Hey, guess what? I finally got Valerie Buhagiar to do an episode of Someone Else’s Movie!

Not because she was dodging my offers, mind you — she’s just been awfully busy over the last few years, both as an actor and a director, and our schedules didn’t align until last week, when the release of her new drama Carmen gave me a chance to book her.

So here she is, and she wanted to talk about Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning 2013 drama starring Agata Trzebuchowska as a Polish novitiate in the early ’60s whose path to the convent is interrupted by the revelation that she’s not who she thinks she is … and neither is her country.

Would you like to know more? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. God will judge you either way, I guess.

And then you should catch up to this week’s Shiny Things newsletter, where I wrote about George Miller’s marvelous Three Thousand Years of Longing and Shout! Factory’s new 4K releases of Cat People and Dog Soldiers. (Living together! On my shelf! Mass hysterial!) Subscribe already, willya?

And in other podcasting news, my friend and former NOW colleague Jonathan Goldsbie invited me to co-host Canadaland’s Short Cuts podcast and discuss the slow, awful death of the alt-weekly that meant so much to both of us once upon a time. It’s a rough listen, but I’m glad to have got it on the record.

And things really are better now. Next week, you’ll see just how much better they are.