subscribing that’d be swell too.