I didn’t get to meet Elegance Bratton in Toronto. When he premiered The Inspection at TIFF I was in another auditorium, and we managed to miss each other a few more times over the course of the festival. That’s how it works more often than not, of course.

I still haven’t met Elegance in person, but we did the Zoom thing for this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, which finds him digging into Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of the 1934 melodrama Imitation of Life, its stately racial and societal dynamics updated for the early years of the civil-rights era. And as it turns out, its examination of passing is very relevant to Elegance’s autobiographical first feature — which opens at the Lightbox on Friday, and is very much worth your time. So check that out, and don’t worry; there are no spoilers for it in the podcast.

Where is the podcast? Well, it’s on Spotify now as well as Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, etc. And of course you can also download the episode directly from the web if that’s how you roll.

Rather be reading? The latest editions of Shiny Things await, wherein I tackle the lead balloon of Don’t Worry Darling and four new Paramount catalogue resurrections from the preservationists at Via Vision, who’ve crafted excellent special editions of Save the Tiger, Pretty Baby, Testament and Nobody’s Fool — and if no one was asking for them, maybe that’s the point. Subscribe and catch up on months of writing right here!

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t make all the noise I could about Joanna Hogg’s brilliant, moving new film The Eternal Daughter, which also opens at the Lightbox on Friday. It’s a sort of ghost story about parents and children, and the way the former never really leave the latter, and it’s one of the best films I’ve seen all year. Joanna was even kind enough to record an introduction for this run,  so that’s a nice thing to share. But the movie is the real gift. Trust me on this.