Desolation Boulevard

It’s over! And though I put in the same 12-to-16-hour days as usual, this was honestly my easiest TIFF in a good twenty years. I got to introduce audiences to old friends and new filmmakers, I got to talk to artists whose work I’ve enjoyed for years, I made friends and I even had a proper sit-down dinner at one point. It was … nice?

That said, I’m still exhausted by all of it, and I do sound a little punchy on today’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie — though that’s also because we recorded it at the very last minute yesterday afternoon. But my guest, director Julian Higgins, was more than up for it, recording from a hotel room in Boston during a quiet moment on the press tour for his simmering thriller God’s Country … which is coming to the Lightbox this Friday, as it happens.

And Julian chose Loveless, the quietly devastating 2017 drama from Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev. Loveless wrecked me when I saw it back in the day, and I was a little worried I might be too fragile to really engage with it after the last couple of weeks, but we got there — and we even managed to explore how Zvyagintsev’s five features amount to a dissection of the decaying Russian soul through excruciatingly specific character studies. So, good for us?

You know what’s coming, right?  Subscribe on Apple PodcastsGoogle PlayStitcher or wherever and get the episode right away, or download it directly from the web. And maybe think about joining Julian and me — and co-star Joris Jarsky — for a screening of God’s Country down at the Lightbox on Friday at 7:15 pm. We’ll be introducing the film together, and sitting down for a conversation afterward. I’ll add the ticket link as soon as it goes live.

To kill time until then, check out the latest editions of Shiny Things — this week, I reviewed Greg Mottola’s delightful Confess, Fletch and Baz Luhrmann’s confounding Elvis. It’s good to venture back to the mainstream every once in a while, you know? Hell, I might even watch that last Jurassic Park movie this week.

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