This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Emmanuel Kabongo, an actor who’s been a near-constant presence in Toronto productions for a decade and a half, turning up in everything from Ingrid Veninger’s The Animal Project and Joey Klein’s The Other Half to episodes of Frankie Drake Mysteries, Hudson & Rex and Star Trek: Discovery.

Emmanuel gets a starring role in the microbudget thriller Sway, which opens this week and also marks his first outing as a producer, and that seemed like a great reason to have him on the podcast — especially since he wanted to talk about Training Day, which features Denzel Washington in that Oscar-winning performance — but also got Ethan Hawke his first Oscar nomination, and 25 years later he’s looking like the favorite for his own Best Actor win. So that’s nice for everybody.

Want to check out the conversation? 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 while you sit very still and try to figure out what was in the joint you just smoked. That might be important.

And then go get caught up on your Shiny Things columns! Just yesterday, I wrote about Criterion’s exquisite new special edition of John Huston’s The Dead, and last week I tackled Warner’s 4K releases of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and One Battle After Another. All good stuff, and there’s more on the way; all you need to do to read it is be a subscriber! So go do that, why dontcha?

Last week’s episode fell apart at the very last second — sorry to leave you all hanging, by the way — but Someone Else’s Movie is up and running today with a really fun conversation.

That’s because my guest is Oscar and Emmy nominee Hubert Davis, who’s releasing two dramatic features this year: This Friday,  his dystopian drama The Well opens in Toronto and Montreal before rolling out across the country, and this spring we’ll it’ll be followed by his remake of Youngblood, which premiered at TIFF last fall. Hubert’s a lovely guy with a wide range of interests, and he wanted to talk about Tony Scott’s Top Gun.

Yep, Top Gun. The super-slick, magic-hour Reagan-era blockbuster that defined American commercial cinema for the next decade, and Tom Cruise for a lot longer than that; the movie that reimagines An Officer and a Gentleman through a John Hughes lens, sort of, and somehow managed to launch the careers of a dozen young actors. The one that brings the MTV sensibility of Flashdance and Footloose to the Navy. Forty years after its arrival, it still has a pretty massive footprint, and Hubert was excited to explore its themes, its legacy and what it did for — and to — Tom Cruise.

So suit up! 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 while you sit in the ready room, waiting for the green light to engage The Enemy.

And then you can get caught up on Shiny Things, which also got off to a slow start this year due to everyone else’s release schedules. Last week I covered Lionsgate’s 4K release of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, speaking of war movies, and Sony’s new 4K edition of Thunderheart, which of course stars Top Gun‘s Iceman, Val Kilmer. And there’s a slew of new releases to dig into this week, so if you’re not already a subscriber you should get on board right away. Membership has its privileges, after all.

It’s a new year, but I’m reaching back to 2015 for this week’s Someone Else’s Movie in honor of Alan Zweig‘s new podcast Tubby being named one of last year’s best podcasts by Apple and Amazon. Album titles to the contrary, we love it when our friends become successful, and I’ve been really glad to see Tubby find its audience.

And Alan recorded one of the best episodes of SEMcast’s first year, tackling Peter Yates’ 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle — the one starring Robert Mitchum as an aging gangster being pressured to flip on his much more powerful associates. It’s one of the great character studies of the ’70s, which is really saying something, and it’s a pleasure to revisit it this week. I also promise I’ll have a fresh new episode next Tuesday; it’s just the way things shook out, man.

You know how this works: 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 surreptitiously at the Bruins game. Your friends will never notice.

And then check out the newest editions of Shiny Things, because I’ve been catching up to a bunch of December releases, specifically Black Phone 2, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I’m Still Here, Seeds, The Smashing Machine and Timestalker. All good stuff, and there’s more on the way! Just sign up and it’ll come straight to your inbox, and you can skip this part of the post with a clean conscience. If you go for the paid tier, you’ll also get my weekly Friday roundup of recommendations! That’s worth five bucks a month, right? Of course it is.

We are in desperate need of some seasonal cheer around these parts, so I’m dedicating the Christmas-to-New Year’s run of Someone Else’s Movie to celebrating Rob Reiner’s most-loved films — partly because they’re both great episodes, and partly because I needed to do something, anything, to address that horrible loss. I don’t have a lot left, you guys. This has to help.

So today, I’m re-releasing Kristin Booth‘s lovely episode on The Princess Bride, and next week it’ll be followed by Allana Harkin on When Harry Met Sally, because that’s actually a New Year’s Eve movie and how could I pass that up.

Get on it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web, round up the Brute Squad to storm the castle, and enjoy.

Fun fact: It turns out this episode was released in April of 2022, days after I left NOW for TIFF. The whole world is different now.

Oh, also, the usual heads-up about Shiny Things: This week I’m dropping my lists of the year’s best discs and movies (coming soon), and the Christmas Day What’s Worth Watching is gonna be crammed solid with big-screen recommendations. Gift yourself a present and subscribe so you don’t miss out!

