It’s August, let’s watch a movie with men in T-shirts and shorts.

Not just any men, though — Eric Liddell  and Harold Abrahams, the young men who’d become British Olympians in 1924, running very fast and very hard and becoming friends along the way.

That’s the story of Hugh Hudson’s 1981 historical sports film Chariots of Fire, a movie that four decades later is remembered mostly for its score than anything else … but which has plenty of other elements worth celebrating, as actor Graham Abbey tells me in this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t remember it solely for Vangelis’ score, of course. Just remember, it contains multitudes.

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly,  or download it directly from the web. It’s jolly good, you know.

And then make sure you’ve caught up on the latest editions of my Shiny Things newsletter — I wrote about Amazon’s fun new time-travel show Paper Girls and Kino Lorber’s 4K release of Eastern Promises in Sunday’s paid edition, and the bizarre experience of stumbling across a terrible, terrible movie I had totally forgotten seeing – twice – as a kid in the free weekly mailing.  

I think that’s it for this week, other than a few hundred e-mails I need to send. Oh, and you should also know that I Love My Dad is opening at the Lightbox on Friday; it’s very funny and very weird, and this Claudia Sulewski kid is really going places.

The frenzy of pre-festival work is slowing down, but this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has ties to TIFF in a couple of ways: My guest is appearing to promote a film that played there last year, and he chose to talk about a movie I saw there almost thirty years ago.

The guest would be Adeel Akhtar, whom you may know from Four Lions, Stranger Things, Enola Holmes and Sweet Tooth among dozens of screen credits, the latest of which is Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava — in which he plays a proper romantic lead opposite Clare Rushbrook —  and the film is Gurinder Chadha’s 1993 breakout Bhaji on the Beach, which arrived at precisely the right time to make him think about storytelling, representation and all the other things he didn’t believe were accessible to people that looked like him.

It’s a thoughtful, engaging conversation, and we also discuss Ali & Ava at length. That film is opening across Canada on Friday; in Toronto, we’ve got it exclusively at the Lightbox. Don’t miss out.

So once again I am asking you: Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web.

And while you’re doing web stuff, subscribe to my Shiny Things newsletter for crying out loud! In addition to my reviews of Nope, the 4K release of Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Criterion edition of Devil in a Blue Dress, the latest edition has this nifty giveaway contest I’m sure you don’t want to miss out on.  Contest closes at noon tomorrow (Wednesday, July 27th); instructions are in the newsletter. C’mon, it’s so worth it.

So it turns out that when you work for a film festival that takes place in September, the real crunch time is in June and July. I suppose I should have seen this coming, but after 35 years of “oh, it’s early summer, nothing really happens until TIFF ramps up in mid-August” it was a little bit of a surprise. Everything’s fine, don’t worry, I’m just a little behind on blog posts.

Still, Someone Else’s Movie is sticking resolutely to its Tuesday schedule, and this week we put out a pretty great one, if I do say so myself: Actor, playwright and now author Tracy Dawson joins me to celebrate James L. Brooks’ wonderful Broadcast News, his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment and the film that cemented Holly Hunter’s status as one of the brightest and most interesting actors of her generation.

It probably helped that Raising Arizona had been released just a few months earlier; has any other actor come out swinging like that? Like, ever?

Anyway, Tracy loves the movie as much as I do, and we had a lively, wide-ranging conversation that you’re definitely going to enjoy. You know the deal: Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or be all old-school and download it directly from the web. That’s what Aaron Altman would do.

And then, go catch up to Shiny Things! Last week I reviewed Robert Eggers’ big, stompy action fable The Northman and Kino Lorber’s marvelous 4K edition of Out of Sight, and offered some thoughts about how great it was to see Ms. Marvel stick its landing by remembering exactly who Kamala Khan is.

There’s more good stuff coming this week, including a review of Jordan Peele’s Nope (spoiler: Yep) and a look at Criterion’s snappy new edition of Devil in a Blue Dress, so if you have yet to subscribe you’re gonna want to do that. There’s a giveaway coming!

Told you we’d be breaking away from Someone Else’s Movie‘s unofficial horror run — although this week’s episode is a kind of soft uncoupling, given that my guest, South African director Jenna Cato Bass, has a new genre work, Good Madam, dropping on Shudder today.

