By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from writer-director Nicole Holofcener, this time working from a book by Ted Thompson, The Land of Steady Habits centres on Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn), a middle aged man who divorced his wife (Edie Falco) and retired from his job in finance in an attempt to reinvent… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Land of Steady Habits
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Based on Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same name, Boy Erased focuses on Jared (Lucas Hedges), a young man who gets outed at college, and is sent by his Baptist preacher father (Russell Crowe) to a gay conversion camp run by the “ex-gay” councillor Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Boy Erased
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Damian Chazelle follows up his Oscar-winnings films Whiplash and La La Land with First Man, a space race drama that follows Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) over seven years as he prepares to become the first man to walk on the moon. The film charts his journey from his… Read More #TIFF18 Review: First Man
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) For his directorial debut, Bradley Cooper has delivered the third remake of A Star is Born, following the 1937 original which received new iterations in 1954 and 1976, and the results are pretty great. This time around, the story involves Jackson Maine (Cooper), a washed up country star… Read More #TIFF18 Review: A Star is Born
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a working class Italian-American family man who works as a bouncer at a New York night club. Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is a renowned classical pianist of Jamaican descent who is embarking on a tour throughout the Deep South of 1962, a… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Green Book
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Claire Denis does sci-fi in High Life, and the results are as confounding and maybe even weirder than you expect from the French auteur, who is also working in English for the first time. The film opens with Monte (Robert Pattinson) alone on a spaceship, tending to his baby… Read More #TIFF18 Review: High Life
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) When Bridget (Hilary Swank) returns home to help deal with her mother (Blythe Danner), who is rapidly progressing into Alzheimer’s, she also finds herself having to deal with the drama of her father (Robert Forster) not being ready to have his high school sweetheart leave home, as her… Read More #TIFF18 Review: What They Had
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Franky (Josh Wiggins) is a popular high schooler who has his world upended after his 17th birthday party leads to a drunken but reciprocal sexual encounter with his best friend Ballas (Darren Mann). The encounter leaves Franky struggling to define his own sexuality, as bullying amps up at… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Giant Little Ones
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Jonah Hill, in his directorial debut, has delivered one of the best movies of the festival with Mid90s. The indie flick follows Stevie (Sunny Suljic), a kid in 1995 who is looking for a sense of belonging that he isn’t getting at home with his single mother (Katherine… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Mid90s
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following up his Oscar-winning masterpiece Moonlight, Barry Jenkins brings James Baldwin’s work to the screen with a highly lyrical sensibility in his latest film If Beale Street Could Talk. Based on Baldwin’s 1974 novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne)… Read More #TIFF18 Review: If Beale Street Could Talk
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) When an anonymous hacker starts leaking the personal data of everyone in the town of Salem, four high school girls – Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) and Em (Abra) – end up having their worlds upended after their photos and texts are made public.… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Assassination Nation
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Colette is a biopic of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley), a French writer at the turn of the 20th Century who marries into money when she meets the charismatic Willy (Dominic West). Seeking new material for his publishing house, Willy puts out a novel written by Colette, but he… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Colette
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Dreams, memories and cinema collide in Chinese director Bi Gan’s second feature Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hypnotic and transfixing neo-noir that eschews a traditional narrative structure in favour of deep symbolism and metaphor. The film follows Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue), a man who returns to his… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) When rogue LAPD detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) starts investigating the reemergence of Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of a brutal California gang, she is forced to finally confront the past trauma of a sting operation gone wrong that involved her former partner Chris (Sebastian Stan). Director Karyn… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Destroyer
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton Zalesky (Alexander Skarsgård) are cousins who hatch a scheme to make money by drilling a four inch wide tunnel running fiber optic cables from Kansas to New York that will speed up transactions on the Stock Exchange by a millisecond, but they face… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Hummingbird Project
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Paul Dano, who co-wrote the script with his wife Zoe Kazan, Wildlife is told from the point of view of Joe Brinson (Ed Oxenbould), a young teenager in 1960s Montana who is forced to watch his family fall apart when his father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Wildlife
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Ben (Lucas Hedges) cuts out of rehab to return home for Christmas, his mother Holly (Julia Roberts) agrees to let him stay the night despite disasters over the past two holidays, but she goes into panic mode and tries desperately to help him stay clean overnight. Written… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Ben is Back
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Based on a pair of memoirs written by father and son, Beautiful Boy depicts the struggles faced by writer David Sheff (Steve Carell) to help his drug-addicted young adult son Nic (Timothée Chalamet) get clean, after he started using crystal meth as a teenager. The English language debut… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Beautiful Boy
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film from Dan Fogelman, best known as the creator of the hit show This Is Us, Life Itself follows a collection of characters who are all connected in various ways, with the through line being Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde), a New York couple… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Life Itself
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Based on Canadian author Patrick deWitt’s acclaimed book of the same name, The Sisters Brothers follows Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), a pair of outlaw brothers in 1851, Oregon who are hired to kill an eccentric prospector (Riz Ahmed), who is also being tracked… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Sisters Brothers
The Joy of Movies 