By John Corrado The Teachers’ Lounge is Nominated for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards Stolen cash leads to accusations of racial profiling and a growing culture of distrust between faculty and students in director Ilker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated film The Teachers’ Lounge, a tautly executed middle school drama that often moves like a… Read More Review: The Teachers’ Lounge
By John Corrado New releases for the week of January 26th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Four Daughters (TIFF Lightbox): This freshly Oscar-nominated documentary from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania is a chilling and fascinating study of how radicalization takes hold. The film offers a formally audacious mix of documentary and dramatic reenactments, blending subjects and actors… Read More New This Week (01/26/2024): Four Daughters, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, & More!
By John Corrado The latest work from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (the Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin), the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters is a chilling and fascinating study of how radicalization takes hold. The film is formally audacious in its mix of documentary and dramatic reenactments, blending subjects and actors to tell… Read More Review: Four Daughters
By John Corrado Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ artful, unconventional documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood follows a group of women in Southern Estonia, who are gathered together in a traditional smoke sauna hidden deep in the woods. Shot over several years, Hints follows a variety of subjects over the backdrop of changing seasons. As they sit naked… Read More Review: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
John Corrado Inspired by Pixar’s 1998 second feature A Bug’s Life, the Disney Plus series A Real Bug’s Life puts us on the ground to document the lives of real insects around the world across five half-hour episodes narrated by Awkwafina. Produced by National Geographic, A Real Bug’s Life begins on the streets of New… Read More Review: A Real Bug’s Life (Disney+)
By John Corrado The nominations for the 96th Academy Awards were announced this morning. Leading the pack is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer with thirteen nominations, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things with eleven and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with ten. First off, I must say that this is a very strong lineup of… Read More Nominations for the 96th Academy Awards
By John Corrado New releases for the week of January 19th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Origin (Limited Release): Ava DuVernay’s ambitious latest project aims to adapt Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, turning it into both an exploration of the ideas within Wilkerson’s book, and a dramatization of Isabel’s experiences while writing… Read More New This Week (01/19/2024): Origin, Memory, Fallen Leaves, & More!
By John Corrado Director Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary Radical Dreamer: Werner Herzog offers an enjoyable overview of the iconic German filmmaker’s career, known both for his accent and bold, inquisitive filmmaking style. The documentary chronologically explores Herzog’s early films as part of the New German Cinema movement, which gave way to his reputation as a… Read More Review: Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer
By John Corrado The title of Memory, the latest film from Mexican writer-director Michel Franco, takes on a few different meanings throughout the course of this tender, stripped down character drama. It refers to repressed memories and the lingering impacts of childhood trauma that Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) carries with her every day, as well as… Read More Review: Memory
By John Corrado Ava DuVernay’s Origin is an ambitious film that aims to adapt Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents for the screen. It serves as both an exploration of the ideas within Wilkerson’s book, and a dramatization of Isabel’s experiences while writing it. DuVernay’s film finds… Read More Review: Origin
By John Corrado The third film in DreamWorks Animation’s popular Trolls franchise, Trolls Band Together explores more of this vibrant animated world, while adding a slew of boyband jokes into the mix. The story revolves around Poppy (Anna Kendrick) discovering that her boyfriend Branch (Justin Timberlake) used to be a member of the boyband BroZone,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Trolls Band Together (Sing-Along Edition)
By John Corrado The 1999 coming-of-age sports movie Varsity Blues is now available for the first time on 4K Ultra HD, in honour of the film’s 25th anniversary this month. The film is set in West Canaan, Texas, a fictional all-American small town that revolves around their high school football team, the Coyotes. James Van… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Varsity Blues
By John Corrado New releases for the week of January 12th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Mean Girls (Wide Release): This musical remake of the 2004 teen classic is actually pretty good. Tina Fey returns to write the screenplay (and reprises her role as the calculus teacher), in this redo of Cady Heron (Angoirie Rice) taking on… Read More New This Week (01/12/2024): Mean Girls, Freud’s Last Session, & More!
By John Corrado Freud’s Last Session is a period drama that imagines a fictionalized conversation between Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) two days after the start of World War II on September 3rd, 1939. The meeting takes place at Freud’s home in London, with the psychoanalyst and staunch atheist having invited… Read More Review: Freud’s Last Sesson
By John Corrado It’s been twenty years since Tina Fey released her high school satire Mean Girls in 2004, and now we have a new version of the modern teen classic being released in theatres. Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. (taking over for Mark Waters who directed the 2004 film), the 2024… Read More Review: Mean Girls
By John Corrado There were a lot of good movies released in 2023, but one of the best things about the year that just ended is that it finally felt like the movies were truly, fully back following the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a year when a talky, three-hour biopic like Oppenheimer could make nearly… Read More The Best Movies of 2023
By John Corrado New releases for the week of January 5th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: All of Us Strangers (Limited Release): This latest from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) is a tender, dreamlike meditation on grief and loneliness. Andrew Scott stars as a lonely screenwriter who is given the chance to reconnect with his late… Read More New This Week (01/05/2024): All of Us Strangers, Society of the Snow, & More!
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The latest work from writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 breakout film Weekend remains an essential piece of queer cinema, All of Us Strangers is a tender, dreamlike meditation on grief and loneliness. Working from the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Haigh’s film is a ghost story… Read More Review: All of Us Strangers
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) When Paul King stepped away from directing the third Paddington movie to direct a Willy Wonka origin story, after helming the critically acclaimed first two movies about the bear from Peru, it seemed like a curious move. But the moral of Wonka is that we never should have… Read More Review: Wonka
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