… okay, so I’ve been a little busy. My TIFF duties ramped up over the weekend, and I’ve been offered more intros and Q&As and even an invitation to the odd social event.

It’s still nowhere near as exhausting as covering the festival as a journalist, mind you. Sometime Sunday morning, I realized it was the total absence of the undercurrent of anxiety that comes from racing from one event to the next without any assurance that said event will go as planned, or that I’ll be turned away from a screening I’ve been standing in line to see for an hour. This is the first TIFF in decades that I haven’t experienced that, and honestly? It’s kind of wonderful.

I was still doing the racing-around thing, though, and as a result I fell behind in my blogging duties. So I’m here to catch you up on the two episodes of Someone Else’s Movie I released over the last few days.

On Friday, Sophie Jarvis — the director of the excellent festival drama Until Branches Bend (starring friend of the show Grace Glowicki) — tackled Mike Leigh’s ensemble drama Another Year, a film about a retired couple and their circle of miserable friends that can be interpreted in at least two very different ways.

And earlier this week, I celebrated the TIFF debut of my friend Chandler Levack‘s terrific first feature I Like Movies by pulling her episode on Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s Can’t Hardly Wait out of the SEMcast vault, because it turns out she was setting up everything she’d do in her film seven years later. It’s kind of amazing, really.

So obviously, you should check them both out! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episodes right away, or download them directly from the web. Here’s Sophie’s episode, and here’s Chandler’s.

And of course I’m still plugging away at the Shiny Things newsletter,  Last week I wrote about I Like Movies and Paramount’s new 4K editions of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the five films that followed, and while this week’s editions might be a little late as well, I think they’ll be worth your time. Have you subscribed yet? Why not? You’re making Elvis sad!

Oh, also my friend Dave Voigt asked me to do an episode of his In the Seats podcast about my transition from journalist to TIFF programmer, and it was a really nice conversation.

We recorded it a couple of weeks ago, so I sound a little more uncertain about what’s coming; honestly, if I’d known how much fun this was going to be, I’d have been bouncing off the walls.

TIFF is upon us, and while I lay out my schedule of intros and interviews — let’s hear it for that transferable skill set! — you can sit back and enjoy the latest episode of Someone Else’s Movie, where I introduce y’all to Toronto filmmaker V.T. Nayani, whose first feature This Place premieres at the festival on Friday, and is quietly devastating.

Nayani’s choice of movie, though? It’s anything but. She picked the delightful teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, the 1998 smash that made instant stars of Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, introduced Shakespeare to millennials who weren’t quite old enough to see Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and made perfect use of Larry Miller and Allison Janney.

Come join the fun! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web like Kat Stratford probably would, the better to enjoy it on your own terms. However you listen, mark your calendar for next Saturday night’s free open-air screening of the movie, with Nayani and me on hand to introduce it, at 10 pm at TIFF’s Cinema Park in David Pecaut Square. Did I mention it was free? Because it is.

And then you can go check out the new editions of Shiny Things, where I share my copious thoughts on the Prime Video reboot of A League of their Own, the new Criterion editions of Faya Dayi and Hotel du Nord and Shout! Factory’s gorgeous 4K box of Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. There’s more coming this week, somehow,  so you’ll want to subscribe if you haven’t already. 

Also, I did another episode of Jeremy LaLonde’s Black Hole Films … where it turned out I was the only person defending the pure, sweet heart of Steve Martin’s Roxanne from  the jaded souls of Jeremy and Ian MacIntyre. You think you know people. Jeez.

Also also: I’ll be dropping a bonus episode of Someone Else’s Movie this Friday, because it’s TIFF and there are lots of cool people to talk to. Stand by!

Hey, guess what? I finally got Valerie Buhagiar to do an episode of Someone Else’s Movie!

Not because she was dodging my offers, mind you — she’s just been awfully busy over the last few years, both as an actor and a director, and our schedules didn’t align until last week, when the release of her new drama Carmen gave me a chance to book her.

So here she is, and she wanted to talk about Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning 2013 drama starring Agata Trzebuchowska as a Polish novitiate in the early ’60s whose path to the convent is interrupted by the revelation that she’s not who she thinks she is … and neither is her country.

Would you like to know more? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. God will judge you either way, I guess.

And then you should catch up to this week’s Shiny Things newsletter, where I wrote about George Miller’s marvelous Three Thousand Years of Longing and Shout! Factory’s new 4K releases of Cat People and Dog Soldiers. (Living together! On my shelf! Mass hysterial!) Subscribe already, willya?

And in other podcasting news, my friend and former NOW colleague Jonathan Goldsbie invited me to co-host Canadaland’s Short Cuts podcast and discuss the slow, awful death of the alt-weekly that meant so much to both of us once upon a time. It’s a rough listen, but I’m glad to have got it on the record.

