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
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) There is a huge market for nostalgia these days, and this is a big part of what is fuelling Disney’s surge of live action remakes over the past few years, many of which have proven to be hugely popular with audiences. The studio most recently found financial success… Read More Review: The Lion King
By John Corrado This week, Warner Bros. is releasing their superhero hit Shazam! on Blu-ray, a film that injects a much needed jolt of energy into the DC Extended Universe, and remains one of the most flat-out entertaining movies of the year so far. The story of a 14-year-old foster kid named Billy Batson (Asher… Read More Blu-ray Review: Shazam!
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by the filmmaking team of Patrick Imbert and Benjamin Renner, who also brought us the wonderful Ernest & Celestine a few years back, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales is a French animated film that is a real treat to watch from start to finish. After… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales
By John Corrado ★ (out of 4) The college romance After, based on the YA novel by Anna Todd, opens with our protagonist Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) telling us in voiceover about the “moments in our lives that seem to define us” and how her life “before him” was “simple and undecided,” and how “after… Read More Blu-ray Review: After
By John Corrado Max Minghella’s flashy directorial debut Teen Spirit, which premiered at TIFF last year and enjoyed a theatrical release in the spring, is being released on DVD this week. The film follows Violet (Elle Fanning), a 17-year-old from a small town in the UK who dreams of becoming a pop star, and secretly… Read More DVD Review: Teen Spirit
By John Corrado Claire Denis’s High Life was one of the most divisive films of the festival when in premiered at TIFF last year, before becoming one of the year’s most critically acclaimed movies following its theatrical release this spring. It’s now available on DVD. The film follows Monte (Robert Pattinson), a prisoner trapped aboard… Read More DVD Review: High Life
By John Corrado A low-key financial thriller set in the high stakes world of inside trading that premiered at TIFF last year before getting a limited release in theatres this spring, Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s The Hummingbird Project is now available on DVD. The film follows two cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård), who hatch… Read More DVD Review: The Hummingbird Project
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Serving as both a new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1983 novel, and a remake of director Mary Lambert’s 1989 film version, Pet Sematary is a mildly entertaining but also flawed take on the story that doesn’t do as much with the source material as it could have. The… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Pet Sematary
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) As cities and communities become increasingly gentrified, the people who built them up and made these spaces what they were end up getting pushed out in favour of populations that might not even recognize the history of where they have come to inhabit. It’s a frustrating phenomenon that… Read More Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Ari Aster burst onto the scene last year with his debut feature Hereditary, a horror movie that offered superior genre thrills through the dramatic story of a family being ravaged by grief. It was always going to be a tough act to follow, but Aster has handily done… Read More Review: Midsommar
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Following up Spring Breakers, an unlikely hit that remains the biggest and most accessible film of his scrappy career, eccentric indie filmmaker Harmony Korine has returned with The Beach Bum, a stoner comedy that stars Matthew McConaughey as a strung out poet named Moondog. This description tells you… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Beach Bum
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Vincent D’Onofrio, The Kid finds the actor reuniting with his The Magnificent Seven co-stars Ethan Hawke and Chris Pratt for another Western, offering a partially fictionalized retelling of the encounters between real life figures Sheriff Pat Garret (Hawke) and Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan).… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Kid
By John Corrado The first of Disney’s several live action remakes to be released in theatres this year, Tim Burton’s Dumbo serves as a complete reimagining of the studio’s 1941 animated classic about a flying baby elephant. The film is coming to Blu-ray this week. I think Burton has done a good job of paying… Read More Blu-ray Review: Dumbo
By John Corrado This week, Disney is releasing a new edition of their 1950 animated classic Cinderella, as part of their current series of Signature Collection releases. While the film’s seventieth anniversary will not be officially celebrated until next year, this is also being sold as an anniversary edition. This has always been one of my… Read More Blu-ray Review: Cinderella: The Signature Collection
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann looks at the bond between six people and their service dogs in her latest documentary Buddy. The subjects here include an elderly German lady who was blinded by an explosion in World War II and has had many service dogs over the years;… Read More Review: Buddy
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Made without the involvement of original series creator Don Mancini, the 2019 version of Child’s Play serves as a completely new reimagining of the 1988 killer doll classic and the multiple sequels that it spawned. The result is a surprisingly solid and fun horror remake that is actually a… Read More Review: Child’s Play
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) I spent the better part of this decade thinking that I didn’t need a fourth Toy Story. The Pixar series that began in 1995 received a heartbreaking and almost unexpectedly perfect conclusion with Toy Story 3 in 2010, so the natural assumption was that the story was done… Read More Review: Toy Story 4
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Jordan Peele burst onto the filmmaking scene with his debut film Get Out in 2017, radically deviating from his career as a comedic actor to establish himself as one of our most exciting new horror directors. The film became a huge hit, and Peele even received a much… Read More Blu-ray Review: Us
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following a similar trajectory to other gritty, ripped from the headlines films like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Captain Phillips, and more recently Clint Eastwood’s underrated The 15:17 to Paris, Hotel Mumbai is the latest movie that seeks to dramatize a violent real life attack by recreating it in the… Read More Blu-ray Review: Hotel Mumbai
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