By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Director Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a quirky and enjoyable biopic of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, whose stylized drawings of cats with large eyes are credited with helping turn felines into acceptable house pets. You see, cats were thought of only as rodent-killing… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman Island is a very enjoyable love letter of sorts to the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The film is set on the Baltic island of Fårö, where the director lived and shot some of his most famous films, which… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Bergman Island (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Neil Bennett (Tim Roth) is a wealthy Englishman vacationing at a resort in Acapulco, Mexico with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two kids Colin (Samuel Bottomley) and Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan). Their holiday gets cut short when Alice receives a phone call informing them of a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Sundown (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) Director Rob Savage made waves during the pandemic when he released Host, a horror movie set on Zoom. Now he returns with the Blumhouse-produced Dashcam, another pandemic project that was apparently made on the fly without much of a script and just a basic outline. And it’s a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dashcam (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director Stephen Karam confidently adapts his own Tony-winning play for the screen in The Humans, crafting an intense and engaging family drama that comes to life with the help of a small but mighty six person ensemble cast. The film unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving Day, and… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Humans (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Based on a novel by Laura Santullo, who co-directs the film version alongside Mexican filmmaker Rodrigo Plá, The Other Tom focuses on Elena (Julia Chavez), a single mother living in El Paso, Texas with her nine year old son Tom (Israel Rodriguez). Elena is barely making ends meet,… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Other Tom (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín reinvigorated the biopic formula in 2016 with Jackie, offering a complex portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following her husband’s assassination, featuring a bravura performance by Natalie Portman. Now Larraín pulls off a similar magic trick in Spencer, which similarly hones in on a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Spencer (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Filmmaker Barry Levinson returns to the big screen with The Survivor, a biopic of Holocaust survivor turned boxer Harry Haft, who is played extremely well in the film by Ben Foster, delivering one of the finest performances of his career. The screenplay by Justine Juel Gillmer focuses on Haft… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Survivor (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest animated film from Waltz With Bashir filmmaker Ari Folman, Where is Anne Frank is a valuable and often moving animated history lesson that draws parallels between past and present discrimination. The film serves as an adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, but it takes a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Where is Anne Frank (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by Eric Warin and Tahir Rana, Charlotte is an animated biopic of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley), whose magnum opus was a biography in pictures titled Life? Or Theatre? painted during World War II, that is often credited as being the first graphic novel.… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Charlotte (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the French Canadian filmmaker’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel of the same name. And the movie, which focuses on the beginning half of Herbert’s book and is intended as the first in a two-part saga (the opening title card says Dune:… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dune (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nostalgia and ghosts of the past collide in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, the British filmmaker’s very dark, stylish, and gloriously entertaining tribute to both London in the Swinging Sixties and Italian giallo films. This fondness for the past is represented through the movie’s heroine, Eloise (Thomasin… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Last Night in Soho (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The feature debut of writer-director Haya Waseem, who has made a number of short films, Quickening is a young adult drama told from the unique perspective of a young Pakistani-Canadian woman in the GTA suburbs. The film centres around Sheila (Arooj Azeem), who is in her first year… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Quickening (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Frank Farelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is an out of work sad-sack who is hired as the new “middle man” in the fictional town of Karmack, USA. The job involves being dispatched out to deliver bad news to residents when people die or accidents happen, a surprisingly common occurrence… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Middle Man (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Stephen Chbosky’s big screen take on Dear Evan Hansen, the Broadway musical with songs by Benji Pasek and Justin Paul that swept the Tonys in 2017, is a pretty good stage to screen adaptation. Even if the material is not quite as impactful onscreen as it was onstage,… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dear Evan Hansen (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A new short film written, directed and produced by Canadian filmmaker Albert Shin, Together focuses on two anonymous strangers, a younger woman (Ahn So Yo) and an older man (Kim Jae-Rok), who meet up in a motel room by the sea in South Korea. Shin made this film… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Together (Short Cuts)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Anna (Alanna Bale), the immortal protagonist of Kicking Blood, is a young vampire who is intrigued by mortals. She works a day job in a library, and is friends with her dying, elderly co-worker (Rosemary Dunsmore), which is perplexing to the rest of her undead crew who only… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Kicking Blood (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Indigenous-led survival thriller Night Raiders is set in the year 2043, and imagines a dystopian, post-war society where all children are taken to be wards of the state, and put in a military academy that serves as an indoctrination camp. The film centres around Niska (Elle-Maija Tailfeathers),… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Night Raiders (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria is his first film made outside his home country of Thailand. But the film, which is set in Colombia and unfolds through a mix of English and Spanish, still feels at one with the rest of his filmography. Tilda… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Memoria (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Julia Ducournau’s Titane surprised a lot of people when it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes a few months ago, becoming not only the second female-directed film to win, but also the rare genre flick to take home the top prize. Now that I’ve seen the film I… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Titane (Midnight Madness)
The Joy of Movies 