On the Saturday September 27, 2025 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we meet actress Kim Roberts. She is s a distinguished Canadian actress with over 200 credits in film, television, theater, and voice acting. Born in Toronto to Caribbean parents, she began performing at age seven and is best known for roles like Mayor Goodway in PAW Patrol, Christine in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Marnie in Schitt’s Creek. A co-founder of Obsidian Theatre Company, she has worked alongside luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Robin Williams, earning accolades such as the 1996 Harold Award and the 2014 Reelworld Trailblazer Award.
Then, we get to know Canadian actress, comedian, and musician Lauren Ash. Best known for her role as the no-nonsense Dina Fox on the NBC sitcom Superstore, Ash has also made her mark in films like Lars and the Real Girl and voiced characters such as Scorpia in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. A Second City Toronto and Chicago alumna, she’s a two-time Canadian Comedy Award winner for Best Female Improviser and co-hosts the popular podcast True Crime and Cocktails. In 2023, she launched a music career, and today we talk about “Call Me When You Get This,” her gut-punching, emotionally charged pop-punk debut album.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
All iHeartRadio Canada stations are available across Canada via live stream on iHeartRadio.caand the iHeartRadio Canada app. iHeartRadio Canada stations are also connected through Alexa, Siri, and Google Home smart speakers.
SYNOPSIS: “The Baltimorons,” an underdog romance from director Jay Duplass, now playing in theatres, sees a dentist and her blabbermouth patient form a connection as they spend a special Christmas Eve together.
CAST: Michael Strassner, Liz Larsen, Olivia Luccardi. Directed by Jay Duplass.
REVIEWS: Set on Christmas Eve “The Baltimorons” is a character study of two mismatched people who find the gift of companionship.
Michael Strassner, who co-wrote the script with director Jay Duplass, is Cliff, recovering alcoholic and failed comedian. When he falls and breaks a tooth, he finds Didi (Liz Larsen), the one dentist willing to take a patient on Christmas Eve.
Even though they don’t exactly hit it off right away—“If you keep talking, I’m going fit you for a muzzle,” she tells him.—when his car is towed, she offers him a lift to the impound. His irrepressible nature lies somewhere between overbearing and charming, but over the course of one event-filled night, feelings develop between the two lonely people. “I just had an amazing day,” he says. “That’s it. And I didn’t want it to end.”
“The Baltimorons” is a quiet, sweet natured movie about an annoying guy who hides his vulnerabilities behind a façade of verbal diarrhea and a lonely woman searching for connection.
A throwback to character-based indie movies, circa the mumblecore years, the movie is a simple story about connection but is laced with subtext drawn out of the situation. As the two find ways to pass the time on Christmas Eve, their lives and true selves reveal themselves organically, without ever feeling like plot points wedged in for dramatic effect.
With a light touch Duplass and Strassner’s script touch on recovery, resilience and the role creative passion plays in Cliff’s life. These details bring these underdog characters to gentle life.
The film’s sense of longing and sentimentality is unspoken, but, by virtue of the Christmas setting, is steeped into every frame. Didi’s melancholy regarding her broken marriage is amplified by the season, as memories of Christmas’s past are triggered by the twinkling lights of downtown Baltimore and celebrations happening around her.
In the film’s final moments Did asks Cliff, “Where are we going with this kid?” “I don’t know,” he says. “I just like you.” Like the film itself, the exchange is simple, without bells and whistles, heartfelt and yet perfectly sums up the situation.
SYNOPSIS: Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” “One Battle After Another” is a story of rebellion and what happens when the tentacles of the past reach out to touch a new generation.
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
REVIEW: “One Battle After Another” begins as a story of The French 75, a revolutionary group on a mission to free hundreds of detainees at the US-Mexico border. Explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and co-conspirator Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are freedom fighters and lovers who stage daring raids that attract the attention of the aptly named Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
Cut to sixteen years later. With Perfidia no longer in the picture, Bob, now stoned and drunk much of the time, lives off the grid with their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Fearful his past will catch up to them, Willa isn’t allowed to have a cell phone and never leaves the house unless she has a special pager undetectable by everyone except French 75 members.
When Lockjaw reemerges, now working with a group of white supremacists, Bob is forced back into his old life, trouble is, all that lingers from his revolutionary days is a deep paranoia, the result of massive drug use. When Willa disappears, he must clear his addled brain long enough to track her down.
