Last September, one of the highlights of my stint at TIFF was landing the world premiere of RT Thorne‘s 40 Acres, and watching his powerhouse dystopian allegory bring the house down for two straight nights. Today, with the movie in theaters across North America, I finally get RT onto Someone Else’s Movie — something I’ve been trying to do for years. He’s really busy, as you can imagine.

RT chose another bravura debut:  Blood Simple, the 1984 neo-noir that introduced the world to a couple of film nerds named Joel and Ethan Coen — along with an actor named Frances McDormand, a DP named Barry Sonnenfeld and a composer named Carter Burwell — and American art-house cinema would never be the same. Also, the movie’s pretty good, you should catch it sometime. (I understand the Criterion edition is pretty cheap at Barnes & Noble right now.)

And then you can enjoy RT’s episode! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re driving out to that place nobody goes to get rid of an inconvenient corpse.

After that, if you’re still on the fence about seeing 40 Acres on the big screen, I did an episode of CBC’s Day 6 arguing that very point! So listen to that too, and get going.

Once you’re back at home, cozy up with a nice glass of lemonade or whatever and get caught up on Shiny Things! Last week I rounded up the recent releases of Drop, Opus and The Wedding Banquet, and I’ve got a look at Arrow Video’s new 4K editions of Dark City and Swordfish coming up in the next day or so. If you subscribe now you’ll get it as soon as it’s published! Won’t that be fun?

Happy Canada Day, everybody! Today’s Someone Else’s Movie is all about celebrating our own, with writer-director Nik Sexton — whose Newfoundland culture-clash drama Skeet was one of my picks for last year’s TIFF Industry Selects lineup — tackling Incendies, the picture that set Montreal’s own Denis Villeneuve on the path to the superstar career he’s enjoying now.

If you haven’t seen it, Incendies is Denis’ very cinematic 2010 adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s stage play, which follows a brother and sister whose investigation of their late mother’s past ends up drawing a map of their own history. It was acclaimed on the festival circuit and parlayed that success into an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film, bringing Denis to Hollywood’s attention  and now he’s directing the next Bond picture. Wild, right? But totally deserved, and it’s nice to be able to celebrate it a decade and a half later.

So giddy up, eh? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the flight over to the country of your mother’s birth, wondering what you’ll find.

And then you can get caught up on your Shiny Things reading, not that there was that much of it last week; between one thing and another, I was only able to review Criterion’s new 4K editions of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Francois Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould — two long-neglected masterworks that are brought back to vivid life in these new releases. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next edition! It’s good for you, probably!

The thing about programming is, it’s a lot of clicking and waiting. You start the next thing on the submissions pile, and then you wait for it to grab you. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. And every now and then — maybe half a dozen times, in my experience so far — you get to make a discovery.

That was the experience I had last year with Do I Know You from Somewhere?, a beautiful independent drama that marks the feature debut of Fredricton director Arianna Martinez. Built around an incandescent performance by stage actor Caroline Bell — her first time on-screen, incredibly enough — it’s a multiverse movie without a single special effect, unless you count the cast. (I may have used that in my TIFF note.) It’s on VOD now after a modest theatrical run, and you really ought to see it.

The VOD release was also my excuse to grab Arianna for the episode of Someone Else’s Movie that drops today. And she did not disappoint, choosing Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness, the creepy Gothic nightmare that flopped fairly spectacularly in early 2017, but has enough going on inside it that it … kind of deserves a reappraisal, maybe? So let this be the first salvo in that battle.

The sanitorium awaits you. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you stare at the eel tank in the basement, watching the rhythms of their movement. What secrets do they hold? Or are they just eels? No, that can’t be it.

Also, you can get caught up on Shiny Things, because last week I caught up to another trio of new releases — The Shrouds, Last Breath and A Working Man — and went long on Universal’s magnificent 50th anniversary edition of Jaws, because of course I did. (If you subscribe you’ll get all the good stuff delivered right to your inbox and you can skip past this graph every week! Won’t that be fun?)

Oh, and also here’s that TIFF Original we made about Jaws in 2023, when I programmed it on the digital platform. Still proud of that one.

Want to feel old? On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome Rob Michaels, whose charming new comedy Please, After You is now available on digital and on demand in Canada, to discuss his favorite comedy: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the charming Judd Apatow production that vaulted Jason Segel out of second-banana status and launched Nicholas Stoller’s directorial career.

