We are in desperate need of some seasonal cheer around these parts, so I’m dedicating the Christmas-to-New Year’s run of Someone Else’s Movie to celebrating Rob Reiner’s most-loved films — partly because they’re both great episodes, and partly because I needed to do something, anything, to address that horrible loss. I don’t have a lot left, you guys. This has to help.

So today, I’m re-releasing Kristin Booth‘s lovely episode on The Princess Bride, and next week it’ll be followed by Allana Harkin on When Harry Met Sally, because that’s actually a New Year’s Eve movie and how could I pass that up.

Get on it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web, round up the Brute Squad to storm the castle, and enjoy.

Fun fact: It turns out this episode was released in April of 2022, days after I left NOW for TIFF. The whole world is different now.

Oh, also, the usual heads-up about Shiny Things: This week I’m dropping my lists of the year’s best discs and movies (coming soon), and the Christmas Day What’s Worth Watching is gonna be crammed solid with big-screen recommendations. Gift yourself a present and subscribe so you don’t miss out!

And even if you don’t, I hope you get some peace during the holidays. The storm has to end sometime, right?

Aimee Carrero has been in a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. The Americans, Blindspot and Your Friends and Neighbors; Mack & Rita, The Menu and Spirited. She’s the voices of She-Ra and Elena of Avalor!

And most recently, she co-starred with Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery in Christopher Leone’s snappy, cynical paramedic comedy-drama Code 3, which I programmed in TIFF’s Industry Selects series last year. And now that it’s available on Blu-ray, and coming to VOD on Friday, this felt like a perfect time to invite Aimee onto Someone Else’s Movie. So we did that!

Aimee did not disappoint, delivering the most enthusiastic, informed take on Mike Nichols’ adaptation of The Birdcage that I could have asked for. (She even had Mark Harris’ biography of Nichols by her side; I love it when people show up with reference materials.) However you feel about the film, the episode offers a welcome distraction from all the truly horrible shit that’s been going on this year. I needed it, and maybe you do too.

So make a mai-tai, switch on your sunlamp and give yourself a little pleasure! 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 while you get your wig just right.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, because last week’s column was a doozy: I tackled Severin Films’ expansive, exhaustive Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection, an eleven-disc set that assembles the original Emmanuelle trilogy in pristine 4K restorations — the better to see what all the fuss was about — along with hours of extras and even a whole other feature. The perfect last-minute stocking stuffer? Very possibly!

What’s that? You haven’t susbcribed? Jeez! Go take care of that, and  maybe consider trying out the paid tier, where you’ll also get my weekly What’s Worth Watching dispatches. Otherwise you might end up wasting two hours on something that doesn’t deserve you.

I’m here to help, you know.

If you were paying any attention to the Toronto Film Critics Association’s awards on Sunday, you might have seen Eephus appear as a runner-up for our Best First Feature award, alongside Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby. Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron was the winner, but honestly all three are excellent debuts, and Eephus has been turning up in that conversation all over the place this month.

That’s because with Eephus, director  and co-writer Carson Lund creates a beautiful little pocket universe of melancholy, following a group of men in 1990s Massacheussets who’ve assembled to play their last ballgame at a local stadium that’s about to be demolished. They don’t want to talk about it, exactly, but it’s very clearly on their minds, and Lund lets us share the impending sense of loss that settles over the field as the innings roll by. It’s a small but potent ensemble drama, and if you missed it during its very modest theatrical run you could certainly do worse than pull it up on Mubi or VOD tonight.

And for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie, Carson wanted to dive into the existential grindhouse vibe of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, the one where James Taylor and Dennis Wilson challenge Warren Oates to a race across America, for reasons none of them fully understands. Hell of a picture, as they say, even if Roger Corman didn’t see the appeal.

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 your 8-track player while you roll on endlessly down the highway.

And then get yourself caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I spun up the new 4K releases of I Know Where I’m Going! and Howards End — one a Criterion release, the other a former Criterion release now available from the Cohen Entertainment Group — and found them both entirely beguiling.

Go check that out, and maybe think about upgrading to the paid tier so you can get the weekly What’s Worth Watching edition; this Friday, I’ll be writing about Bryan Fuller’s delirious Dust Bunny among others. You don’t want to miss that, do you?

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer and director Tasha Hubbard, who shifts from documentaries to dramatic features with her new film Meadowlarks, opening across Canada this Friday.

It’s an adaptation of sorts of Tasha’s 2017 doc Birth of a Family (which is streaming at the NFB’s website), with Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush as adult siblings reuniting in Banff decades after being separated from their parents — and each other — in the Sixties Scoop.

Meadowlarks is small, quiet and profoundly felt, using the spectacular backdrop of Banff as a subtle way of reminding us about the colonial origins of Canada, and how much work still needs to be done to heal both the land and its people. And I wish I’d thought of that when we were recording Tasha’s episode, because the film she chose — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone — is similarly about using a specific landscape as an element of the story. In that film, it’s the sparse rural environment of the Ozarks, where Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree tries to save her own family by tracking down her missing father. The tension and urgency of Granik’s thriller couldn’t seem more different from Tasha’s more thoughtful cinema, but the two directors are connected in more ways than one, and we dig into that over the course of the episode.