At almost three hours in length, “One Battle After Another” is an epic story that mixes and matches the political and the personal. A satirical look at the extremes of the left and right, and the resulting tribalism and polarization, when the film settles in after its first action packed hour it focusses on Bob, a revolutionary well past his best by date.
DiCaprio channels “The Big Lebowski’s” shambolic Dude. From his ever-present bathrobe and slightly bewildered facial expressions to his loyalty to friends and family and resilience the star’s take on Bob is a fun and funny homage to Jeff Bridges’s iconic performance. It allows DiCaprio the opportunity to display his comedic chops but also show emotional depth.
He’s at the center of a sprawling film, a movie about the ever-growing chasm between opposing political sides, but the movie succeeds because, at its heart, it’s a thrilling, redemptive family drama about what bonds us, not what divides us. Bob is a hot mess, a deeply flawed guy, but he steps up when his past actions put his daughter’s life in danger, and in the process finds reconciliation in that fractured relationship amid chaos he helped create.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the script, has a lot on his mind. With its take on radical politics and domestic terrorism, the movie feels timely, while its portrayal of the connection between father and daughter is timeless.
SYNOPSIS: In “Eleanor the Great,” the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson now playing in theatres, June Squibb plays a woman who tells lies to fit in with a new group of people.
CAST: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor. Directed by Scarlett Johansson.
REVIEW: A story of loss and grief, “Eleanor the Great” gives 95-year-old star June Squibb the best role of her decades long career.
When we first meet Eleanor (Sqibb) she’s living in Florida with Bessie (Rita Zohar) her best friend of 70 years. Their husbands have passed, and the two are so tight they share everything, including a bedroom equipped with twin beds. When Bessie has nightmares of her time in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Eleanor comforts her with conversation and tea.
When Bessie passes away, Eleanor she moves in with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York. Lonely without her best friend, she attends a support group, unaware it’s for Holocaust survivors. A convert to Judaism, Eleanor is Jewish but grew up in the Midwest, far from the horrors of the Holocaust. Flustered when she is pressed to share her experience, she co-opts Bessie’s stories, telling them as her own.
When Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student takes an interest in her stories, the lie gets bigger than she ever could have imagined.
For her directorial debut Johansson tackles a touchy subject. The use of the Holocaust as a plot device and the essaying the ethical implications of Eleanor’s fabrications is daring stuff, but Johansson and screenwriter Tory Kamen use the story to study themes of grief, community and friendship. Eleanor’s telling of Bessie’s experiences is her way of keeping her friend alive, in memory anyway. It is a lie, and a hurtful one, but it is her misguided expression of grief for the loss of her closest friend.
Squibb hands in a feisty performance. Eleanor is quick witted, with a bit of an attitude, but she exhibits an emotional depth that conveys the heartbreak that fuels the events of the movie.
“Eleanor the Great” is a solid, if uneven debut for Johansson, but it provides Squibb with a career high.
SYNOPSIS: “The Strangers: Chapter 2” is a survival of the dumbest film, pitting three masked marauders against a victim who perseveres even though she makes endlessly stupid decisions.
CAST: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath. Directed by Renny Harlin.
REVIEW: Part two of a proposed trilogy, “The Strangers: Chapter 2” should probably have been called “The Strangers: This Time It’s Not So Random.”
The story of three masked, axe and knife wielding killers, known for choosing victims at random, picks up where the last movie left off. “Chapter One” saw the prerequisite good looking young couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), targeted and terrorized by the Strangers while vacation in the creepy little town of Venus, Oregon.
Axes chop flesh, knives get stabby and blood spurts but for the first time ever the trio of marauders leave one of their victims alive.
In “Chapter 2” they return to finish the job. Revenge of the Random Killers. Cue ninety minutes of near misses, terrified gasps, jump scares with a dollop of nihilism and general unpleasantness.
“The Strangers: Chapter 2” isn’t so much a story as it is a collection of slasher movie tropes—like the masked killer who menacingly scrapes his blade against a metal surface to inspire terror, every door has a creaky hinge, and every radio station is tuned into religious fire-and-brimstone programming—randomly thrown at the screen.
The randomness of the murders, which has always been the franchise’s calling card, is out the window, and with it goes any sense of menace. In its place is flat footed horror with no sense of imagination.
“The Strangers: Chapter 2” ends with a “To Be Continued” title card and scenes from Chapter 3, which, given how bad this movie is, seems like a warning rather than an advertisement.
