This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie risks creating a little bit of a paradox, as I’m joined by Daniel Bernhardt — who stars in Steven Kostanski’s endearing Deathstalker reboot, opening everywhere on Friday — to discuss a film that’s near and dear to his heart: The Matrix.

Why is this one spacey-timey? Because Daniel has dozens of action-movie credits, and one of them is The Matrix Reloaded … which let him stomp around in the world the Wachowskis created four years previous. I think that’s cool; Daniel thinks that’s cool. So we talked about it a little. But mostly we talked about The Matrix, because it’s still pretty awesome.

Join in! 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 as you eat the best steak of your life.

Also, if you’re curious to hear more from Team Deathstalker, you can and should check out Steven Kostanski’s 2021 SEMcast on Mortal Kombat, and co-star Conor Sweeney’s 2024 episode on Alien; these are people who love weird creatures and strange environments, and they’re very savvy about why they love them. Never a dull moment.

And then you can catch up to the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I dug into Decal’s new Blu-ray release of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck — which turns out to be a lovely package for one of the best films of the year.

Subscribers to the paid tier also got my reviews of Play Dirty, All of You and V/H/S Halloween on Friday as part of the weekly What’s Worth Watching newsletter; if you want to be among the elite and informed, it’s awfully easy to upgrade that subscription! So maybe do that? I bet you’ll be a lot happier.

Now that Someone Else’s Movie is in its eleventh year — wild, right? — I’ve been allowing the occasional repeat of either a guest or a film choice. But this week’s episode is a groundbreaker for a couple of reasons.

First, because it’s the third time the chosen film has been discussed on the show, and second, because my guest is Lizzie Borden, whose 1983 Born in Flames is as much of a breakthrough feminist statement as the film she wanted to talk about.

That would be Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, first tackled on the podcast in 2020 by Wayne Wang and again in 2023 by Lukas Dhont, both of whom had some very pertinent thoughts about Akerman’s unblinking study of domestic desperation, and the shattering precision of Delphine Seyrig’s performance. But Lizzie has a different approach to the film, wondering what happens after the credits roll and how Akerman’s vision allows the viewer to imagine a whole world beyond the Dielman apartment.

It’s a really fun conversation, given the subject matter, and of course Lizzie discusses her own cinematic evolution as well. So you should give it a listen! And check out the other Jeanne Dielman episodes if you haven’t heard them, what the hell.

You know how this goes. 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 draw up the plans for your intersectional feminist group’s political action. The resistance is on a schedule, you know.

Oh, and pick up the new Criterion Blu-ray of Born in Flames when you have the chance — it’s an excellent release of a landmark cinematic work. I featured it this weekend in the latest Shiny Things, in fact, alongside Warner Archive’s splendid 4K edition of Get Carter. Of course, if you were a subscriber you’d already know that. Why aren’t you a subscriber? What’s wrong with you?

I’m sorry about the headline. I am. It’s low-hanging fruit. But Alex Winter really is excellent, both in his art and his activism, and I’ve been trying to get him for an episode of Someone Else’s Movie almost since I launched the show. And he’s been into it! He’s just, you know, really busy … especially right now, what with releasing a new movie, Adulthood, the same week he and Keanu Reeves bring Waiting for Godot to Broadway.

… so of course he’d carve out an hour the morning after the first Gotot preview to sit down and record the episode I released today. Because he’s excellent.

Alex wanted to talk about Luis Bunuel’s 1951 drama Los Olvidados, a study of impoverished young people turning on each other, and  ultimately themselves, because there’s nowhere else to direct their rage. Hailed at Cannes — but scorned by Mexican critics who’d been hoping for a homegrown Bicycle Thief — it’s an uncompromising work that feels even more meaningful in light of Bunuel’s turn towards absurdist satire for his social critiques. This one’s raw and angry and real, and that’s why Alex is championing it.

You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download it directly from the web and listen to it while you’re dragged around the most neglected parts of Mexico City by an older boy who’s enlisted you in a fevered plan for violent revenge. Because that’s fun.

After that, there’s more Shiny Things to catch up on! By the time you read this, I should have published my reviews of Criterion’s new release of Born in Flames and Warner Archive’s 4K special edition of Get Carter, both of which have that above-and-beyond feeling that tells me the people who worked on these discs truly loved doing so.

And of course subscribers to the paid tier already got this morning’s What’s Worth Watching, where I reviewed Mike Figgis’ Megadoc, Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions and the second season of Amazon’s Gen V.  Not a subscriber yet? Maybe you should be!

I mean, you don’t have to take the paid option, but obviously it’d be swell if you did.

TIFF has reached its mid-point, and while I’ve been doing a few things here and there I’ve been pleasantly out of the loop on most of the happenings. It’s been relaxing!

But if you were worried, I still got my annual Festival moment of surrealism: Yesterday afternoon while dismounting from a bike in front of the Royal York hotel, I nearly kicked Bob Odenkirk in the leg. There was no hostility to it; he was doing his best to avoid a crowd of lookie-loos and walked right into the docking station. And before you ask: Yes, I know better than to attack Bob Odenkirk on the street. I’ve seen Nobody.

Speaking of surrealism and unexpected violence, let me introduce you to Todd Rohal, the guest on today’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie. He’s the guy who made the off-kilter indies The Guatemalan Handshake and The Catechism Cataclysm — the latter of which was tackled by Mel Eslyn on her SEMcast a couple of years back — and tomorrow he premieres his latest venture, the inglorious comedy Fuck My Son!, in TIFF’s Midnight Madness.  (Tickets for that show, and Thursday’s repeat screening in the Scotiabank IMAX room, should still be available at the links here.)

