This week on Someone Else’s  Movie , I welcome writer-director Joseph Amenta — whose first feature Soft, about three queer kids obsessed with getting into a Toronto nightclub, was one of the best things we screened at TIFF last year, and which finally starts its commercial run this Friday at the Revue Cinema — to talk about the movie that helped him see cinema in a different way: Sean Baker’s Tangerine.

Tangerine has sort of faded away over the last few years, overwritten in Baker’s filmography by The Florida Project and Red Rocket, but it couldn’t be more relevant to the current moment — as a deeply empathetic portrait of two trans sex workers having a really bad Christmas Eve in West Hollywood. What could have been a stunt (especially considering the whole shot-on-an-iPhone thing) instead turned out to be something small and intimate and honest, a movie that truly sees its characters from every angle. It’s informed Baker’s cinema ever since, and Joey took the right lessons from it as well.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download the episode directly from the web. Listen, enjoy, be inspired.

And then get on over to your inbox and catch up on the latest Shiny Things newsletters; over the last week I’ve dug into Shout! Factory’s new 4K edition of The Exorcist III, Arrow’s Blu-ray of Black Sunday and Paramount’s 4K restoration of Dragonslayer and Blu-ray release of the first glorious season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s all good! Come check it out!

Also also: We’ve booked a really great film for next Tuesday’s Secret Movie Club, so if you haven’t snagged your ticket yet you should really get on that. See you at the Lightbox, I hope.