By John Corrado The nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards were announced this morning, with eight films (The Father, Judas And The Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial Of The Chicago 7) ultimately getting into the Best Picture lineup. David Fincher’s Mank leads the day with a total… Read More Nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Five students from different parts of the world who all share a similar entrepreneurial spirit come together to compete at the 2019 Global Student Entrepreneur Awards in the new National Geographic documentary Own the Room, which is premiering on Disney Plus this weekend. The five students that the… Read More Disney+ Review: Own the Room
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Alfred “Boogie” Chin (Taylor Takahashi), the main character in Fresh Off the Boat producer Eddie Huang’s feature directorial debut Boogie, is a Taiwanese-American teenager in Queens, New York who dreams of playing professional basketball. Working from his own screenplay, Huang has crafted a film that does a pretty… Read More Review: Boogie
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Robin Wright makes her feature directorial debut with the simply titled Land, a small but emotionally effective portrait of a woman wounded by grief who leaves her life in the city behind to find solitude in the wild. Wright stars in the film as Edee. When we first… Read More VOD Review: Land
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) An elderly couple gets a chance to relive their youth over one magical night in Us Again, a charming and poignant new short film from Walt Disney Animation Studios. It will be playing in theatres in front of Raya and the Last Dragon starting this weekend, before being released… Read More Disney+ Review: Us Again
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney’s 59th official animated film, has some of the hallmarks of a Disney Princess movie, while also feeling like somewhat of a departure for the studio. Not only is this their first film to feature a Southeast Asian Princess, there are also no… Read More Disney+ Review: Raya and the Last Dragon
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The World to Come, the latest in a string of period piece lesbian romances, is a film that suffers in comparison to Ammonite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But even if it hadn’t been released in such close proximity to those better, thematically similar films, this… Read More VOD Review: The World to Come
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Mauritanian, a new legal thriller directed by Kevin Macdonald and featuring a starry cast, dramatizes the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi and the years he spent awaiting a trial at Guantanamo Bay, where he was kept imprisoned with no formal charges laid against him. Slahi is… Read More VOD Review: The Mauritanian
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) There are some films that leave me scratching my head as to why they have been so acclaimed. And Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a belated sequel to the 2006 film which finds actor Sacha Baron Cohen reprising his role as fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, is one of them.… Read More Review: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) A Korean-American family in the 1980s moves to Arkansas in search of a better life in filmmaker Lee Issac Chung’s deeply personal yet universally relatable Minari. The father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), moves his wife Monica (Yeri Han) and their two kids Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan Kim)… Read More VOD Review: Minari
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Palm Springs, the new time loop romantic comedy from the Lonely Island guys, is a film that takes many of its cues from the 1993 classic Groundhog Day, a work so iconic that it’s title has become shorthand for every other story of this type. Andy Samberg, who… Read More Review: Palm Springs
By John Corrado This week, Paramount is releasing the John Hughes 5-Movie Collection on Blu-ray, a five disc set that includes two of his best films (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Planes, Trains and Automobiles), two of his most underrated (Some Kind of Wonderful and She’s Having a Baby), and one of his most popular (Pretty… Read More Blu-ray Review: John Hughes 5-Movie Collection
By John Corrado In 1972, Toronto-born director Sidney J. Furie made a biopic of Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross in an Oscar-nominated debut performance as the legendary singer. That film, Lady Sings the Blues, is being released for the first time ever on Blu-ray this week from Paramount, a release that is timed to coincide… Read More Blu-ray Review: Lady Sings the Blues
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) DreamWorks Animation returns to prehistoric times in The Croods: A New Age, the long-in-development sequel to their 2013 box office hit The Croods. This follow-up film, which is arriving on Blu-ray this week following a limited release in theatres and on PVOD, pretty much offers more of the… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Croods: A New Age
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of Disney’s hottest and most profitable properties. The simple fact is that superheroes are hugely popular with audiences, and this is exactly what Disney is hoping to capitalize on with their new film Flora & Ulysses, which premieres on Disney+ today. The… Read More Disney+ Review: Flora & Ulysses
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, Lovecraft Country is a TV series that certainly isn’t lacking in terms of ambition. The series comes to us from the mind of young TV writer Misha Green, who also serves as showrunner, with both Jordan Peele and J.J.… Read More Blu-ray Review: Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Six songs by famed Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim are used to provide deeper insight into his life and career as a whole in director James Lapine’s documentary Six By Sondheim. The film, which premiered on HBO in 2013 and has just been released on Blu-ray as… Read More Blu-ray Review: Six By Sondheim
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In 2019, for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, director and editor Todd Douglas Miller delivered Apollo 11, a documentary that brilliantly assembled never before seen archival footage of the event into a compelling narrative feature. Now Miller has returned to this historic event, or, rather,… Read More Review: Apollo 11: Quarantine (Digital Release)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The lines between faith, fundamentalism, and religious extremism get increasingly blurred in Saint Maud, an unsettling mix of slow-burn horror and psychological drama that serves as a promising feature directorial debut for British writer-director Rose Glass. The film, which premiered at TIFF in 2019 as part of the… Read More VOD Review: Saint Maud
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Vince Vaughn acting like a teenage girl is the main attraction in Freaky, the very entertaining new horror comedy from Blumhouse and Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon that is arriving on Blu-ray this week. Vaughn stars in the film as a serial killer nicknamed The Butcher, who’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Freaky
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