Todd wanted to talk about the cinema of George Kuchar, using his 1966 short film Hold Me While I’m Naked as the entry point into the underground filmmaker’s lurid, obsessive universe of underdogs and freaks — perhaps best expressed in the 160-minute hardcore porn epic Thundercrack!, which also comes up in the conversation. It’s a lively and digressive episode, which is part of the fun; I’m honestly not sure how we swerved into an appreciation of the artistic legacy of “Weird Al” Yankovic, but there you go. I cast a wide net and it’s always fun to see what it pulls in.

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 have a miserable, lonely shower, because that’s all you believe you deserve.

But you deserve so much more! Todd’s episode isn’t the only one I released since last Tuesday; I also dropped a special Friday show with Redlights and Aberdeen director Eva Thomas, whose new feature Nika and Madison premiered at TIFF over the weekend, talking at length about her love of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

I love it too, and our conversation was one of the most earnest and moving I’ve had with anybody all year. If you’ve already subscribed to the podcast it should be in your queue already, but browser listeners can stream it right here.

And that brings us to Shiny Things, where last week I wrote about Via Vision’s Impact edition of Hud and Canadian International Pictures’ exceptional restoration-cum-resurrection of David Secter’s groundbreaking queer drama Winter Kept Us Warm, and also had fun recounting my experience of the mobile Criterion Closet, which was the biggest draw on Festival Street last weekend. Subscribers already know which titles I picked; if you’re curious, there’s a really easy way to find out.

It’s TIFF time! And while this is the first festival in 36 years that I won’t be either covering or working for the festival, I’ve got a few things going on around it — so if you see me down around the Lightbox, say hi!

(I know, it’s weird. But say hi anyway!)

And since it’s TIFF time, the next few episodes of Someone Else’s Movie will be devoted to the festival, starting today with Little Lorraine director and co-writer Andy Hines on Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 breakout Sexy Beast — still the only film to make Ben Kingsley a terrifying screen presence, even though Ray Winstone’s meant to be a pretty hard man all on his own.

It’s a good conversation, barring a couple of fuzzy audio moments, with Andy finding some intriguing echoes in his own work and even doing a passable impression of Kingsley’s ferocious gangster.

So join us, why don’t you? 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 by the pool, assuming you’ve got sweat-resistant earbuds.

And then it’s time to catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I tackled the brand-new discs of The Phoenician Scheme and Virmiglio, and the resurrections of Saving Face, Blue (RIP Terence Stamp) and Fade In. Even smaller pictures deserve love and care, you know? Have you subscribed yet? This is a call to action: Subscribe! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

(… seriously, is he dead yet? Queen Elizabeth died just before the 2022 festival, it’d be a nice little echo.)

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has been awaiting release for a while now — since early March, in fact, which feels like a lifetime ago for all sorts of reasons.

So I was happy to listen back to it and hear that everything Catherine Legault and I discussed was still more or less relevant, and now that her new film Larry (they/them) is available to stream on CBC Gem in Canada you get to hear it too!

Catherine picked another documentary, Zachary Heinzerling’s 2013 Cutie and the Boxer, which places us inside the marriage of Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, two Japanese expats living in New York — not always harmoniously. It’s an intimate look at the lives of working artists, and the compromises they make — or refuse to make — for each other, and what happens when a couple’s fortunes start to move in opposing directions.  It’s very good, is what it is, and I’m really glad she chose it.

Want to hear her thoughts? Get to 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 as you paint your masterpiece — or drink yourself into a stupor while your partner paints theirs.

And then, since Jaws is returning to theaters this weekend, you can catch up to that episode of Commotion I did last week with Rad and Tomris Laffly! After that, you can catch up on Shiny Things; it was a fairly quiet week, all I did was tackle A24’s Bring Her Back and Warner’s 4K upgrade of The Conjuring. Of course, if you’re a paying subscriber you also know I reviewed some other stuff in the weekly Friday What’s Worth Watching missive. So subscribe already!

As if the world wasn’t already in the toilet, we’re in the middle of an absolutely epic internet outage over here. Our fiber feed went down on Sunday morning and won’t likely be restored until early tomorrow, so I’m using my phone as a hotspot and doing everything through mobile data. It turns out hotpost technology has gotten really good since the last time I tried to use it, and I’ve been able to post an edition of Shiny Things and this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie on schedule. So that’s nice.

Let’s start with the podcast: This week I welcome Melanie Oates, whose quietly excellent character study Sweet Angel Baby is opening in select Canadian theaters this Friday, to discuss a film that’s very dear to her heart: Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s shattering 2010 drama about a passionate but unstable relationship reaching its natural end. If you’ve seen it, you know how powerful Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are as two people who can’t reconnect no matter how hard they try; if you haven’t, I’d recommend you seek it out before you listen to the episode because otherwise we sound like we’re wildly overpraising a simple domestic study. But it’s so much more than that, thanks to its combination of talent and the circumstances in which it was produced — even if those circumstances probably weren’t ideal.

It’s all in the episode, and you can find it in the usual places: 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’re driving aimlessly around your small town, wondering where it all went wrong.

And then you can cheer up with Shiny Things, which checks out a bad romance of its own: Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, freshly reissued in a three-disc Blu-ray set from Via Vision’s Imprint label alongside the first-ever BD releases of Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly and Cliff Robertson’s J.W. Coop. I wrote about all three, and also took some time to appreciate Arrow Video’s new releases of Ole Bornedal’s Nightwatch duology and Larry Cohen’s cracked masterpiece The Stuff; if you had a subscription, of course, they’d already be in your inbox. Probably you should get one, huh.

Catch you next week. Say a prayer for my internet service, would you?