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?