By John Corrado New releases for the week of September 6th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Wide Release): This long-awaited legacy sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 fan favourite Beetlejuice finds Michael Keaton reprising his role as “the ghost with the most.” Winona Ryder also reprises her role from the original, with Jenna Ortega joining the… Read More New This Week (09/06/2024): Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, & More!
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Nutcrackers, the opening night film of this year’s TIFF, finds director David Gordon Green sort of returning to his more indie movie roots, following his forays into horror franchise filmmaking… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Nutcrackers (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. After breaking out with his iPhone-shot Tangerine, Sean Baker has become one of our best modern filmmakers, gifting us exceptional, singular works like The Florida Project and Red Rocket. Now Baker returns with Anora, which… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Anora (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In her showbiz sendup The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) crafts her own bloody take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, mixing extreme body horror and absurd satire of… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Substance (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado New releases for the week of August 30th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Reagan (Wide Release): Dennis Quaid stars in this new biopic of Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States. Director Sean McNamara’s film mainly concerns (and is at its best when focusing on) Reagan’s steadfast fight against communism, to win… Read More New This Week (08/30/2024): Reagan, & More!
By John Corrado ”Peace through strength.” That was the famous adage of President Ronald Reagan when it came to his foreign policy approach, and taking on the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union during the final stages of the Cold War. This motto also provides the backbone for director Sean McNamara’s Reagan, a new biopic that… Read More Movie Review: Reagan
By John Corrado New releases for the week of August 23rd, 2024. Theatrical Releases: The Crow (Wide Release): This remake of the 1994 supernatural thriller with the late Brandon Lee (who infamously died in a tragic on-set accident), stars Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs. I didn’t attend the screening so can’t offer a review, but… Read More New This Week (08/23/2024): The Crow, Between the Temples, & More!
By John Corrado Between the Temples, the latest work from director and co-writer Nathan Silver, is a sort of indie screwball comedy that reinvents that old trope of finding yourself through an unconventional relationship. The two figures at the centre of it are Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwarzman), a cantor at his synagogue who has found… Read More Movie Review: Between the Temples
By John Corrado Netflix has released the first trailer for The Piano Lesson, one of their big awards contenders that will be screening at TIFF next month. The film is produced by Denzel Washington, and is the latest in his series of film adaptations of August Wilson plays, following the Oscar-winning films Ma Rainey’s Black… Read More Trailer Released for Netflix’s The Piano Lesson
By John Corrado Update: The trailer has now been pulled by Lionsgate, due to the critic quotes at the beginning having been fabricated. It’s unfortunate that the studio passed this through without a fact check. More info on the whole situation can be found on Variety here. The new, full-length trailer has just been released… Read More New Trailer Released for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis
By John Corrado New releases for the week of August 16th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Alien: Romulus (Wide Release): The biggest of this week’s many new releases is Alien: Romulus, director Fede Alvarez’s new addition to the Alien franchise. As I wrote in my review, the film “works because it is trying to be an old… Read More New This Week (08/16/2024): Alien: Romulus, Good One, Close to You, & More!
By John Corrado In her confident feature directorial debut Good One, emerging filmmaker India Donaldson uses the premise of a father-daughter camping trip to offer an engaging, fascinatingly stripped down character study. The protagonist is Sam (Lily Collias), a 17-year-old girl who ends up on a weekend camping trip to the Catskills with her dad… Read More Movie Review: Good One
By John Corrado The seventh instalment in the Alien franchise that began in 1979, Alien: Romulus is a spinoff sequel that is set somewhere between the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 followup Aliens. Directed by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, the Evil Dead remake), Romulus shares a lot of DNA with Scott’s… Read More Movie Review: Alien: Romulus
By John Corrado The fifth film in Australian filmmaker George Miller’s operatic action anthology, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel to his Oscar-winning 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road, that finds him returning to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the decades-old series. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa,… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
By John Corrado The group GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics has announced the winners of their 16th annual TV awards. Leading the pack is Hacks with four wins including Best TV Comedy, followed by Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which racked up three wins including Best TV Drama. In third place is… Read More Winners of the 2024 Dorian TV Awards from GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics
By John Corrado Disney’s biannual convention D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event is currently taking place in Anaheim, California, where the Mouse House has unveiled new looks at a variety of their upcoming projects. This includes the first trailer for Disney’s Snow White, new trailers for Mufasa: The Lion King and Moana 2, as well as… Read More New Trailers Released for Disney’s Snow White, Mufasa: The Lion King, Moana 2, & Win or Lose
By John Corrado New releases for the week of August 9th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Borderlands (Wide Release): Eli Roth takes a stab at trying to bring the video game Borderlands to the big screen, and the result is kind of a mess. This is an uninspired sci-fi adventure, that feels slapped together from a variety… Read More New This Week (08/09/2024): Borderlands, Cuckoo, & More!
By John Corrado The sophomore effort from German writer-director Tilman Singer, Cuckoo is an intentionally bizarre horror movie that draws upon the metaphorical symbolism of the titular cuckoo bird to reimagine genre tropes through Singer’s more unique vision. Our heroine is Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a 17-year-old girl who travels to Germany with her father (Marton… Read More Movie Review: Cuckoo
By John Corrado Sony Pictures has released the first trailer for director Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (formerly titled SNL 1975), a dramatization of the frantic ninety minutes leading up to the first ever live broadcast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live on October 11th, 1975. Co-written by Reitman and Gil Kenan (his writing partner on Ghostbusters:… Read More Trailer Released for Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night
By John Corrado Eli Roth, the actor turned filmmaker who is mostly known for his bloody slasher movies, now takes a stab at directing a video game adaptation with Borderlands. But, in bringing the titular franchise to the screen, Roth struggles mightily to overcome the curse of most video game adaptations. The result is a… Read More Movie Review: Borderlands
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