And even if you don’t, I hope you get some peace during the holidays. The storm has to end sometime, right?

Aimee Carrero has been in a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. The Americans, Blindspot and Your Friends and Neighbors; Mack & Rita, The Menu and Spirited. She’s the voices of She-Ra and Elena of Avalor!

And most recently, she co-starred with Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery in Christopher Leone’s snappy, cynical paramedic comedy-drama Code 3, which I programmed in TIFF’s Industry Selects series last year. And now that it’s available on Blu-ray, and coming to VOD on Friday, this felt like a perfect time to invite Aimee onto Someone Else’s Movie. So we did that!

Aimee did not disappoint, delivering the most enthusiastic, informed take on Mike Nichols’ adaptation of The Birdcage that I could have asked for. (She even had Mark Harris’ biography of Nichols by her side; I love it when people show up with reference materials.) However you feel about the film, the episode offers a welcome distraction from all the truly horrible shit that’s been going on this year. I needed it, and maybe you do too.

So make a mai-tai, switch on your sunlamp and give yourself a little pleasure! 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 while you get your wig just right.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, because last week’s column was a doozy: I tackled Severin Films’ expansive, exhaustive Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection, an eleven-disc set that assembles the original Emmanuelle trilogy in pristine 4K restorations — the better to see what all the fuss was about — along with hours of extras and even a whole other feature. The perfect last-minute stocking stuffer? Very possibly!

What’s that? You haven’t susbcribed? Jeez! Go take care of that, and  maybe consider trying out the paid tier, where you’ll also get my weekly What’s Worth Watching dispatches. Otherwise you might end up wasting two hours on something that doesn’t deserve you.

I’m here to help, you know.

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?

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer and director Tasha Hubbard, who shifts from documentaries to dramatic features with her new film Meadowlarks, opening across Canada this Friday.

It’s an adaptation of sorts of Tasha’s 2017 doc Birth of a Family (which is streaming at the NFB’s website), with Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush as adult siblings reuniting in Banff decades after being separated from their parents — and each other — in the Sixties Scoop.

Meadowlarks is small, quiet and profoundly felt, using the spectacular backdrop of Banff as a subtle way of reminding us about the colonial origins of Canada, and how much work still needs to be done to heal both the land and its people. And I wish I’d thought of that when we were recording Tasha’s episode, because the film she chose — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone — is similarly about using a specific landscape as an element of the story. In that film, it’s the sparse rural environment of the Ozarks, where Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree tries to save her own family by tracking down her missing father. The tension and urgency of Granik’s thriller couldn’t seem more different from Tasha’s more thoughtful cinema, but the two directors are connected in more ways than one, and we dig into that over the course of the episode.

(Except for the Banff thing, dammit.)

You’re gonna listen, right? 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 while you race from one house to another in search of an answer you don’t  really want to find.

There’s a lot of ground to cover over at Shiny Things, too; over the last week I’ve covered the new releases of Universal Language,  Splitsville,  Together,  Red Sonja and Him, as well as Criterion’s special edition of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels and Shout! Select’s 4K upgrade of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. All good stuff! (Well, except maybe for Him. That one’s a mess.) And there’s more coming … so why not subscribe and get each newsletter as soon as it’s released? It’ll save you all that clicking!

On this week’s Someone Else’s Movie I welcome a colleague and pal, film critic Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail. And here’s here for a book launch!

See, Barry’s spent a truly terrifying amount of his free time writing Welcome to the Family, a book about the evolution and cultural significance of the Fast & Furious franchise, and now that said book is coming out next week I couldn’t pass up the chance to have him on the show.

And what did he want to talk about? Fast Five, of course —  the 2011 chapter that took the series from low-level car stunts to actual spectacle, shunting our antiheroes into a heist plot that culminates in an almost absurdist set piece: It’s the one where they rob a bank by stealing the entire vault. Pure mayhem, and a glorious thing to experience with a crowd — and both the franchise and its fans have chasing that high ever since. I wish I’d thought of that line yesterday when I wrote and recorded the intro.

Anyway! Barry uses Fast Five as a way to put the entire series under the microscope, and it makes for a very fun episode. You should check it out! 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 while you practice saying “family” in a low growl.

And if you’re in Toronto, think about coming down to the Hot Docs Cinema next Tuesday for Barry’s book launch, or next Friday to see him introduce a screening of the 2001 Point Break knockoff that started it all, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious. A quarter-century later, can anyone still live their life a quarter-mile at a time? Barry knows the answer.

Also, there are new editions of Shiny Things to read; last week I wrote about the freshly released discs of  The Naked Gun, The Toxic Avenger, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Spinal Tap II — though only the first two are really worth your time — and Universal’s 40th anniversary edition of the Back to the Future trilogy, the oft-released property’s best package yet. C’mon, subscribe already! It’s good for the soul!