It’s a delightful movie — sweet, funny and unpredictable, and even with the whole Russell Brand thing it holds up very well after … seventeen years.

THAT’S RIGHT, SEVENTEEN YEARS. JESUS CHRIST, WHERE DOES THE TIME GO.

Sorry. (But seriously.)

It’s a fun conversation and I don’t think you can hear my gasp when Rob mentions he saw the film when he was in Grade 10. Rob’s movie is fun, too. You should check it out!

But first, listen to the podcast! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while working diligently on your elaborate puppet musical about the secret heart of a mythological character who’s now in the public domain.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things! Which won’t be difficult, because I only published the paid edition last week (a revew of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, which I adored), but there’s a lot more coming up in the next few days. So if you’re not already a subscriber, maybe get on board?

Also, if you’re not yet sick of hearing me talk about how much I love Jaws, go watch my epic conversation with Eric Marchen for his Untitled Movie Podcast, in which we spend far too long indulging our mutual love for Steven Spielberg’s genre-defining blockbuster.  It’s also available as an audio podcast, if you’d rather not stare at my big shiny head for 87 minutes.

Also also! SEMcast is on Blu-ray! The cheery elves at Canadian International Pictures reached out to ask if they could include Becky Shrimpton’s episode of the podcast on their new special edition of Robert Fortier’s The Devil At Your Heels, and I was delighted to be part of the package; CIP does terrific work, and their service to Canadian cinema is currently unmatched.

Which reminds me, I really need to pick up their Roadkill BD.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I finally welcome Chloé Robichaud to the show. I’ve been a fan of Chloé’s work ever since Sarah Prefers to Run arrived in 2013; a decade later, I got to introduce the world to Days of Happiness at TIFF, which was something of a highlight.

But it wasn’t until now — with Chloé’s new film Two Women on screens in Toronto and Montreal, and opening in Vancouver on Friday, following its Canadian premiere at Secret Movie Club earlier this winter — that I was able to get her on the podcast. And even though we didn’t have a lot of time, we had a really great conversation because Chloé picked Jean-Marc Valleé’s Café de Flore, the deeply personal 2011 drama that looks more and more like his masterpiece. And you can’t discuss Valleé without engaging with creativity, inspiration, structure, and life itself — so yeah, this was a good one. Christ, I miss him.

Anyway, you know what to do. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you sleepwalk through your life, waiting for your soulmate to find you.

And then you can dig into some jam-packed editions of Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, The Informant!, Presence and Black Bag, which all arrived in 4K over the last few weeks, and Shout! Studios’ glorious Blaxploitation Classics, Vol. 1 boxed set. Have you seen Across 110th Street recently? It really holds up. Anyway, they’re free to read but if you felt like subscribing that’d be swell too.

Paid subscribers to my Shiny Things newsletter might recognize the guest on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, since I reviewed Kourtney Roy‘s Kryptic a couple of weeks ago.

Everybody else, meet Kourtney! She’s a photographer and filmmaker whose first feature is an eerie, unsettling mood piece starring the Scots actor Shannon Pirrie as a woman who becomes entirely unmoored after an encounter with something inexplicable in a Pacific Northwest forest. It’s newly available on VOD in North America, but if you’re in Toronto you can also catch it at the Imagine Carlton Cinemas at least until Thursday.

And Kourtney wanted to discuss another story of transformation: District 9, the alien-apartheid allegory from South Africa that introduced the world to Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, and which still packs a punch a decade and a half later … even as it makes clear that the flaws that hindered Blomkamp’s subsequent films were always a part of his toolkit. Kourtney loves it without reservation, though, and I let her exuberance steer us. I regret nothing.

Check it out! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you wander amongst redwoods, trying to figure out what else might be out there with you.

And then you can get back to Shiny Things, where I was especially busy last week, writing up the new Criterion editions of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising from Criterion, 4K discs of The Andromeda Strain, Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X from Arrow Video, and a new 4K restoration of Scent of a Woman under the Shout! Select banner. There’s even more coming this week; maybe subscribe so you don’t miss anything cool? It’s appreciated.

Lubitsch, man. Over more than a decade of Someone Else’s Movie,  this is the first time someone has brought one of the master farceur’s pictures to the show — and I’m so happy that Daniel Robbins chose To Be or Not to Be for his episode.

