On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by actor Lyndsy Fonseca — of How I Met Your Mother, Agent Carter and now the Disney+ Turner and Hooch series, which drops its season finale tomorrow night — to talk about a film near and dear to her heart: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the 1997 cult comedy that plays as the counter-argument to Grosse Pointe Blank, on so many levels.

You know what to do — I mean, after 360 of these, I hope you know what to do. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. So do that!

And then you may proceed to all the other stuff that’s waiting for you, like the latest episode of NOW What, in which I’m joined by Rad and Hollywood Suite’s Alicia Fletcher to discuss the myriad disappointments of No Time to Die, and then by Richard Trapunski to talk about his rejuvenative experience of going to see live music again.

There’s also last week’s What to Watch page, with reviews of Titane, Maid, The Guilty (Glenn), The Many Saints of Newark (Rad) and Criterion’s magnificent Melvin Van Peebles boxed set, and my stand-alone review of Venom:  Let There Be Carnage, which the kids liked. And if it seems like a light week, trust me: It wasn’t. There’s so much more copy coming your way.

In this week’s Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by David Yarovesky — director of Brightburn and the brand-new Nightbooks — to discuss the work of John Carpenter and Sam Neill, specifically as it relates to the work of Sutter Cane, in In the Mouth of Madness.

Do you … not read Sutter Cane? You’ll want to listen to this episode as soon as possible, then. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web.

And then you can move on to last Friday’s NOW What, which starts with an interview with Next Stop‘s Jabbari Weekes, Tichaona Tapambwa and Vanessa Adams about making the second season of their remarkable CBC Gem series, and ends with a post-mortem on Canada’s federal election from Enzo DiMatteo. Podcasts are awesome!

You’re probably also excited to read my review of Daniel Craig’s last  Bond movie, No Time to Die, which, I guess, okay. I should warn you that it runs about 1400 words. (And if you think that’s long, wait until you see the movie. Hoo boy.)

Also, there’s last week’s What to Watch digest, and the list of the 50 best movies to stream on Crave that Kevin and I spent most of last week writing. It’s also the end of the month, so our October lookaheads for Netflix, Crave, CBC Gem and Disney+ are all there for your perusal, with Amazon coming soon.

Enjoy ’em! I have more writing to do. And also I have to see the Venom sequel, which I understand is 73 minutes shorter than the Bond one. So that’ll be nice.

Well, the festival is over — and I was genuinely surprised to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye miss out on the People’s Choice award. I figured the gimmick of Chastain’s makeup, and the fact that she delivers a genuinely great performance underneath it, would be an unbeatable one-two punch, but it didn’t even make the final three; the prize went to Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, with Scarborough and The Power of the Dog as runners-up. Color me shocked.

At least I can return to normal life now, and that means releasing this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, which brings Between Waves director and co-writer Virginia Abramovich onto the show to tackle the corkscrew genius of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which … look, it’s been out for 21 years, if you haven’t seen it at this point that’s on you.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web, and then check out Virginia’s movie. It’s got a slippery beauty that’s really striking.

I’m also on this week’s episode of Black Hole Films, joining Jeremy Lalonde, his son Ephraim, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Chris Smets to talk about Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno’s extremely disturbing take on Toho’s greatest monster. (This was my first at-home, in-person recording since March 6, 2020, and it was weirdly emotional. But in a good way, I think.)

And then there’s everything else: In last week’s episode of NOW What, I convened a panel about the history of alt-weeklies with my old bosses Michael Hollett and Susan G. Cole, as well as Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian; I also chatted with Michael Showalter about directing The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and that’s fun too.

And the Emmys happened! Here’s me talking about them (in standard definition, the horror) on CP24 yesterday.

If you’re more into reading, have some reviews! There’s last week’s What to Watch guide, featuring reviews of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Nowhere Inn, Blue Bayou and the new season of Sex Education, and also my stand-alone review of Clint Eastwood’s decent-enough Cry Macho. Also, NOW just put my Fall Guide lookaheads for movies and television online, so you can check those out as well if you’re curious about what I think will be worth watching in the coming months.

And of course there’s opinion aplenty in my TIFF dispatches, which I realize I should probably assemble for your convenience right here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5,  Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9. Enjoy, I hope? At the very least, I hope they make your life a little bit easier.

So I’m doing TIFF from home this year, which is … honestly, not the worst thing. I’m still watching too many movies and writing too many words in between those movies, and my brain is leaking out the side of my head, but I don’t have to deal with lines and crowds and weather and frantic texts from publicists who don’t understand why I can’t be in their green room 45 minutes ahead of a slot that’s going to start at least 15 minutes later than it should.

I’d be happy never to go to another in-person festival, is what I’m saying. Although I would miss the coffee bars.

