TIFF has reached its mid-point, and while I’ve been doing a few things here and there I’ve been pleasantly out of the loop on most of the happenings. It’s been relaxing!

But if you were worried, I still got my annual Festival moment of surrealism: Yesterday afternoon while dismounting from a bike in front of the Royal York hotel, I nearly kicked Bob Odenkirk in the leg. There was no hostility to it; he was doing his best to avoid a crowd of lookie-loos and walked right into the docking station. And before you ask: Yes, I know better than to attack Bob Odenkirk on the street. I’ve seen Nobody.

Speaking of surrealism and unexpected violence, let me introduce you to Todd Rohal, the guest on today’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie. He’s the guy who made the off-kilter indies The Guatemalan Handshake and The Catechism Cataclysm — the latter of which was tackled by Mel Eslyn on her SEMcast a couple of years back — and tomorrow he premieres his latest venture, the inglorious comedy Fuck My Son!, in TIFF’s Midnight Madness.  (Tickets for that show, and Thursday’s repeat screening in the Scotiabank IMAX room, should still be available at the links here.)

Todd wanted to talk about the cinema of George Kuchar, using his 1966 short film Hold Me While I’m Naked as the entry point into the underground filmmaker’s lurid, obsessive universe of underdogs and freaks — perhaps best expressed in the 160-minute hardcore porn epic Thundercrack!, which also comes up in the conversation. It’s a lively and digressive episode, which is part of the fun; I’m honestly not sure how we swerved into an appreciation of the artistic legacy of “Weird Al” Yankovic, but there you go. I cast a wide net and it’s always fun to see what it pulls in.

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 have a miserable, lonely shower, because that’s all you believe you deserve.

But you deserve so much more! Todd’s episode isn’t the only one I released since last Tuesday; I also dropped a special Friday show with Redlights and Aberdeen director Eva Thomas, whose new feature Nika and Madison premiered at TIFF over the weekend, talking at length about her love of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

I love it too, and our conversation was one of the most earnest and moving I’ve had with anybody all year. If you’ve already subscribed to the podcast it should be in your queue already, but browser listeners can stream it right here.

And that brings us to Shiny Things, where last week I wrote about Via Vision’s Impact edition of Hud and Canadian International Pictures’ exceptional restoration-cum-resurrection of David Secter’s groundbreaking queer drama Winter Kept Us Warm, and also had fun recounting my experience of the mobile Criterion Closet, which was the biggest draw on Festival Street last weekend. Subscribers already know which titles I picked; if you’re curious, there’s a really easy way to find out.

It’s TIFF time! And while this is the first festival in 36 years that I won’t be either covering or working for the festival, I’ve got a few things going on around it — so if you see me down around the Lightbox, say hi!

(I know, it’s weird. But say hi anyway!)

And since it’s TIFF time, the next few episodes of Someone Else’s Movie will be devoted to the festival, starting today with Little Lorraine director and co-writer Andy Hines on Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 breakout Sexy Beast — still the only film to make Ben Kingsley a terrifying screen presence, even though Ray Winstone’s meant to be a pretty hard man all on his own.

It’s a good conversation, barring a couple of fuzzy audio moments, with Andy finding some intriguing echoes in his own work and even doing a passable impression of Kingsley’s ferocious gangster.

So join us, why don’t you? 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 by the pool, assuming you’ve got sweat-resistant earbuds.

And then it’s time to catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I tackled the brand-new discs of The Phoenician Scheme and Virmiglio, and the resurrections of Saving Face, Blue (RIP Terence Stamp) and Fade In. Even smaller pictures deserve love and care, you know? Have you subscribed yet? This is a call to action: Subscribe! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

(… seriously, is he dead yet? Queen Elizabeth died just before the 2022 festival, it’d be a nice little echo.)

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has been awaiting release for a while now — since early March, in fact, which feels like a lifetime ago for all sorts of reasons.

So I was happy to listen back to it and hear that everything Catherine Legault and I discussed was still more or less relevant, and now that her new film Larry (they/them) is available to stream on CBC Gem in Canada you get to hear it too!

Catherine picked another documentary, Zachary Heinzerling’s 2013 Cutie and the Boxer, which places us inside the marriage of Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, two Japanese expats living in New York — not always harmoniously. It’s an intimate look at the lives of working artists, and the compromises they make — or refuse to make — for each other, and what happens when a couple’s fortunes start to move in opposing directions.  It’s very good, is what it is, and I’m really glad she chose it.

Want to hear her thoughts? Get to 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 as you paint your masterpiece — or drink yourself into a stupor while your partner paints theirs.

And then, since Jaws is returning to theaters this weekend, you can catch up to that episode of Commotion I did last week with Rad and Tomris Laffly! After that, you can catch up on Shiny Things; it was a fairly quiet week, all I did was tackle A24’s Bring Her Back and Warner’s 4K upgrade of The Conjuring. Of course, if you’re a paying subscriber you also know I reviewed some other stuff in the weekly Friday What’s Worth Watching missive. So subscribe already!

As if the world wasn’t already in the toilet, we’re in the middle of an absolutely epic internet outage over here. Our fiber feed went down on Sunday morning and won’t likely be restored until early tomorrow, so I’m using my phone as a hotspot and doing everything through mobile data. It turns out hotpost technology has gotten really good since the last time I tried to use it, and I’ve been able to post an edition of Shiny Things and this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie on schedule. So that’s nice.

Let’s start with the podcast: This week I welcome Melanie Oates, whose quietly excellent character study Sweet Angel Baby is opening in select Canadian theaters this Friday, to discuss a film that’s very dear to her heart: Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s shattering 2010 drama about a passionate but unstable relationship reaching its natural end. If you’ve seen it, you know how powerful Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are as two people who can’t reconnect no matter how hard they try; if you haven’t, I’d recommend you seek it out before you listen to the episode because otherwise we sound like we’re wildly overpraising a simple domestic study. But it’s so much more than that, thanks to its combination of talent and the circumstances in which it was produced — even if those circumstances probably weren’t ideal.

It’s all in the episode, and you can find it in the usual places: 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 driving aimlessly around your small town, wondering where it all went wrong.

And then you can cheer up with Shiny Things, which checks out a bad romance of its own: Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, freshly reissued in a three-disc Blu-ray set from Via Vision’s Imprint label alongside the first-ever BD releases of Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly and Cliff Robertson’s J.W. Coop. I wrote about all three, and also took some time to appreciate Arrow Video’s new releases of Ole Bornedal’s Nightwatch duology and Larry Cohen’s cracked masterpiece The Stuff; if you had a subscription, of course, they’d already be in your inbox. Probably you should get one, huh.

Catch you next week. Say a prayer for my internet service, would you?

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.