Someone Else's Movie

Filmmaker Julian Higgins , whose latest feature God’s Country stars Thandiwe Newton as a retired academic drawn into a confrontation with trespassers on her remote Montana property, delves into the darkness of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2017 drama Loveless – and Zvyagintsev’s cinema as a whole. Your genial host Norm Wilner will be chatting with Julian and co-star Joris Jarsky after the 7:15pm screening...

In 2015, emerging filmmaker Chandler Levack joined your genial host Norm Wilner to talk about her love for Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s 1998 coming-of-age film Can’t Hardly Wait . Seven years later, Chandler's first feature I Like Movies is making its world premiere at TIFF -- and Norm has joined the festival as a programmer. Enjoy the flashback -- and if you want to see I Like Movies , it's...

It's a special TIFF bonus episode, and Vancouver filmmaker Sophie Jarvis -- whose unnerving first feature Until Branches Bend makes its world premiere this Saturday, September 10th, at 8 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 -- is here to discuss Another Year , the 2010 Mike Leigh dramedy starring Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as an unassuming English couple who are always inviting friends and family to come...

Toronto filmmaker V.T. Nayani , whose first feature This Place premieres at TIFF this Friday (September 9th) at 8:45 pm at the Scotiabank 3 and is available to stream in the Festival @ Home digital series next Wednesday September 14th on digital.tiff.net , steps up for 10 Things I Hate About You ,  the Disney high-school update of The Taming of the Shrew  that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger in...

Actor and filmmaker Valerie Buhagiar , who broke out in Bruce McDonald’s Roadkill and Highway 61   and went on to direct her own features -- like The Anniversary , It’s Hard to Be Human and her latest, Carmen , which is now playing in theatres across Canada -- tackles the religious and emotional undercurrents of Pawel Pawlikowski's Oscar-winning 2013 drama Ida , which stars Agata Trzebuchowska as...

Writer-director Perry Blackshear , whose new thriller When I Consume You is now on digital and on demand, reaches back to the darkness of Absentia , the feature that put genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan on track to make Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Doctor Sleep and all those Netflix projects. Your genial host Norm Wilner just wants to be able to use pedestrian tunnels again someday.

Actor and filmmaker Jude Klassen , whose new film Stupid for You -- about a teenager who decides to reunite her mother's old punk band to impress a girl -- hits VOD today, is here to celebrate John Waters' 1988 breakthrough Hairspray , the movie about Ricki Lake and Divine accidentally enabling a civil-rights revolution in 1962 Baltimore ... and pissing off Sonny Bono and Debbie Harry in the proce...

Becky Shrimpton , producer and host of Hollywood Suite's A Year in Film podcast and one of the dozen or so critics and programmers who appear in the new HS documentary series Cinema A to Z , is here to celebrate NFB filmmaker Robert Fortier's mesmerizing 1981 documentary The Devil At Your Heels , a chronicle of stunt driver Ken Carter's obsession with jumping a rocket car across the St. Lawrence R...

Stage and screen veteran Graham Abbey ( Defendor , Take This Waltz , Degrassi: The Next Generation, Under the Banner of Heaven ), who's also the artistic director of Prince Edward County’s Festival Players , takes a run at Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire , the film about the unlikely friendship between British Olympians Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) and Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) that went on to tr...

BAFTA-winning actor Adeel Akhtar ( Four Lions, Stranger Things , Enola Holmes and Sweet Tooth , among others), who co-stars with Clare Rushbrook in Clio Barnard's Ali & Ava -- opening across Canada Friday -- is here to talk about how important it was to see himself reflected in Gurinder Chadha's 1993 breakout drama Bhaji on the Beach , and what real representation means for everyone who's watching...

Award-winning actor turned author Tracy Dawson -- whose first book Let Me Be Frank: A Book About Women Who Dressed Like Men to Do Shit They Weren’t Supposed To Do was published in May by Harper Collins -- is here to celebrate James L. Brooks' eerily prophetic Broadcast News , the 1987 dramedy starring Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and William Hurt that showed us exactly where America media, and the...

South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass -- director of High Fantasy and Flatland , co-writer of Rafiki and whose crafty new thriller Good Madam drops on Shudder this Thursday, July 14th -- found her early aesthetic in Homicide: Life on the Street , the revolutionary NBC series which explored policing and morality in 1990s Baltimore  over seven seasons and a feature-length finale. Your genial host...