On the Saturday September 20, 2025 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we meet musician, songwriter, and director Gerald Casale. Best known as a co-founder, co-lead vocalist, and bassist of band DEVO. He was a key creative force behind DEVO’s satirical, art-driven sound and aesthetic, contributing to hits like “Whip It” and directing many of their innovative music videos. His work is deeply influenced by his experiences as an art student at Kent State University during the 1970 May 4th massacre, which shaped his views on societal devolution, a core theme in DEVO’s music. Today we talk about evolution of a band famous for singing about devolution.
Then, we spend time with actor, director, producer, screenwriter and political activist Rob Reiner. He starred on the classic sitcom “All in the Family,” directed the coming-of-age drama “Stand by Me,” the romantic fantasy “The Princess Bride,” and the rom-com classic “When Harry Met Sally,” and his company Castle Rock Entertainment produced hits like “Seinfeld and “The Shawshank Redemption.” Today we talk about the classic “Spinal Tap,” which he directed and starred in, the new sequel “Spinal Tap: The End Continues” and his new book, “A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap.”
Then actor Rade Šerbedžija stops by to talk about “Rise of the Raven,” a 10-part historical epic series about Hungarian commander János Hunyadi’s battles against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, and tell a grewat story about working with Maggie Smith.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
All iHeartRadio Canada stations are available across Canada via live stream on iHeartRadio.caand the iHeartRadio Canada app. iHeartRadio Canada stations are also connected through Alexa, Siri, and Google Home smart speakers.
Celebrate the 10th anniversary of “Mad Max: Fury Road” with us and check out my filmed introduction to the classic action movie on the big screen!
“It is a chase movie where characters chase immortality, a new life in a better place, love and one another across a vivid landscape. Gone are the grey tones of dystopian movies like ‘The Road.’ In its place is a dusty but vibrant backdrop that frames the non-stop action. Miller keeps the pedal to the metal but he keeps the action earthbound. The laws of physics are respected by the director’s use of practical effects. So, for instance, when a car blows up it doesn’t rocket into space, instead it explodes spectacularly but organically…” HERE‘s a preview. To see the whole thing, check your local Cineplex listings for times and a theatre near you!
SYNOPSIS: In “HIM,” a new psychological sports horror film starring Marlon Wayans and now playing in theatres, after suffering a potentially career-ending brain injury, up-and-coming quarterback Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) accepts an offer to train with a legendary coach at his isolated compound. As the training intensifies Cameron’s life is plunged into a dark world of sacrifice.
CAST: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies. Directed by Justin Tipping.
REVIEW: A candidate for the Most Overwrought Sports Movie Ever, “HIM” is a jarring look at football culture. A curious mix of football, power dynamics, gore and psychological horror, it’s a muddled mix of “Any Given Sunday” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”
When an attack by a crazed football mascot leaves next-big-thing quarterback Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) with a brain injury, it appears his dreams of superstardom will have to be put on hold. When he’s offered the chance to train with “Him,” legendary Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), it’s a second chance he can’t turn down.
The charismatic former quarterback lives in a remote, state-of-the-art compound as he contemplates the final phase of his professional career. He’s thinking about hanging it up and wants to train the next G.O.A.T.
The training is extreme, a bootcamp with no distractions, just football. As the mix of physical and psychological coaching pushes Cameron to his limit, he senses a sinister, cult-like vibe in the compound. “In this game violence is rewarded,” Isaiah tells Cameron, “so learn to enjoy it.”
As Isaiah shifts from inspiring to menacing, Cameron’s quest for fame and success at the hands of his new mentor becomes a matter of life and death. “I’m not going to just give it to you,” Isaiah says, “You going to have to take it from me.”
Slick and stylish, “HIM” is a metaphor masquerading as a movie. Through artfully composed shots director Justin Tipping uses splashy music video style visuals to comment on athletic commodification and exploitation, the sports physical toll and the price of fame.
The result is an undeniably cool looking film. Whether it is the live action X-Ray imagery of on field collisions between players to graphically illustrate the devastating internal damage done during regular play or the psychedelic training scenes or the gory and gross Grand Guignol finale, the film’s style is pure eye-candy.
It’s in the storytelling that the movie fumbles. Disjointed and often incoherent, the narrative ideas get smothered by the film’s high style. More interested in flashy visuals than narrative cohesion, it allows its premise of football as a religion that requires great sacrifice to get lost. It’s an interesting concept, one that could have inspired psychological horror, but instead is content to stylishly splatter the screen with fake plasma.
Despite an MVP performance from Marlon Wayans and some interesting (although unexplored) ideas, “HIM” is style over substance.
