By John Corrado Directed by Mike Mills, loosely basing the story on his own childhood, 20th Century Women follows teenage protagonist Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) who is essentially being raised by the three women in his life, including single mother Dorothea (Annette Bening), their tenant Abbie (Greta Gerwig), and his best friend Julie (Elle Fanning). With outstanding… Read More DVD Review: 20th Century Women
By John Corrado Chad Cutler (Michael Fassbender) lives with his wife (Lyndsey Marshal) and their two young kids in the same trailer park as his notorious crime boss father Cal (Brendan Gleeson). Chad is desperate to break away from a life of crime and go clean, not wanting his son to grow up like him,… Read More DVD Review: Trespass Against Us
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sometimes the hardest movies to review are not the ones that are really good or really bad, but the ones that fall into the middle ground of being just okay. Such is the case with The Zookeeper’s Wife. Pretty much everything about the film is fine enough in… Read More Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) are Jesuit priests in 17th century Portugal. When they travel to Japan, both to spread their religion and also to locate their mentor Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who was captured for preaching his beliefs and may have apostatized, they find their… Read More Blu-ray Review: Silence
By John Corrado A prequel to the Harry Potter series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them takes place in the 1920s and follows Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) as he arrives in New York from Hogwarts, and accidentally unleashes the creatures inside his magical briefcase. Serving as a polished piece of world building that is… Read More Blu-ray Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) is a Boston-born gangster in Prohibition era, who operates on a different side of the law from his Irish cop father (Brendan Gleeson). Following a run in with the Italian mob, he senses a way to get rich by moving his business to Miami and trying to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Live By Night
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, Julieta is adapted from a short story by Canadian author Alice Munro, that follows the title character at two stages in her life. We first meet Julieta as a middle-aged woman (Emma Suárez), who receives word on her estranged daughter after… Read More Blu-ray Review: Julieta
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The opening scene of Elle will test your tolerance for everything that comes after. Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) lies on the floor of her house screaming, with her clothes torn, legs bloodied and broken dishes surrounding her head, as a masked intruder brutally rapes her. A grey cat… Read More Blu-ray Review: Elle
By John Corrado The Canadian Film Fest is back again and, dare I say, bigger than ever. For starters this year, the festival has moved from The Royal Cinema to Scotiabank, and will be running for a full five days, up from the previous four. The festival is also boasting its largest ever lineup of ten… Read More Previewing the 2017 Canadian Film Fest
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The latest from veteran Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald, Weirdos is an endlessly charming and surprisingly touching coming of age story, that finds the director in top form delivering one of his best and most heartfelt films. The year is 1976, and Kit (Dylan Authors) and his best friend Alice… Read More Review: Weirdos
Beauty and the Beast Review By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) There is perhaps no bigger test as to the resilience of Disney’s current trend of doing live action remakes of their animated classics than Beauty and the Beast. This is a pretty much beat for beat recreation of their iconic 1991 release, a film so beloved… Read More Three Views: Beauty and the Beast
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Jim (Chris Pratt) is in a hibernation pod aboard a spaceship taking him on a journey to live on a new planet. But when he mysteriously awakens ninety years too early, with no way of putting himself back to sleep and messages taking too long to reach earth,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Passengers
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) After the death of his young daughter, Howard (Will Smith) has become withdrawn in his job at the New York ad agency that he helped found, spending his time writing angry letters to abstractions like Love, Time and Death, while his co-workers Whit (Edward Norton), Simon (Michael Peña) and… Read More Blu-ray Review: Collateral Beauty
By John Corrado Based on August Wilson’s stage play, Fences follows the slow unravelling of a working class family in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, as patriarch Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) struggles to provide for his wife Rose (Viola Davis) and their teenage son (Jovan Adepo), while dealing with his own dashed dreams of playing baseball. Winning Viola Davis a… Read More Blu-ray Review: Fences
By John Corrado Taking place a week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), Jackie centres its main narrative around an interview between Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) and a reporter (Billy Crudup), to offer a complex and nuanced portrait of how the First Lady and sudden widow meticulously managed her place in the public spotlight to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Jackie
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Some films really feel like they are trying too hard to please, and The Last Word is guilty of this. This is the sort of cliche-riddled Sundance dramedy that follows its formula to a tee, trying to tackle potentially poignant subject matter through a sunny disposition. The film feels… Read More Review: The Last Word
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The most revealing character moment in Hello Destroyer comes when star hockey player Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahmson) lies in a dimly lit hotel room, icing his knuckles after a fight during the game, and tells one of his teammates about how he could never stand silence as a child.… Read More Review: Hello Destroyer
By John Corrado Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) is a restless teenager in the South Pacific who wants to follow in the footsteps of her explorer ancestors. When the crops on their island start to die due to an ancient curse, she sets out on an ocean journey in search of demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), in order to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Moana
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The easiest way to describe Before I Fall would be as a sort of YA Groundhog Day, but this richly textured and wholly engaging high school time loop drama still has enough originality and smarts to become something really good on its own terms. It’s “Cupid’s Day,” and Samantha… Read More Review: Before I Fall
By John Corrado Days after winning a trio of much deserved Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali’s immaculate performance as a kind drug dealer, Best Adapted Screenplay and finally Best Picture, Moonlight is now available on Blu-ray, and at this point I couldn’t recommend it any more highly. The story of a young… Read More Blu-ray Review: Moonlight
The Joy of Movies 