By John Corrado A month ago, I shared my picks for the best movies of 2020, and now it’s time to make my selections for the best documentaries of last year. This list has been a long time coming, I know, and It took me a while to put it together, from deciding on the… Read More The Best Documentaries of 2020
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Climb, Michael Angelo Covino’s bittersweet comedy about male friendship, opens with the camera following two friends cycling up a hill in France. It’s an incredible long take that goes on for nearly nine whole minutes, moving seamlessly between wide shots and medium closeups, only getting more impressive… Read More VOD Review: The Climb
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) is a teenager in 1935, who lives on a Texas farm in a dustbowl town that has been hit hard by the Great Depression and never recovered. He finds his escape through stories of outlaws on the run from the law, fuelling his dream… Read More Blu-ray Review: Dreamland
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) In Wander, the latest film from Canadian director April Mullen, a paranoid private investigator named Arthur Bretnik (Aaron Eckhart) is hired to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in an American small town called Wander. Arthur is a former cop who worked in the homicide division,… Read More DVD Review: Wander
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Kaminski brothers, Stanley (Charlie Hunnam) and Lion (Jack O’Connell), are working class guys struggling to make ends meet in the gritty drama Jungleland. Stanley acts as a promoter for his brother’s career as a bare-knuckle boxer, booking him scrappy local fights in order to earn some cash.… Read More DVD Review: Jungleland
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is the titular “promising young woman” in director Emerald Fennell’s ultra stylish and unforgettable feature debut of the same name. Cassie used to be in med school and was on her way to becoming a doctor, until a shocking and traumatic incident forced her to… Read More VOD Review: Promising Young Woman
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Mixing elements of a kidnapping thriller with dark Hoodoo magic, Spell is a B-grade horror movie that had the potential to bring something unique to the genre with its almost entirely African-American cast and folklore, but ends up feeling derivative of better films. Marquis T. Woods (Omari Hardwick)… Read More Blu-ray Review: Spell
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Over the past few years, Jordan Peele has gone from comedy star to one of our finest horror filmmakers, an unexpected but genuinely exciting career reinvention. In 2019, Peele leveraged his power to get a reboot of Rod Serling’s classic show The Twilight Zone on the air, updating… Read More DVD Review: The Twilight Zone (2019): Season Two
By John Corrado SpongeBob SquarePants has been on the air for over two decades now, and the complete twelfth season of the Nickelodeon cartoon is being released on DVD this week. The set comes with all 25 episodes from the season spread across three discs, and the Bikini Bottom adventures included herein serve as familiar… Read More DVD Review: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Complete Twelfth Season
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A Filipino girl, who is living in Texas as an undocumented immigrant, dreams of being a country music star. This simple logline, which could have easily been the premise behind an exploitive movie of the week, instead provides the basis for the often touching Yellow Rose. Directed, produced… Read More VOD Review: Yellow Rose
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) I will never forget the first time that I watched the original film version of The Boys in the Band. Directed by William Friedkin, and adapted from the late Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking play of the same name, the 1970 film details the lives of a group of gay… Read More Netflix Review: The Boys in the Band (2020)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Ryan Murphy’s flashy gay rights musical The Prom, which is based on the Broadway musical of the same name, is a prime example of a film that has some enjoyable moments, but feels like an uneven mishmash overall. It tells the story of Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman),… Read More Netflix Review: The Prom
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) It’s hard to write about Hillbilly Elegy, director Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir about growing up poor in rural Appalachia, without getting into the discourse around it. Take, for example, the awards season hopeful’s duelling scores on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has a “rotten” critics… Read More Netflix Review: Hillbilly Elegy
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