By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) There has been a lot of talk in the movie industry lately about increased representation for minority groups, and that’s a good thing. It’s long overdue. But the one group that all too often gets left out of this conversation is people with disabilities. The problem isn’t really… Read More Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) After closing their doors during the recession and leaving thousands of workers without a job, a former General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio got taken over by a Chinese company and was able to reopen in 2014 as Fuyao Glass America. What happened next is documented in American… Read More Review: American Factory
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Named for the first single off of Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 debut album Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Blinded by the Light tells the story of an unlikely Springsteen fan who uses the music of The Boss to help him find his own place in the world. Based on… Read More Review: Blinded by the Light
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Back in 1961, the United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was openly fighting for the decolonization of Africa at the time, was killed in a plane crash in Northern Rhodsia, and the common belief was that it was a simple engine failure. But for years an alternate… Read More Review: Cold Case Hammarskjöld
By John Corrado It’s already the biggest movie of the year – not to mention the highest grossing film of all time worldwide, finally surpassing the record previously set by James Cameron’s Avatar a decade ago – and now Avengers: Endgame is arriving on Blu-ray this week. Bringing about the end of the first stretch… Read More Blu-ray Review: Avengers: Endgame
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series by Alvin Schwartz is frequently included on lists of the most banned and challenged books due to its disturbing subject matter and creepy black and white illustrations by Stephen Gammell. The three books, which were originally published between 1981 and 1991… Read More Review: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) After a mysterious illness wiped out the female half of the human population a decade ago, a father (Casey Affleck) must keep his 11-year-old daughter Rag (Anna Pniowsky) hidden in the woods from the remnants of society and disguised as a boy, with other men threatening to do her… Read More Review: Light of My Life
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are movies of the moment, and then there is Luce, a race-based dramatic thriller that ignited plenty of conversations at Sundance and weaves so many hot button issues into its narrative that it can’t help but feel heavy-handed. The film centres around Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a… Read More Review: Luce
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Born in 1985, six years after China’s communist government brought in their one child policy in 1979 as a way to combat overpopulation, filmmaker Nanfu Wang grew up intimately effected by the law, which stayed in place until 2015. Now having a child of her own, Wang explores… Read More Review: One Child Nation
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are some movies that end up being pleasant surprises simply because they turn out better than anyone rightly expected them to be. Last year’s surprisingly solid Transformers spin-off Bumblebee is just one example that springs to mind, and now we can add Pokémon Detective Pikachu to this list. Based on… Read More Blu-ray Review: Pokémon Detective Pikachu
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) New Line Cinema continues their cornering of the mainstream horror movie market with The Curse of La Llorona, which serves as a loosely connected spin-off of their hugely popular Conjuring franchise, a series that has already been expanded to include last year’s The Nun and the recently completed… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Curse of La Llorona
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Haditze Muratova is the last of the wild bee keepers in Macedonia. Living in an old hut in the Balkan mountains, she spends her time tending to a colony of wild bees, and is careful not to disturb them as she extracts pieces of honeycomb from their hive,… Read More Review: Honeyland
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) There is something appealing about the idea of seeing David Harbour, who we all know and love as the grizzled Chief Hopper on Stranger Things, take over the role of Hellboy, a half-demon hero who works with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence and has dedicated his life to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Hellboy
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) The much hyped ninth film from Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a love letter to the pop culture of the 1960s that features all of the director’s best impulses, and a tribute to the year 1969 in particular. Why 1969 you might ask? Well,… Read More Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Chinese people have a saying; when people get cancer, they die.” Several days after seeing director Lulu Wang’s acclaimed new tragicomedy The Farewell, and struggling to nail down the right tone for my review, this is the line that jumped out at me. It’s what Jian (Diana Lin)… Read More Review: The Farewell
By John Corrado One of my favourite movies of the year so far, Laika’s latest beautifully animated stop motion adventure Missing Link is being released on Blu-ray this week. The film follows a 19th century explorer, Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman), who befriends an eight foot tall Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis) who wants help finding the… Read More Blu-ray Review: Missing Link
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) If Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson had directed Fight Club, the result might have looked something like The Art of Self-Defense, a quirky dark comedy that explores what happens when isolated young men turn to violence as a means of self preservation. The film follows Casey (Jesse Eisenberg),… Read More Review: The Art of Self-Defense
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Kevin Hearn, the keyboard player and guitarist for the beloved Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies, bought a painting by Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau for twenty thousand dollars, he was shocked to find out that the painting was actually a fake, just one of many fake Morrisseau paintings… Read More Review: There Are No Fakes
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) With housing prices at record highs in cities around the world, including here in Toronto, many young people are no longer able to even dream about one day owning a house. This multi-pronged issue is explored in director Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Push, which follows Leilani Farha, the UN’s… Read More Review: Push
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein sets his sights on how propaganda is used to effect political change in his broad-based and often enjoyable new documentary Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, which ponders if all art is propaganda, and how we can tell what’s true in this age of… Read More Review: Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies
The Joy of Movies 