Anyway, if you want to know what I’m watching/recommending/begging you to avoid, our TIFF dispatches  are appearing daily at the NOW site, where our digital magic scrubs away the weepy exhaustion and gives you the clean, cold text you deserve. I also posted a stand-alone review of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which feels to me like the only real contender for the People’s Choice award at this point.

And in the middle of all of this, I released an episode of Someone Else’s Movie, because you deserve it. Best Sellers director Lina Roessler joins me to talk about Ali Abbasi’s genre-fluid 2018  film noir Border, and if you’ve seen the movie you know there’s a lot to talk about. And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

Anyway, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. And keep an eye out for Best Sellers when it hits VOD this Friday. Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine are just delightful together.

More stuff! There’s last week’s What to Watch page, with reviews of The Card Counter, Kate, The Voyeurs and HBO’s new spin on Scenes from a Marriage, in which Jessica Chastain gives her other great performance of the year. (Oscar Isaac’s not too bad himself, mind you.)

I also spoke to The Voyeurs star Sydney Sweeney about her 21st century take on the erotic thriller; you can listen to that conversation in last Friday’s episode of NOW What, which also features TIFF-adjacent interviews with musician and composer TiKA and filmmakers Albert Shin and Igor Djrlaca, or you can watch a video clip and read some of the transcript. But why would you want to do that? Podcasts are it, man!

I’ve noticed that a lot of guests on Someone Else’s Movie picking recent films lately — or recent-ish, anyway. It’s rare that someone goes back further than the ’90s, which I suppose speaks to the general age of my guests, and the age they were when they encountered the movies that hit them like lightning bolts.

For his episode, the documentary filmmaker Jeremy Workman surprised me — choosing William Wyler’s The Heiress, the 1949 drama that earned Olivia de Havilland her second Oscar and gave Montgomery Clift his first real leading role.

It’s the first time anyone’s brought a Wyler film onto the show, which I find frankly astonishing; how has no one chosen Ben-Hur or Roman Holiday before now? But Jeremy did it, and now you can enjoy that conversation.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get it instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then you can feast on all the other stuff that I’ve put down for you in the last week.

There’s the latest episode of NOW What, where I talk to restaurateur Jacob Wharton-Shukster and provincial NDP leader Andrea Horwath about the efforts to curb anti-vaxxer harassment of staff and diners at establishments whose owners have expressed support for vaccination passports,

And then there’s all the written stuff, like my looks at TIFF’s Canadian content and promising genre cinema and the NOW 40 at 40 I wrote about what Sarah Polley’s been up to since her festival cover all the way back in 1997. (Rather a lot, really.)

There’s also last week’s What to Watch column, and our Crave preview, which came in a lot later than usual this month. But it’s all up there now! Get to reading!

(And Winnie is settling in very nicely, thanks for asking.)

First things first: MEET WINNIE. She’s two years old, she comes from northern Manitoba by way of the Etobicoke Humane Society, she can climb anything and she lives with us now.

Kate and I brought her home last Thursday night, and after some entirely understandable anxiety she’s settling in and revealing herself to be a very sweet, ridiculously goofy girl.

As you might imagine, that also means our free time has taken a bit of a hit, to the point that I’m posting this about 36 hours later than I would have liked. Oh, and the TIFF screenings have started up for the year, so … yeah, this wasn’t the best time to bring home a dog. But she needed us, and I guess we needed her too, so here we are.

Anyway! Work continues apace, meaning you can and should still enjoy a brand-new episode of Someone Else’s Movie, where I welcome back John Ross Bowie — who has a new podcast of his own, Household Faces, that’s just terrific — to discuss Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, a film for which I do not care at all. But because John and I are both adults, we managed to have a really good conversation about it. No matter who you agree with about the movie, I think you’ll enjoy listening to it.

So go do that!  Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get it instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then you can feast on all the other stuff I neglected to post about on Friday due to a horrific lack of sleep, starting with last week’s episode of NOW What, in which Rad and I talk about the OnlyFans debacle with sex-work activists Jenna Hynes and Gwen Adora, and discuss the Ted Lasso backlash with television writer and producer — and I Hate It But I Love It podcast co-host — Jocelyn Geddie. No spoilers, because we are not monsters.

And then there’s last week’s What to Watch digest, my stand-alone web reviews of Candyman (good) and Only Murders in the Building (brilliant) and the September lookaheads for Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and CBC Gem.

But remember what I said about TIFF looming in the future? Here’s the start of NOW’s festival coverage, a list of the ten films to which we are most fervently looking forward — but which doesn’t include genre, documentary or Canadian features, because those are getting their own lists.

