Someone Else’s Movie gets a little chilly this week. It’s September, so that shouldn’t be too surprising … but maybe it’s the movie.

Writer-director Christian Sparkes — whose new drama Hammer is on VOD now, and well worth your time — joins me from the east coast to talk about Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, that forgotten 2004 drama starring Nicole Kidman as a young widow shaken by the arrival, on the eve of her remarriage, of a boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her dead husband.

It’s a strange, austere work, and a lot of people (myself included) were confused by the muted tone Glazer adopted after his bravura debut Sexy Beast, but given what he’d later do with Under the Skin it all makes sense. We talk about all that, and more besides. So join us!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher and get the episode immediately, or just download it directly from the web.  And then go catch up to all the other stuff I’ve done in the last week, starting with Friday’s NOW What about whether you should see Tenet in a theatre  because that seems like a pressing issue.

(In today’s episode, I talk to journalist and parent Hannah Sung about her participation in Ontario SAFE, an activist organization trying to get the provincial government to reduce class sizes and reduce the risk of COVID transmission when schools reopen later this month. That’s also rather pressing.)

But that’s not all! I reviewed Bill & Ted Face the Music, which was lovely; I filed a bunch of reviews for our weekly What To Watch column and contributed a few capsules to our monthly Netflix, Crave and Amazon lookaheads, because I am a machine.

And because it’s September now, the TIFF machinery has started rolling: Here’s my list of ten features I’m very much looking forward to seeing during this truncated festival.

It’s a lot, I know. But you’re strong.