It’s the final Someone Else’s Movie of 2025, and my impromptu celebration of Rob Reiner’s cinema concludes with Allana Harkin‘s delightful hour on When Harry Met Sally … which is actually a New Year’s Eve movie, so there.

I hadn’t listened to this one in a while — it’s been eight and a half years since we recorded it — and I’d forgotten all about the rainstorm that arrived about halfway through, and can be heard hammering the roof of my old studio. It’s weirdly nice to be reminded of a time when doing the show in person was the custom rather than the exception, and where you could just enjoy a conversational dynamic without fear of stepping on someone’s thought or losing the rhythm to sync drift. Maybe I’ll try to do more live recordings in the new year. That’d be good.

… and also, how sharp is When Harry Met Sally, anyway? That script is airtight, building character details and tics into the fabric of the narrative while still leaving room for improvisations and unexpected bits of business. I’m, ah, developing something that skews very heavily in the direction of a rom-com, and Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner basically perfected it with this one. It’s the genre template for the rest of eternity, and you always find yourself coming back to it.

So enjoy it! 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 that long car ride from campus to New York. Embrace the truth of baby fishmouth, by the way; you’ll save yourself so much agita.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just run down the best movies and discs of this miserable year. And there’s one more piece coming before the calendar rolls over, as well as the weekly What’s Worth Watching dispatch for paid subscribers. You should be one of those by now, surely? No? Maybe make it a new year’s resolution, then.

Happy 2026, everybody. Things have got to get better.