By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Chad Cutler (Michael Fassbender) lives with his wife (Lyndsey Marshal) and their two young kids in the same trailer park as his father Cal (Brendan Gleeson), a notorious crime boss who doesn’t want his son to stray from the family business. Chad is desperate to break away from… Read More Review: Trespass Against Us
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), the former a divorced father and the latter an ex-convict, are brothers who are violently robbing a series of banks around West Texas, trying to make back enough money to pay a debt. Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto (Gil… Read More Review: Hell or High Water
By John Corrado The 2002 action film xXx has now arrived in a new Blu-ray edition to coincide with both the film’s 15th anniversary, as well as the release of the franchise’s latest instalment xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which just came to theatres this past weekend. A solid box office hit of its time, xXx follows Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), a thrill-seeking extreme sports… Read More Blu-ray Review: xXx: 15th Anniversary Edition
By John Corrado After returning from the war, Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) decides to live a life of solitude as a lighthouse keeper. Then he falls in love with Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander), and she moves to the island with him. When they find a dead man and a baby girl floating in a rowboat, they… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Light Between Oceans
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Directed by Tom Ford, following up his masterful directorial debut A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals is a story within a story where the story within the story is infinitely more compelling than the actual plot. This means it’s only really half worth seeing. The film follows Susan Morrow… Read More Review: Nocturnal Animals
Split Review By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) M. Night Shyamalan has had a rocky career following his early successes like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, slowly segueing into self-parody in the years that followed. But now the director has returned with Split, a ludicrous and often entertaining thriller that continues his recent resurgence of… Read More Three Views: Split
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Although The Founder is sometimes staged under the guise of being a feel good story, it’s the bitterness lurking underneath the surface that makes this biopic interesting. The film recounts the true story of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), an “over the hill milkshake machine salesman” from Illinois, who discovered a family burger joint in… Read More Review: The Founder
Hidden Figures Review By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) A crowbar smashes into the sign for a “colored” washroom, tearing it from the wall. A piece of chalk passes from a white man’s hand to a black woman at a classified NASA briefing, where there was previously no protocol for women attending, let alone people… Read More Three Views: Hidden Figures
Fences Review By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) is a man who is almost always talking, filled with stories and sharing his opinions on just about everything. When Fences opens, we find him already in the middle of a conversation with his coworker Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), as they both cling to… Read More Three Views: Fences
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Christian Wolfe (Ben Affleck) is an accountant who has Asperger’s syndrome, and was raised by a militant father (Robert C. Treveiler) who taught him survival skills so that he could stand up against bullies. These survival skills come in handy considering that most of his clients are crime bosses and drug… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Accountant
By John Corrado First released in 2001, and receiving Oscar nominations for Will Smith and Jon Voight, Ali is an impressionistic biopic that follows Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) over a decade of his life in the 1960s and ’70s. Last year, the film received a new cut to coincide with its 15th anniversary, which is now… Read More Blu-ray Review: Ali: 15th Anniversary Commemorative Edition
By Erin Corrado As part of Canada’s Top 10, the Student Shorts Programme plays today at 1pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Filmmakers will be in attendance, and the Student Short Film Prizes will be announced following the screening. Each film was made as part of a university program by students, and while there… Read More Review: Canada’s Top Ten Student Shorts Programme
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The first thing we see gracing the screen in La La Land, the new throwback to old musicals that is good but not quite as good as you’ve heard, is a nicely retro logo for Summit Entertainment, presented on a black and white screen in Academy aspect ratio. The screen pulls out to announce… Read More Review: La La Land
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) “Maybe I’m a feminist,” teenage protagonist Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) tells his mother Dorothea (Annette Bening) partway through 20th Century Women, and there is perhaps no better statement to sum up what makes this film so special. This is the story of a boy essentially being raised by the woman… Read More Review: 20th Century Women
By John Corrado Dramatizing the events of the worst oil spill in United States history, Deepwater Horizon centres its narrative around engineer and family man Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), who goes to work on the rig off the Gulf of Mexico and starts to realize that things are going very wrong. Expertly crafted on a technical scale,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Deepwater Horizon
By John Corrado Recounting the events of a landmark court case in the 1990s, Denial tells the story of Jewish professor and historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), who was taken to court by David Irving (Timothy Spall), a Holocaust denier who has devoted his life to discrediting proof that Aushwitz was ever used as a killing machine. Built around… Read More DVD Review: Denial
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) With undertones of an Amblin production from the 1980s, A Monster Calls is the rarest of things nowadays. It’s a family film that is as much for older kids as it is for adults, and is unafraid of going dark and exploring sensitive themes involving the death of… Read More Review: A Monster Calls
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Florence Foster Jenkins (Meryl Streep) is a rich heiress who has always dreamed of being an opera singer, with the only problem being that she is oblivious to the fact that she can’t sing. But her husband St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) is fully willing to keep her dreams alive,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Florence Foster Jenkins
By John Corrado Boasting a fine performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role, Snowden uses a narrative that jumps around in time to show Edward Snowden’s career trajectory from a patriotic army hopeful to working for the NSA, which leads him to the startling realization that compel him to steal classified documents proving to the world that the… Read More Blu-ray Review: Snowden
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following their mega hit The Secret Life of Pets this summer, Illumination has delivered another animated winner with Sing, a fun and often joyful pop musical that is enlivened by its colourful visuals and likeable characters. Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) is a theatre-loving koala who is struggling to… Read More Review: Sing
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