Filmmaker Gigi Saul Guerrero -- whose Into the Dark episode Culture Shock just landed on Hollywood Suite in Canada -- discusses the impact of William Friedkin's The Exorcist on her young psyche, and the creative path she's been on ever since. Your genial host Norm Wilner wonders why everyone wants to talk about horror movies lately ... not that he minds, of course.

Memories of seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street as a child send filmmaker Albert Birney on a reverie through the films that walk between the conscious and unconscious. Your genial host Norm Wilner works Cronenberg in there somehow, too. Strawberry Mansion , which Birney co-wrote and co-directed with his pal Kentucker Audley, is now on digital and on disc, and you should see it; Norm liked it so much...

Actor Jordan Gavaris , whom you knew and loved on Orphan Black , The Sea of Trees , Take Two  and Love in the Time of Corona -- and who's now showing off his comic and dramatic chops in the Prime Video series The Lake -- shares his enduring love for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria , the Italian auteur's 2018 reinterpretation of Dario Argento's 1977 classic about an American student uncovering witchy wo...

In our 399th episode, Alanna Bale of Cardinal , Killjoys and Blaine Thurier’s Kicking Blood -- which arrives on digital next week -- braves the bleak, woodsy horrors of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez' game-changing 1999 found-footage classic The Blair Witch Project . Your genial host Norm Wilner is standing in the corner, don't mind him ... although he would feel a lot less lonely if you subscr...

Sibling filmmakers Yoav and Doron Paz ( The Golem, JeruZalem ), whose new film Plan A opens the Toronto Jewish Film Festival this Thursday, June 9th, at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, are here to tackle Christopher Nolan's genre-twisting thriller Inception , which blew their minds when they first experienced it in 2010. Your genial host Norm Wilner is willing to take his eyes off that damn top lo...

Hello (Again) director Melanie Chung plumbs the psychological depths of Denis Villeneuve's all-star 2013 thriller Prisoners -- the one where Hugh Jackman holds Paul Dano hostage in a basement to solve his daughter's disappearance, while Jake Gyllenhaal's obsessive detective conducts his own equally fevered investigation. Your genial host Norm Wilner warns you: We talk about the ending almost immed...

In an episode almost seven years in the making, actor Tim Rozon ( Lost Girl , Schitt’s Creek , Wynonna Earp, Vagrant Queen , Surreal Estate and the new family film Dakota ) shares his love for My Own Private Idaho , and the incandescent, indelible performance of River Phoenix within Gus Van Sant's masterful 1991 indie drama. Your genial host Norm Wilner is really just an enabler here, but also  fe...

Filmmaker Nathalie Bibeau ( The Walrus and the Whistleblower , and the new Prime Video miniseries The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith ) saw Into the Wild , Sean Penn's 2007 film about the life and death of Chris McCandless, at exactly the right moment in her development as an artist. Your genial host Norm Wilner wants to hear all about that ... and he also wants you to know his Shiny Things...

Actor Rong Fu  -- whom you might know from Pretty Hard Cases and Hello (Again) , and who's now a member of the Enterprise bridge crew in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds -- is here to talk about discovering Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 in her teens, and the rush that came with discovering Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii and realizing badass villains could be more than just one-dimensional antagonists...

Filmmaker Chase Joynt -- whose metatextual documentary Framing Agnes makes its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs this week -- unpacks the layers of Cheryl Dunye's 1996 indie breakout The Watermelon Woman , a film that was easily 25 years ahead of its time in its exploration of race, representation, privilege and sexuality. Your genial host Norm Wilner can't believe what he missed the first time around...

Writer, producer and performer Stephanie Kaliner -- whose delightful new series Pinecone & Pony just dropped on Apple TV+ -- is here to share her love of Disney's 2016 animated smash Moana , another fantastical tale of a young woman who learns that being a hero and saving the world can be ... complicated. Your genial host Norm Wilner is Team Hei Hei all the way, and would also like to remind you t...

It's National Canadian Film Day on Wednesday, and filmmaker Michael McGowan -- director of Saint Ralph , One Week , Still Mine and now All My Puny Sorrows , which opened in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal last weekend and reaches Winnipeg this Friday, April 22nd -- is here to celebrate Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting , the secretly Canadian 1997 drama that won Robin Williams  his only Oscar and c...

Toronto filmmaker Martin Edralin , whose award-winning first feature Islands plays the TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight (April 12th) through Thursday (April 14th), unpacks the tensions at play in Korean master Lee Chang-dong's almost unbearably empathetic Secret Sunshine , a study of a woman carrying the weight of unimaginable loss that earned star Jeon Do-yeon the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2007....