And things really are better now. Next week, you’ll see just how much better they are.

It’s a beautiful day out, and this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is here to ruin it.

Not that the episode is a bummer or anything, but my guest — genre filmmaker Perry Blackshear, whose moody new thriller When I Consume You just slithered out on VOD — picked Mike Flanagan’s extremely grim 2011 breakout Absentia, a horror movie rooted in despair, isolation and misery. Perry saw it at a key stage in his own evolution as a storyteller, to the point that When I Consume You plays almost as an answer film to it, and we get pretty deep into both heavy emotions Flanagan’s work brings out of Perry and the compassion for emotionally damaged characters that connects their cinematic realms.

And that makes for a dark but worthwhile conversation, even if my mic was somehow miscalibrated throughout, resulting in a weird mechanical growl that runs through most of my side of the conversation. I did my best to minimize it, but it’s there, like a gnawing awareness of mortality or something. Try to tune it out.

Wanna listen? Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episode instantly,  or download it directly from the web if you’re afraid of a podcast player suddenly becoming sentient and snatching you into the ether. I hear that happens.

And then you should check out the latest editions of Shiny Things, in which I have thoughts on the finale of Better Call Saul and the end of the Breaking Bad cinematic universe, take a look at the Blu-ray release of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future and celebrate the pure uncut joy of watching Tatiana Maslany in Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Have you subscribed? You can do that here!

Oh, and if you were wondering how things at TIFF are going? Pretty great! Both of my programming projects — the Festival @ Home digital slate and the Industry Selects market screening series — were announced over the last few days, and I’m very happy with the way they worked out. You’ll be hearing more about them both in the weeks to come, I’m sure.

… oh, you want tips? Subscribe to the damn newsletter! Jeez!

I have to say it: This is not at all where I thought I’d be one year ago today.

I mean, in a lot of ways nothing has changed: I’m typing this on my laptop at the dining room table, which is exactly how I’ve functioned for the last three years, but everything else is different.

For the last 33 years, the middle of August has marked the end of my summer; my birthday would always be the last time I saw family or friends until after TIFF ended five weeks later. But now that I’m on the other side of the festival, my birthday marks the end of the big sprint to our programming deadlines; the logistics teams take over, and I’m at loose ends until Labour Day.

I am not complaining at all, mind you, but it’s weird. Usually I’d be bracing for a marathon; now, I’m just trading e-mails with people and waiting for the press releases to go out. Kate and I can grab lunch today like civilized people. I have this weird feeling that this is how life was supposed to work all along.

But other things still happen as scheduled, so a new episode of Someone Else’s Movie drops today, with Stupid for You writer, director and co-star Jude Klassen tackling the exuberant teenage dance party (and progressive call to action) that is John Waters’ Hairspray. Can you take creative inspiration for a movie that’s about 15% Divine and Jerry Stiller yelling at each other? You damn well can, and Jude discusses that at length with me. It’s a blast!

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get it instantly,  or download it directly from the web.

And if you still haven’t gotten on the Shiny Things train, this week I used a new Blu-ray of Nathalie … as an excuse to ruminate on what it means to be part of TIFF this year, and reviewed Emily the Criminal, the new 4K editions of God Told Me To and Event Horizon. Seriously, subscribe already. You’re missing out.

It’s a podcast exchange on Someone Else’s Movie this week, as I welcome Hollywood Suite podcaster Becky Shrimpton — on whose show A Year in Film I have appeared a couple of times — to talk about a documentary near and dear to her heart.

That’d be The Devil At Your Heels, Robert Fortier’s 1981 study of stunt driver and would-be daredevil Ken Carter’s attempt to jump a rocket car over the St. Lawrence River — a distance of more than a mile, and a dream that ended very badly for everyone involved. But not for Becky, who uses the film (and Carter’s story) to solidify her pitch for the Doofus With A Dream genre of storytelling. She’s really got something there, I think.

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 you can catch me and Becky as guests on the first episode of Hollywood Suite’s Cinema A to Z series, discussing literary adaptations of all sorts of authors! You can watch it free right here; I’m on board for segments on Graham Greene, H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Ondaatje and H.G. Wells.

And then, make sure you’re subscribed to my Shiny Things newsletter so you don’t miss out on my takes on Dan Trachtenberg’s franchise-reviving Predator prequel Prey and Arrow’s 4K edition of Flatliners. This week, I’m taking a look at a couple of beloved genre titles that are newly arriving in UHD editions; it’s basically just an excuse to write about horror movies at length, but that’s what you want from me, right?

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!