By John Corrado Alex Garland’s Civil War, the filmmaker’s visceral near-future portrait of an America on the brink, doesn’t divide things into Red States and Blue States. In fact, the story’s imagined alliance between California and Texas doesn’t even make much sense along current political lines. But this neutral stance is also what makes the… Read More Movie Review: Civil War
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
By John Corrado New releases for the week of April 5th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: The First Omen (Wide Release): Director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen is a surprisingly solid horror prequel that dovetails pretty seamlessly into Richard Donner’s 1976 original film, charting the events leading up to the birth of the spawn of Satan. Set… Read More New This Week (04/05/2024): The First Omen, Monkey Man, The Old Oak, & More!
By John Corrado Based on the real life case of the Littlehampton Letters (with an opening title card assuring us that “this is more true than you’d think”), Wicked Little Letters is an amusing trifle set in a small English town in 1920. The story centres around the scandal involving a series of insulting letters… Read More Movie Review: Wicked Little Letters
By John Corrado Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the Italian filmmaker’s latest following The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, is itself a bit of a chimeric creature. The film unfolds with a loose, shifting narrative structure that morphs between magical realism, absurdist comedy and character drama, shone through with a wistful nostalgia for the past. The… Read More Movie Review: La Chimera
By John Corrado A young nun begins to discover ominous things are afoot after arriving in Italy. This is the basic plot of the indie horror film Immaculate released two weeks ago. But it’s also the setup for director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen. Stevenson’s film serves as a surprisingly solid prequel to The Omen,… Read More Movie Review: The First Omen
By John Corrado The latest and possibly final film from British director Ken Loach, The Old Oak is another poignant social realist drama exploring themes of unrest in modern England, this time centred around the migrant crisis. Done in his usual neorealist style, the film focuses on the clash between a group of Syrian immigrants… Read More Movie Review: The Old Oak
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!