This is all to explain the absence of Last Night in Soho. Edgar Wright finally brings a picture to TIFF and we don’t highlight it? What am I, an asshole?

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, we add our fourth Paul Thomas Anderson film to the catalogue as Carly Pope steps up for his 1997 breakout Boogie Nights, which still feels eccentric, electric and vaguely transgressive almost a quarter-century after its premiere.

It’s a great movie, and it made for a great episode; Carly is someone I’ve been hoping to book on the show for a while, and it finally came together in a very satisfying way. So give it a listen! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get it instantly, or download the episode directly from the web.

And then you can check out my review of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which is very satisfying as a Marvel movie and even more so as the feature-film breakout of Simu Liu, who graduates from Kim’s Convenience to superherodom and makes it look downright graceful. It hits theatres September 3rd, and if the idea of going to see a movie with a crowd is worrying to you … well, I understand. Maybe catch a matinee. Or wait for it to hit Disney+ in a couple of months; it shouldn’t be too long, with The Eternals looming in November.

It’s weird that it’s almost September, right? This whole summer blew right past me. But that means TIFF is coming, and the festival revised their COVID policies yesterday to mandate full vaccination or proof of a recent negative test. I wrote that up for NOW yesterday, not that there’s really any more to the story than that. But still. It’s a living.

Okay, I know you won’t believe me at this point but I tried to get this up earlier and there was some weird thing going on with the WordPress image gallery, and I left it alone and I got busy with something else and now here we are. Sorry!

I’ll start by pointing you to this week’s What to Watch omnibus, and to the longer reviews of The Chair and Nine Perfect Strangers that break out of it. You should also check out my short but fun conversation with Manny Jacinto, who appears in the latter show and also in Brand New Cherry Flavor, which dropped on Netflix last week. And the first of our monthly streaming lookaheads is up, with Disney+ getting its release out ahead of the pack, and leading with the announcement of Reservation Dogs. I’m really looking forward to that.

And of course there’s the latest NOW What podcast, in which I discuss matters federal (election!) and provincial (vaccination!) with Fatima Syed and Sneh Duggal, respectively.

That’s it! Enjoy the weekend! Try to have some cold water handy, it’s gonna be really gross.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie was originally supposed to have been recorded last summer, but my guest got a gig so we had to postpone it.

Well, now the gig is rolling into the world: It’s Nine Perfect Strangers, a miniseries adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel starring Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Grace Van Patten, Regina Hall, Bobby Cannavale and half a dozen other very gifted performers that premieres on Hulu in the U.S. tomorrow and on Amazon in Canada on Friday. And its director, Jonathan Levine — maker of extremely entertaining films like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, 50/50, Warm Bodies, The Night Before, Long Shot — is here to talk about Billy Madison, the Tamra Davis comedy that took Adam Sandler from Saturday Night Live to proper movie stardom, and also is not nearly as dumb as you might remember it. 

I mean, it’s pretty dumb, but in a conscious way. I think. We break it all down for you.

Wanna listen? You can! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get it instantly, or download the episode directly from the web. And then you can move on to all the stuff I forgot to post about last week … like the latest episode of NOW What, which offers a look at the COVID risks Ontario’s back-to-school policy does nothing to mitigate, according to the Ontario Parent Action Network. The episode also includes my chat with The Suicide Squad‘s Nathan Fillion, which you may have seen earlier this month.

And then, read stuff! There’s last Friday’s What to Watch page, my longer reviews of Brand New Cherry Flavor and Free Guy, and a look at Cineplex’s new subscription service, CineClub. Well, it’s more of a discount program. But it does require a subscription, so  there.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome director Heather Ross, whose documentary For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close assembles dozens of very talented people to talk about the man who more or less invented long-form improv as we know it. It’s been streaming on Hot Docs for a couple of weeks, and as of today it’s available on VOD platforms everywhere! Check it out!

Heather she picked a film that’s very much in line with her project: Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest’s improvised comedy that premiered at TIFF 25 years ago, launching his very specific subgenre of eccentricity-based mockumentary.  I suppose This Is Spinal Tap was the first one, but the tone was very different with Rob Reiner directing. Guest’s films are gentler and more indulgent of their casts, and at a tight 84 minutes Guffman doesn’t have any of the puffiness that creeps into some of Guest’s later projects. It holds up, is what I’m saying.

Join the revelry! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get it instantly, or download it directly from the web.

And because NOW What only comes out on Fridays these days, that’s all the podcast news I can give you. But if you go to the NOW website, you can read about that time we put Jessica Chastain on the cover for TIFF 2011, and what made us so sure she was the real deal.

That’s pretty much it for today. Boy, when I do a Friday post I really burn through the content, huh.