By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Are You Afraid of the Dark? Ghost Island is the third season in Nickelodeon’s reboot of the kids horror series from the 1990s, banking heavily on nostalgia while also appealing to a modern audience of tweenaged viewers. Like the first two instalments of this limited series that began… Read More DVD Review: Are You Afraid of the Dark? Ghost Island
By John Corrado New releases for the week of August 4th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Wide Release): This animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is one of the nicest surprises of the summer, utilizing its mix of stylized animation, Seth Rogen humour, and teen voice actors to offer a rock… Read More New This Week (08/04/2023): Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Meg 2: The Trench, & More!
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest big screen outing for the adolescent mutant turtles trained in ninjutsu who eat pizza and live in the sewers of New York City, and it serves as a rock solid reboot of sorts for the franchise. Directed by Jeff Rowe… Read More Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Canadian drama North of Normal is an adaptation of Cea Sunrise Person’s 2014 memoir of the same name, following her coming of age in the city after an unconventional upbringing in the Yukon wilderness with her free-loving teen mother (played in the film by Sarah Gadon). The… Read More Review: North of Normal
By John Corrado New releases for the week of July 28th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Haunted Mansion (Wide Release): Disney’s Haunted Mansion is the latest movie based on one of their theme park rides, and a reboot of the Eddie Murphy film from twenty years ago. This version stars LaKeith Stanfield as an astrophysicist brought in to photograph… Read More New This Week (07/28/2023): Haunted Mansion, North of Normal, & More!
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Disney’s Haunted Mansion is the latest movie based on one of their theme park rides, while also serving as a reboot of their maligned 2003 film The Haunted Mansion. Directed by Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair), this is a slightly more “serious” take on the material… Read More Review: Haunted Mansion
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Book Club ladies are back in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 film that finds elderly best friends Diane (Diane Keaton), Vivian (Jane Fonda), Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen) – who first bonded over reading Fifty Shades of Grey – taking a… Read More Blu-ray Review: Book Club: The Next Chapter (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Taken from Sanskrit, these were the famous words spoken by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer following the test of his atomic bomb in the Los Alamos desert, an invention that would be used to take countless lives when it was… Read More Review: Oppenheimer
By John Corrado New releases for the week of July 21st, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Barbie (Wide Release): This is the biggest day for movies in quite some time, with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both opening in theatres (aka the Barbenheimer double bill). First let’s talk about Barbie. I saw it at one… Read More New This Week (07/21/2023): Barbie, Oppenheimer, & More!
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) With her blonde hair and iconic figure, Barbie is one of the most recognizable toys of all time. Whether you view Mattel’s flagship doll as a beloved plaything or an impossible standard by which to judge female beauty standards, there’s little denying the impact that she has had… Read More Review: Barbie
By John Corrado New releases for the week of July 14th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Wide Release): Tom Cruise returns to the big screen as Ethan Hunt in the seventh instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, this is another exciting sequel, with the main attraction… Read More New This Week (07/14/2023): Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Miracle Club, & More!
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) A group of women from Ireland take a pilgrimage to Lourdes in The Miracle Club, an Irish film that takes a talented cast fronted by two Oscar winners (Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith) and two Oscar nominees (Laura Linney and Stephen Rea), but struggles to live up to… Read More Review: The Miracle Club
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Following the release of Ghost Protocol in 2011, the Mission: Impossible series has turned into one of our best and most reliable action movie franchises, building on the promise of sequels that either match or exceed their predecessors. That trend continues with the seventh film in the series,… Read More Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the Blu-ray release of Scream VI. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my original review right here. The sixth film in the Scream franchise, Scream VI is being released on 4K Ultra HD (and Blu-ray) this week from Paramount,… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Scream VI (SteelBook Edition)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Renfield is a horror comedy that serves as a modern take on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, only telling the story from the perspective of the vampire’s assistant, Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). For over a century, Renfield has been the servant to Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage), charged… Read More Blu-ray Review: Renfield (Dracula Sucks Edition)
By John Corrado New releases for the week of July 7th, 2023. Theatrical Releases: Joy Ride (Wide Release): The directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim, Joy Ride is a lot of fun and often very funny, while also being surprisingly smart and heartfelt in how it explores culture and identity. The film… Read More New This Week (07/07/2023): Joy Ride, Something You Said Last Night, & More!
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Tamil Canadian filmmaker V.T. Nayani, This Place (which premiered at last year’s TIFF) is a queer love story between two young women from different backgrounds that finds its strengths in being so culturally specific to Toronto. Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs, who also co-wrote the screenplay… Read More Review: This Place
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Joy Ride, the directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim, is the story of a Chinese adoptee getting reacquainted with her birth country. It’s also a raunchy, proudly R-rated road trip comedy about four friends having their bonds tested through a series of escapades involving drugs… Read More Review: Joy Ride
By John Corrado A film that foretold the boom of reality TV and celebrity obsessions, director Peter Weir’s prescient 1998 movie The Truman Show is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Jim Carrey stars in the film as Truman Burbank, a man whose entire life has been as part of an elaborate television show, masterminded… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: The Truman Show: 25th Anniversary Edition
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In the summer of 2020, after having to cancel their tour due to COVID, the Canadian indie rock band July Talk decided to do a concert at the Stardust Drive-In in Sharon, Ontario. But this came with its own unique set of challenges, including figuring out the logistics… Read More Review: July Talk: Love Lives Here
The Joy of Movies 