It’s really good, constructing a slippery, character-driven nightmare that evokes Jordan Peele’s brilliant Get Out reconfigured for a post-Apartheid dynamic. You should watch it.

Jenna did not pick a horror movie for the podcast, though. Technically she didn’t pick a movie at all, but when she suggested we tackle the brilliant NBC ensemble procedural Homicide: Life on the Street in its freaking entirety … well, what am I, a chump?

Obviously we didn’t do justice to a show that ran for seven seasons and a movie — I don’t even think the name “Adena Watson” is spoken in the episode — but boy, was it a fun conversation. Whether you’re Team Pembleton, Team Bayliss or Team Give Meldrick Some Damn Credit For Once, you’ll want to join us for this one,

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web, why dont’cha. And yes, I absolutely think Munch killed Steve Buscemi. Squirrelly little bastard had it coming.

Also, in this week’s Shiny Things I explained why Rogers’ recent internet outage just proves the value of physical media, praised the return of Only Murders in the Building and even spent some time pontificating about the slow-motion disaster of Boris Johnson’s prime ministership. I contain multitudes! Subscribe and found out just how many!

I have no idea why the last few weeks of Someone Else’s Movie have been so horror-heavy; maybe it’s just where we are culturally right now? Next week’s episode will be a break, though it does feature a filmmaker who’s just made her first horror film, so … I don’t know what to tell you. Enjoy the ride, I guess?

This week offers no ambiguity, however. My guest is Gigi Saul Guerrero, a dyed-in-the-bloody wool genre enthusiast, and on the occasion of Hollywood Suite premiering her Into the Dark episode Culture Shock last night, she’s here to tell the story of falling in love with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist at far too young an age. I think you will dig it, as the kids say.

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then go subscribe to my Shiny Things newsletter, why don’t you, because if you haven’t you’ve already missed my review of Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On and my thoughts on Tom Cruise turning sixty this week and why Edge of Tomorrow will likely stand as the greatest exploration of how he sees himself and how everyone else does, along with plenty of other fun stuff. It’s right here, it’s not hiding or anything. Come join me!

It’s all Strawberry Mansion all the time this week. But that’s a good thing — the movie’s really quite lovely, and I’m happy to get behind it.

So on the latest episode of Someone Else’s Movie, filmmaker Albert Birney — who wrote and directed the movie with friend (and star) Kentucker Audley — tells me how an early encounter with Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street sparked a lifelong fascination with dream cinema, and this week’s edition of my Shiny Things newsletter leads off with my review of the Music Box Films Blu-ray, which is just stuffed with special features.

I also offered my thoughts as to why the new Star Trek series Strange New Worlds soars while the new Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi stumbles, so if you’re a huge nerd (like me!) you’re not going to want to miss that. Have you subscribed yet? I hope you’ve subscribed.

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web if you’re feeling all extra-clicky.

And then get yourself to the TIFF website and book tickets for Friday’s 7:30 pm screening of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, because I’ll be there to introduce the film and host a Q&A with director Dean Fleischer-Camp afterward. Marcel the Shell is one of the most oddly beautiful movies you’ll see all year; please come down and join us. You won’t regret it.

Yep, you read that right: Today, I’m dropping the 400th episode of Someone Else’s Movie, and honestly I’m as surprised as anyone. This little project has  brought me so much joy over the years — as well as some wonderful new friends — that I can’t imagine my life without it.

So it’s just about perfect that this week’s episode should finally land Jordan Gavaris, whose off-center charm you’ll remember fondly from Orphan Black and possibly Take Two; he uses his flair for comic frenzy to excellent effect in The Lake, a new Prime Video series from Killjoys writer and producer Julian Doucet. (It’s nice to keep it all in the Canadian genre family, isn’t it?)

And Jordan picked Luca Guadanino’s Suspiria, the Call Me By Your Name director’s 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic about strange goings-on at a German dance academy. I love the original beyond reason; I did not much care for the remake. But Jordan makes a pretty good case for it, and I was very happy to have a lively, even impassioned debate for this very special episode. Also, The Lake is fun and you should watch it.