Daniel is the director and co-writer of the dark comedy Bad Shabbos (now playing in the US, and opening Thursday in Toronto and Vancouver), and he understands the specifically Yiddish nature of Lubitsch’s storytelling: The banter, the sniping, the escalation, the callbacks and, well, the Hitler of it all.

I hadn’t revisited To Be or Not to Be since Criterion’s Blu-ray came out a decade or so back, and it was such a pleasure to see that Jack Benny and Carole Lombard really were in peak form, and that the Nazi stuff lands even harder now, given the state of things. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or you only know the Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft remake — which is fun, but a lot broader than Lubitsch’s version — you should certainly catch up to it when you get the chance. Also you should listen to the episode, because it’s a lot of fun.

And you know how to do that, don’t you? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy it while you’re gluing on your false beard in an eleventh-hour bid to save your theater troupe from the Gestapo. But I’ve said too much already.

Then you can catch up on Shiny Things, which won’t be hard since I only ran one column last week, tackling the new 4K editions of Mickey 17 and Better Man from Warner and Paramount, respectively. Weird, wild stuff, as the kids say. And there’s more to come!

Oh, and also remember when I went to the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival last November? I was on a panel with Slamdance’s Anna Lee Lawson and Calgary’s Brian Owens about how to make films people care about, and it’s up on YouTube now. You might enjoy watching it, if you’re an aspiring filmmaker or you just want to hear stories about how the worst people think they make the best art.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Keeya King, an actor you’ve probably seen more often than you realize, especially if you’re a genre fan. She’s had key roles in Van Helsing and Yellowjackets, popped up in Jigsaw and The Handmaid’s Tale and Batwoman, and just joined the cast of Gen V, Amazon’s spinoff of The Boys. And she stars in a new thriller, Guess Who, that’s now streaming on Tubi in the US and Hollywood Suite in Canada.

And Keeya brought a fun one onto the show: Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s first solo directorial venture and the film that let Saoirse Ronan have a little fun for a change, playing a nervy Sacramento teenager whose decision to reinvent herself as a free spirit in her senior year starts a series of fairly silly events — and further complicates her relationship with her parents, played by Laurie Metcalf and Tracey Letts. It’s a heartfelt coming-of-age comedy with terrific performances and a thoughtful point of view. So there’s a lot to dig into, and Keeya was more than up for it.

Give us a listen! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and put it on in the background while you work a wooden spoon under your cast to scratch your itchy arm.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just written about Shout! Studios’ new 4K restoration of Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath and Arrow Video’s oddly charming box set of nine no-budget crime pictures produced by Japan’s Toei studio in the VHS era: V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets and Betrayal.  Subscribe already! It’s good for the soul!

Oh, also I appear on this week’s episode of the Deep Cuts: The Game podcast, doing my best to  point out the most interesting cast members of Happy Gilmore, Back to the Future Part II and Addams Family Values. I am still not entirely sure I understand how the game works, but I had a good time and that’s what really matters, right?

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome writer-director Jason Buxton, who broke out at TIFF in 2012 with his simmering drama Blackbird — starring friend of the show Connor Jessup — and returned to the festival last September with Sharp Corner, an equally unnerving psychodrama starring Ben Foster as a family man who becomes obsessed with the idea of emergency preparation, and Cobie Smulders as his understandably concerned wife. It opens in theaters in the US and Canada this Friday, so this was the perfect excuse to get Jason on the show,

And Jason picked another quietly devastating drama: The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s 1997 adaptation of Rick Moody’s autobiographical novel about two families in a small Connecticut town confronting the death of hope in Nixon’s America.

I’m oversimplifying, of course, but that’s pretty much it — exquisitely performed by a truly incredible cast that includes Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Jamey Sheridan, Sigourney Weaver as the adults and Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd as their kids. It’s a film that offers a lot of room for interpretation, and Jason was more than up for digging in.

So listen up! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you sit on a stalled train waiting for the power to come back up.

And then you can dig into last week’s Shiny Things, where I wrote about Criterion’s new 4K editions of Sean Baker’s Anora and Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and an excellent trio of UHD upgrades from Warner: Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider. If you haven’t already subscribed … well, there’s a very simple way to do that, you know.