Paid subscribers to my Shiny Things newsletter might recognize the guest on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, since I reviewed Kourtney Roy‘s Kryptic a couple of weeks ago.

Everybody else, meet Kourtney! She’s a photographer and filmmaker whose first feature is an eerie, unsettling mood piece starring the Scots actor Shannon Pirrie as a woman who becomes entirely unmoored after an encounter with something inexplicable in a Pacific Northwest forest. It’s newly available on VOD in North America, but if you’re in Toronto you can also catch it at the Imagine Carlton Cinemas at least until Thursday.

And Kourtney wanted to discuss another story of transformation: District 9, the alien-apartheid allegory from South Africa that introduced the world to Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, and which still packs a punch a decade and a half later … even as it makes clear that the flaws that hindered Blomkamp’s subsequent films were always a part of his toolkit. Kourtney loves it without reservation, though, and I let her exuberance steer us. I regret nothing.

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 as you wander amongst redwoods, trying to figure out what else might be out there with you.

And then you can get back to Shiny Things, where I was especially busy last week, writing up the new Criterion editions of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising from Criterion, 4K discs of The Andromeda Strain, Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X from Arrow Video, and a new 4K restoration of Scent of a Woman under the Shout! Select banner. There’s even more coming this week; maybe subscribe so you don’t miss anything cool? It’s appreciated.

Lubitsch, man. Over more than a decade of Someone Else’s Movie,  this is the first time someone has brought one of the master farceur’s pictures to the show — and I’m so happy that Daniel Robbins chose To Be or Not to Be for his episode.

Daniel is the director and co-writer of the dark comedy Bad Shabbos (now playing in the US, and opening Thursday in Toronto and Vancouver), and he understands the specifically Yiddish nature of Lubitsch’s storytelling: The banter, the sniping, the escalation, the callbacks and, well, the Hitler of it all.

I hadn’t revisited To Be or Not to Be since Criterion’s Blu-ray came out a decade or so back, and it was such a pleasure to see that Jack Benny and Carole Lombard really were in peak form, and that the Nazi stuff lands even harder now, given the state of things. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or you only know the Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft remake — which is fun, but a lot broader than Lubitsch’s version — you should certainly catch up to it when you get the chance. Also you should listen to the episode, because it’s a lot of fun.

And you know how to do that, don’t you? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy it while you’re gluing on your false beard in an eleventh-hour bid to save your theater troupe from the Gestapo. But I’ve said too much already.

Then you can catch up on Shiny Things, which won’t be hard since I only ran one column last week, tackling the new 4K editions of Mickey 17 and Better Man from Warner and Paramount, respectively. Weird, wild stuff, as the kids say. And there’s more to come!

Oh, and also remember when I went to the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival last November? I was on a panel with Slamdance’s Anna Lee Lawson and Calgary’s Brian Owens about how to make films people care about, and it’s up on YouTube now. You might enjoy watching it, if you’re an aspiring filmmaker or you just want to hear stories about how the worst people think they make the best art.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Keeya King, an actor you’ve probably seen more often than you realize, especially if you’re a genre fan. She’s had key roles in Van Helsing and Yellowjackets, popped up in Jigsaw and The Handmaid’s Tale and Batwoman, and just joined the cast of Gen V, Amazon’s spinoff of The Boys. And she stars in a new thriller, Guess Who, that’s now streaming on Tubi in the US and Hollywood Suite in Canada.

And Keeya brought a fun one onto the show: Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s first solo directorial venture and the film that let Saoirse Ronan have a little fun for a change, playing a nervy Sacramento teenager whose decision to reinvent herself as a free spirit in her senior year starts a series of fairly silly events — and further complicates her relationship with her parents, played by Laurie Metcalf and Tracey Letts. It’s a heartfelt coming-of-age comedy with terrific performances and a thoughtful point of view. So there’s a lot to dig into, and Keeya was more than up for it.

Give us a listen! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and put it on in the background while you work a wooden spoon under your cast to scratch your itchy arm.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just written about Shout! Studios’ new 4K restoration of Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath and Arrow Video’s oddly charming box set of nine no-budget crime pictures produced by Japan’s Toei studio in the VHS era: V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets and Betrayal.  Subscribe already! It’s good for the soul!

Oh, also I appear on this week’s episode of the Deep Cuts: The Game podcast, doing my best to  point out the most interesting cast members of Happy Gilmore, Back to the Future Part II and Addams Family Values. I am still not entirely sure I understand how the game works, but I had a good time and that’s what really matters, right?

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome writer-director Jason Buxton, who broke out at TIFF in 2012 with his simmering drama Blackbird — starring friend of the show Connor Jessup — and returned to the festival last September with Sharp Corner, an equally unnerving psychodrama starring Ben Foster as a family man who becomes obsessed with the idea of emergency preparation, and Cobie Smulders as his understandably concerned wife. It opens in theaters in the US and Canada this Friday, so this was the perfect excuse to get Jason on the show,

And Jason picked another quietly devastating drama: The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s 1997 adaptation of Rick Moody’s autobiographical novel about two families in a small Connecticut town confronting the death of hope in Nixon’s America.

I’m oversimplifying, of course, but that’s pretty much it — exquisitely performed by a truly incredible cast that includes Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Jamey Sheridan, Sigourney Weaver as the adults and Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd as their kids. It’s a film that offers a lot of room for interpretation, and Jason was more than up for digging in.

So listen up! 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 on a stalled train waiting for the power to come back up.

And then you can dig into last week’s Shiny Things, where I wrote about Criterion’s new 4K editions of Sean Baker’s Anora and Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and an excellent trio of UHD upgrades from Warner: Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider. If you haven’t already subscribed … well, there’s a very simple way to do that, you know.

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!