By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2023 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 28th to April 1st, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto and virtually on Super Channel Fuse. A routine traffic stop leads to an increasingly obsessive quest to get the ticket thrown out in court in writer-director Adrian… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Retrograde
New releases for the week of March 31st, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Wide Release): Directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the same team behind Game Night, this is a surprisingly fun movie based on the classic fantasy game. What works about the film is that the directors are… Read More New This Week (03/31/2023): Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, A Thousand and One, Rye Lane, & More!
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature A Thousand and One, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January, is a mother-son drama defined by its complex lead character, with the filmmaker eschewing easy emotion for something far thornier. The film, which begins in the 1990s, centres around… Read More Review: A Thousand and One
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a movie based on the classic fantasy roleplaying game, and it offers a surprisingly enjoyable mix of comedy and adventure that has a fun, playing with a group of friends feel to it that I imagine will be quite appealing to… Read More Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah), the two protagonists of British filmmaker Raine Allen-Miller’s directorial debut Rye Lane, have their initial meet-cute through the dividing walls in the unisex bathroom of a South London art gallery. Dom is crying in one of the stalls after a bad… Read More Review: Rye Lane (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2023 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 28th to April 1st, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto and virtually on Super Channel Fuse. In How to Get My Parents to Divorce, a family movie from Quebec that plays like a clever inversion of The… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: How to Get My Parents to Divorce
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) The 2023 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 28th to April 1st, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto and virtually on Super Channel Fuse. The debut film from writer-director Connie Cocchia, When Time Got Louder is a Canadian family drama that explores how a tight-knit… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: When Time Got Louder
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Blue’s Big City Adventure is a new feature-length Blue’s Clues movie from Nickelodeon that branches off from the 2019 reboot series Blues Clues & You, and mainly exists to have new host Josh (Josh Dela Cruz) meet up with the show’s old hosts Steve (Steve Burns) and Joe… Read More DVD Review: Blue’s Big City Adventure
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2023 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 28th to April 1st, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto and virtually on Super Channel Fuse. An absurdist comedy about gender politics that segues into being a psychosexual suburban fantasy, the Quebec film Babysitter is an entertaining… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Babysitter
By John Corrado New releases for the week of March 24th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: John Wick: Chapter 4 (Wide Release): This fourth entry in the very good John Wick franchise is, for my money, the best one yet. The film continues the mission of Keanu Reeves’ titular assassin to take down The High Table, with… Read More New This Week (03/24/2023): John Wick: Chapter 4, Riceboy Sleeps, & More!
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Keanu Reeves returns to the titular role of John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4, which doubles as the best entry yet in this already very good action movie franchise. This fourth instalment puts Reeves’ former assassin Wick, who is now a marked man, at the centre of… Read More Review: John Wick: Chapter 4
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the 4K Ultra HD release of Babylon. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my original review right here. Damien Chazelle’s Old Hollywood epic Babylon is being released on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray this week, including in a limited… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Babylon (SteelBook Edition)
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the Blu-ray release of A Man Called Otto. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my original review right here. A Man Called Otto, director Marc Forster’s very enjoyable remake of the 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, is… Read More Blu-ray Review: A Man Called Otto
John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Brother, the Scarborough-set drama from writer-director Clement Virgo that is up for fourteen Canadian Screen Awards, follows two brothers, Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), over the course of more than a decade. Much of the film takes place in the 1990s, with the Jamaican-Canadian brothers living in… Read More Review: Brother
By John Corrado New releases for the week of March 17th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Shazam! Fury of the Gods (Wide Release): The biggest of this week’s new releases is this sequel to the 2019 DCEU film Shazam!, which is once again directed by David Sandberg and finds Zachary Levi reprising his role as the kid… Read More New This Week (03/17/2023): Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Brother, Boston Strangler, & More!
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Set in Toronto’s Tibetan community, Tenzin is a Canadian social issue drama that takes a moody, minimalistic approach to telling a story and exploring its themes. Directed by Michael LeBlanc and Josh Reichmann, the film centres around Tenzin (Tenzin Kelsang), a young Tibetan man dealing with the grief… Read More Review: Tenzin
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman is a very enjoyable mix of music documentary, concert film, and docu-special that finds Letterman interviewing U2’s lead singer Bono and guitarist… Read More Review: Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Written and directed by Matt Ruskin, Boston Strangler is a pretty good direct-to-streaming serial killer thriller that dramatizes the events around the real life Boston Strangler murders, seen from the perspective of Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley), one of the female journalists who helped break the story in 1962.… Read More Review: Boston Strangler (Disney+)
By John Corrado The 95th Oscars have officially wrapped up, with Everything Everywhere All At Once (which went into the night with a leading eleven nominations), absolutely sweeping the show with seven wins, including Picture, Director, and a trio of acting trophies for Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh (becoming the first… Read More Winners of the 95th Academy Awards
By John Corrado It’s Oscar weekend, which means that it’s time for my final predictions for what will take home this year’s awards. While some of the big categories (Picture, Director) seem easy, there are a lot of hard to predict races. I have very little confidence in some of these predictions, and you know… Read More My 2023 Oscar Predictions
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