By John Corrado New releases for the week of March 29th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Wide Release): The two Titans duke it out and team up in this latest MonsterVerse blockbuster from director Adam Wingard, serving as a followup to his 2021 entry Godzilla vs. Kong (which unfortunately had its… Read More New This Week (03/29/2024): Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Club Zero, & More!
By John Corrado A group of students fall under the sway of their new teacher Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) in Club Zero, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s offbeat and unsettling satire of cliques, social pressure, and radical movements. Miss Novak arrives as the new teacher at the Talent Campus, an international private school where she is… Read More Movie Review: Club Zero
By John Corrado A follow up to the 2021 legacy sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife (which was itself a course correction from the misguided 2016 reboot), Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the latest film in the franchise that began forty years ago. It’s safe to say that all of these films have been chasing the high of the… Read More Movie Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
By John Corrado This sequel to the 1997 Nickelodeon kids comedy Good Burger finds Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell reprising their roles as Dex and Ed, the two dudes who work at the eponymous burger joint. In Good Burger 2 (a Paramount+ Original Movie), Dex is now an aspiring entrepreneur whose business ideas all have… Read More DVD Review: Good Burger 2
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. The latest collaboration between director Sean Garrity and star Jonas Chernick, The Burning Season is a simmering romantic drama with a dark secret at its centre that starts at the end and… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: The Burning Season (Closing Night Film)
By John Corrado Late Night with the Devil is an indie horror film from directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes that is built around the inventive concept of being assembled from the lost tapes from a live TV broadcast of an old 1970s late night talk show. David Dastmalchian stars as Jack Delroy, the old school… Read More Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil
By John Corrado New releases for the week of March 22nd, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Wide Release): This latest film in the Ghostbusters franchise picks up where 2021 legacy sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife left off, setting the action back in New York where Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and her family are now busting ghosts out… Read More New This Week (03/22/2024): Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Immaculate, Late Night with the Devil, & More!
By John Corrado Director Michael Mohan’s new “nunsploitation” flick Immaculate, a passion project for star Sydney Sweeney, seems mainly intended as a throwback to the Italian Giallo genre. But beyond this aesthetic inspiration (Dario Argento is chief among its influences), the film is a mixed bag that lacks some of its own ideas or identity,… Read More Movie Review: Immaculate
By John Corrado Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s previous subjects have included Star Wars fans (The People vs. George Lucas), the shower scene in Psycho (78/52), the movie Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien), and the late director William Friedkin (Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist). Through these works, he has shown a… Read More Movie Review: William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. Director Audrey Cummings’ Place of Bones is an old school Western that plays as an affectionate riff on classic B-movies. Heather Graham stars in the film as Pandora, a frontier woman in… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Place of Bones
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. Named after the beloved Trinidadian street food, the Canadian drama Doubles follows Dhani (Sanjiv Boodhu), a humble street vendor living with his mother (Leela Sitahal) in Trinidad, who is growing tired of… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Doubles (Opening Night Film)
By John Corrado Irish Wish, the new Lindsay Lohan romantic comedy that is being released on Netflix for St. Patrick’s Day, is an example of a film that offers exactly what you want; the chance to watch Lohan in a predictable but cute rom-com set against the beautiful backdrop of Ireland. Lohan stars as Maddie… Read More Movie Review: Irish Wish (Netflix)
By John Corrado New releases for the week of March 15th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Love Lies Bleeding (Wide Release): Rose Glass follows up her simmering 2021 body horror debut Saint Maud with this pulpy thriller following gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) who falls for female bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brien), and gets pulled into a criminal… Read More New This Week (03/15/2024): Love Lies Bleeding, Hey, Viktor!, They Shot the Piano Player, & More!
By John Corrado The latest animated work from co-directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, the filmmakers behind the Oscar-nominated Chico and Rita, They Shot the Piano Player is an ambitious if uneven mix of animation and docudrama. The film opens at the Strand Book Store in New York City, where fictitious music journalist Jeff Harris… Read More Movie Review: They Shot the Piano Player
By John Corrado Director Chris Eyre’s 1998 coming-of-age film Smoke Signals was a landmark for both American indie cinema and Indigenous self-representation, with its Native American cast and crew telling a story featuring authentic characters. Among the film’s cast was Cody Lightning, the child actor who played the younger version of Adam Beach’s lead character… Read More Movie Review: Hey, Viktor!
By John Corrado The name of Peter Farrelly, and his brother Bobby, used to be synonymous with a certain brand of raunchy comedies like Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal. When Peter went solo in 2018, it led to him making the awards bait crowdpleaser Green Book, which inexplicably won the… Read More Movie Review: Ricky Stanicky (Prime Video)
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the Blu-ray release of The Color Purple. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my original review right here. Director Blitz Bazawule’s glitzy The Color Purple serves as both a big screen version of the Broadway musical, and a reimagining… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Color Purple
By John Corrado The 96th Academy Awards were tonight. The big winner was unsurprisingly Christopher Nolan’s box office hit Oppenheimer, which took home a total of seven awards including Best Picture, Best Director (Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy) and Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.). In second place was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things with four… Read More Winners of the 96th Academy Awards
By John Corrado Oscar weekend is here again, which means that it’s time to carry on my annual tradition of trying to predict the winners. This seems like a pretty easy year to predict with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer set to sweep the major categories including Best Picture (I personally have it winning eight of its… Read More My 2024 Oscar Predictions
By John Corrado Jack Black returns as the voice of Po in this fourth instalment of DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda series, which began sixteen years ago now in 2008. It’s easy to say that, by this belated fourth go around, the series is starting to show some wear, and Kung Fu Panda 4 does… Read More Movie Review: Kung Fu Panda 4
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