By John Corrado In his coming-of-age film Olmo, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke finds the right balance between enjoyable portrait of bratty adolescence, and heavier, more dramatic scenes, telling a small but nuanced father-son story. There’s also some star power behind the film, having been produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The titular Olmo (Aivan… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Olmo (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In their latest film collaboration Dead Lover, real life couple Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie craft a German Expressionist parody with a real handmade quality to it. Glowicki, who directs the film from a screenplay that she co-wrote with Petrie, stars as a lonely gravedigger. We are told that she smells really,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Dead Lover (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The entire setup for director Nick Corirossi’s The Napa Boys is itself an elaborate joke; it’s fashioned as the fourth film in a franchise, that has already received a series of spinoffs. Only none of these other entries exist, and the film that is supposed to have spawned this franchise is Alexander… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Napa Boys (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado A prequel to his 2017 stop-motion film Junk Head, which was in turn based on a 2014 short, Junk World finds Japanese filmmaker Takahide Hori playing around on an even larger canvass. Hori’s film is set in a world of people and clones (called “Mulligans”), who rise up against the humans, leading… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Junk World (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The latest film from director Gus Van Sant, Dead Man’s Wire dramatizes a 1977 kidnapping that saw a disgruntled Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) take mortgage banker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage in his apartment. Hall is the son of the man (played by Al Pacino) who owns the mortgage firm that Kiritsis… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Dead Man’s Wire (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Director Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less biography of George Orwell, and more heavily slanted video essay that struggles to thread the needle between the British author’s work and selected modern events. It’s a major disappointment. The film’s title, of course, is a reference to Orwell’s most famous book 1984,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Orwell: 2+2=5 (TIFF Docs)
The Joy of Movies 