(Except for the Banff thing, dammit.)

You’re gonna listen, right? 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 race from one house to another in search of an answer you don’t  really want to find.

There’s a lot of ground to cover over at Shiny Things, too; over the last week I’ve covered the new releases of Universal Language,  Splitsville,  Together,  Red Sonja and Him, as well as Criterion’s special edition of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels and Shout! Select’s 4K upgrade of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. All good stuff! (Well, except maybe for Him. That one’s a mess.) And there’s more coming … so why not subscribe and get each newsletter as soon as it’s released? It’ll save you all that clicking!

On this week’s Someone Else’s Movie I welcome a colleague and pal, film critic Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail. And here’s here for a book launch!

See, Barry’s spent a truly terrifying amount of his free time writing Welcome to the Family, a book about the evolution and cultural significance of the Fast & Furious franchise, and now that said book is coming out next week I couldn’t pass up the chance to have him on the show.

And what did he want to talk about? Fast Five, of course —  the 2011 chapter that took the series from low-level car stunts to actual spectacle, shunting our antiheroes into a heist plot that culminates in an almost absurdist set piece: It’s the one where they rob a bank by stealing the entire vault. Pure mayhem, and a glorious thing to experience with a crowd — and both the franchise and its fans have chasing that high ever since. I wish I’d thought of that line yesterday when I wrote and recorded the intro.

Anyway! Barry uses Fast Five as a way to put the entire series under the microscope, and it makes for a very fun episode. You should check it out! 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 practice saying “family” in a low growl.

And if you’re in Toronto, think about coming down to the Hot Docs Cinema next Tuesday for Barry’s book launch, or next Friday to see him introduce a screening of the 2001 Point Break knockoff that started it all, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious. A quarter-century later, can anyone still live their life a quarter-mile at a time? Barry knows the answer.

Also, there are new editions of Shiny Things to read; last week I wrote about the freshly released discs of  The Naked Gun, The Toxic Avenger, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Spinal Tap II — though only the first two are really worth your time — and Universal’s 40th anniversary edition of the Back to the Future trilogy, the oft-released property’s best package yet. C’mon, subscribe already! It’s good for the soul!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie offers a conversation I never thought I’d have: My guests, Australian filmmakers Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, wanted to talk about a kids’ movie. Or rather, a kids’ movie that they saw when they were kids and continue to love as adults beyond all reason. That film is Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

But honestly? As IP sequels from the early 2000s go, Monsters Unleashed is a lot better than it has any right to be — James Gunn’s script recaptures the energy of the animated series without overdoing it (and yes, it’s that James Gunn), the cast is having a great time and the CG Scooby doesn’t look like a weirdly animated piece of liver the way it did in Raja Gosnell’s first crack at the character. And there’s a streak of playful foolishness that Emma and Leela echo lovingly in their own debut, Lesbian Space Princess … a giddy animated sci-fi comedy that’s going to be a cult classic for a whole new generation, just you wait.

Check it out! You can find 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 running away from the ghoul, goblin or ghost of your choice. It’s good cardo, I hear.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, where in the last week I’ve tackled Imprint’s lovely Blu-ray set of Ang Lee’s Father Knows Best trilogy, and the new 4K editions of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from Shout! Studios and Warner, respectively. It’s really easy to subscribe — just click here and let it happen, man.

Someone Else’s Movie gets meta this week, as I’m joined by French actor Guillaume Marbeck, who plays French director Jean-Luc Godard in Richard Linklater’s delightful new movie Nouvelle Vague, to talk about Godard’s revolutionary debut Breathless … the film we see Marbeck’s Godard making in Linklater’s film.

It’s a house of mirrors, but a really fun one, and I’m indebted to veteran publicist Winnie Wong for coming up with the idea. Time constraints meant the episode is tighter than I would have liked, but that also rhymes with the circumstances in which JLG made his breakthrough, so let’s just pretend it was intentional.

I did trim one thing, though — an early moment where Guillaume asked if I wanted him to record the episode in character as Godard, which I admit I briefly considered. But you know what they say: Podcasts are supposed to be the truth at 96 kilobits per second.

Anyway, give it a listen! 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 race around the streets of Paris with a camera, a girl and a gun. That’s all you need, really.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, if you’ve fallen behind; last week, I wrote about Relay and Clown in a Cornfield and A24’s coffee-table-friendly release of Ti West’s X Trilogy, and took a moment to savor the stunning Warner Archive Collection release of The Curse of Frankenstein, which reached me just a little too late for Halloween but belongs on your shelf whenever you can grab it.  If you aren’t already a subscriber … well, you should be! So subscribe!

Oh, and Dick Cheney is finally dead. That’s nice.