Join the celebration! Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web and play it at your leisure.

Elsewhere, there’s a new edition of Shiny Things, in which I review new Blu-ray editions of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and Girls Nite Out — the latter of which I had never even heard until Arrow’s announcement landed in my inbox — and if you’re looking for something to do this weekend you should come down to the Lightbox on Saturday for the 2 pm screening of Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, a typically loopy examination of frailty, vanity and perversion from the director of Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric.

I’ll be there to introduce the film and conduct a virtual Q&A  iwth Strickland afterward, so if you have even a passing interest in his singular cinematic weirdness, you’ll want to be there for that. We have fun.

I first met Alanna Bale on my 50th birthday — which was also the day of that Killjoys set visit, where she was introduced to the assembled press as the big bad of the final season.

But because the show was shooting its fourth and fifth seasons back to back, none of us knew anything about her character, known only as The Lady, or how she’d be deployed within the storyline. So we had to interview her without knowing anything at all, which turned out to be a fun conceptual challenge.

Of course, now that the series has aired we all know The Lady turned out to be an excellent Big Bad, and Alanna’s performance aligned perfectly with Killjoys‘ realm of high-stakes space adventure and goofball sincerity. So it was a pleasure to catch up with her nearly four years later — with her new movie Kicking Blood rolling onto VOD next week — for an episode of  Someone Else’s Movie, in which we discuss a movie I’m frankly amazed no one has mentioned in nearly 400 episodes: The Blair Witch Project. Alanna came to that film in a pretty unique way too, as it turns out.

No spoilers, just listen. Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web. And  while you’re subscribing to stuff you can catch up to last week’s Extremely Art House edition of Shiny Things, in which I looked at the new Blu-rays of Vive L’Amour, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Funeral and ‘Round Midnight.

Or maybe you’d rather listen to me goof around on CBC’s Day 6 about all the alternate Jurassic Park scripts that never happened. I dunno, I’m not omniscient.

Look, you can’t really do justice to a film as complex as Inception in under 40 minutes. But you take what you can get on press days, so this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie finds me skipping merrily through Nolan’s multi-layered narrative  with my guests, Plan A directors Yoav and Doron Paz.

And you know what? We got to some interesting places, discussing Nolan’s gift for delivering reams of exposition in a propulsive fashion, his skill at using the largest canvas available to him, his regrettably reductive approach to writing women and children and his ability to convince you he’s stuck the landing even as he leaves you in ambiguity. Pretty cool trick, honestly.

Go listen! Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or go old-school and download it directly from the web. And then don’t forget to subscribe to Shiny Things; this week, I reviewed David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Arrow’s new special edition of Wild Things and Sony’s UHD releases of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. I also vented a little about the re-election of Doug Ford. Take your therapy where you can, I always say.

I’ve been sitting on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie until everyone’s had enough time to see Hello (Again), and after two full months I figure we’re good. (You’ve watched it, right?)

That’s because director Melanie Chung and I discuss the plot and ending of her charming CBC Gem series in depth at the end of the episode … which was no big deal to us, since we spoiled the ending of her chosen film, Denis Villeneuve’s all-star 2013 thriller Prisoners, just six or seven minutes into the conversation. I mean, the movie opened nine years ago.

I was middling on Prisoners back in the day, but coming back to it after almost a decade was an interesting experience. Not only is it absolutely the 9/11 allegory I thought it was, but it’s a template for Villeneuve’s brooding, emotional approach to the epic projects that would follow this first studio effort. It’s a little more rattled, but that suits the subject matter. Also, the cast acts the hell out of it, hinting at conflicts and motivations seething beneath facades of courtesy and decency. It’s all fuel for a really passionate conversation about drama and storytelling, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

You know how it goes: Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly, or download it directly from the web like some kind of hermit.

And hey, have you subscribed to Shiny Things yet? This week’s edition covers the new Criterion editions of Double Indemnity, The Last Waltz and For All Mankind, Paramount’s 35th anniversary release of The Untouchables and the death of Ray Liotta.  Just five dollars a month. I think it’s worth it, and I’m almost never wrong about this stuff.