This week’s NOW is our special Hot Docs edition, and I got to interview Tig Notaro for our cover. This made me very happy, partly because I’ve been a fan for years but largely because she almost died in 2012, and turned it into some of the most moving, terrifyingly alive comedy I’ve ever heard.

(You can buy that life-changing set on Emusic for just 49 cents. Go do that.)

Anyway, her survival — and the subsequent documentary about that — meant we got to talk, and that was wonderful. (Don’t forget to play the audio clips.) And once you’ve read the cover story, look for my reviews in the Hot Docs minisite; I should have about thirty up by the time you see this, with more to come.

Elsewhere in this week’s paper, I talk to Alex Garland about his directorial debut Ex Machina and say some things about the second National Canadian Film Day. I am a full-service writer.