Then We Came to the End

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, we contemplate the collapse of American society … through a very stylish lens.

My guest, producer and director Alyssa Rallo Bennett — whose latest feature The Arrival landed on digital and on demand last Tuesday — picked Sam Esmail’s slow-rolling apocalypse thriller Leave the World Behind, and that opened the door to both an appreciation of Esmail’s eerily credible take on the end of everything — as experienced by a handful of people thrown together at a Long Island house — and the frankly terrific performances of Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon.

Wanna listen? You can subscribe at all the usual spots — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and play it in your panic room. It won’t save you, but it might help lull you to sleep.

(And if you like the movie, I’d also recommend Al Horner’s conversation with Esmail on the Script Apart podcast about adapting Rumaan Alam’s novel for the screen and the specific changes he made to the material. )

And when you’re done, assuming the internet still works, catch up on your Shiny Things! This week marks a shift in the way I write the thing; I’m still covering physical media from week to week, that’s not going to change, but I’ve started a what-to-watch advisory for the paid tier that covers streaming releases as well as discs. Last weekend I tackled The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal and His Three Daughters, which respectively dropped on Prime and Netflix last Friday and are both very good.

… other than that, I don’t have much to talk about this week. Still regrouping after TIFF and figuring out what I’m going to do for the next few months. But don’t worry, I’m working on it.

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