By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Ron Mann’s latest documentary, Carmine Street Guitars, takes us inside Rick Kelly’s custom guitar shop located at 42 Carmine Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. Many of their guitars are built out of reclaimed wood stripped from old buildings that has been salvaged from construction sites, and the… Read More Review: Carmine Street Guitars
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Franky (Josh Wiggins) is a popular high schooler who has his world upended after his 17th birthday party leads to a drunken but reciprocal sexual encounter with his best friend, Ballas (Darren Mann). The encounter leaves Franky struggling to define his own sexuality, and bullying amps up at… Read More Review: Giant Little Ones
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) are best friends who are both trapped in the small Ontario town where they grew up, and they are trying to save up enough money so that they can hitch a ride to New York. But their plans to escape are… Read More Review: Firecrackers
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest from Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen, following his very good Arctic romance Two Lovers and a Bear and the Oscar-nominated War Witch, The Hummingbird Project is a flawed but mildly entertaining dramedy that is set in the financial sector. The film takes place in 2011 and follows Vincent… Read More Review: The Hummingbird Project
By John Corrado I have been covering the Canadian Film Fest for several years now. The annual festival – the 13th edition of which starts tonight – always offers an interesting and entertaining showcase of homegrown cinema, and this year is no different, screening nine features and twenty eight shorts over the next several days.… Read More Previewing the 2019 Canadian Film Fest
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Elliot (Josh Hutcherson) is a miniature horse who has always dreamed of flying with the reindeer, and when Blitzen (Martin Short) announces his retirement right before Christmas, leaving Santa (George Buza) scrambling to find a replacement to fill his spot on the sleigh team, he sees an opportunity… Read More DVD Review: Elliot the Littlest Reindeer
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from Canadian director Jeremy LaLonde, The Go-Getters is a dirty and raunchy low-budget comedy that follows Owen (Aaron Abrams) and Lacie (Tommie-Amber Pirie). The former is a drunkard living in the boiler room of his brother’s (Kristian Bruun) bar, and the latter a drug-addicted hooker whom he… Read More Review: The Go-Getters
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Taking place in the 1970s, The Drawer Boy unfolds at the Huron County farm shared by old friends Morgan (Richard Clarkin) and Angus (Stuart Hughes), who have their lives changed and old tensions brought back to the surface when a young playwright named Miles (Jakob Ehman) arrives from… Read More Review: The Drawer Boy
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A followup of sorts to his previous documentary Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project, Barry Avrich’s The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret uses the revelations of sexual assault that took down legendary mogul Weinstein last fall as the jumping off point for an exposé on sexual abuse in Hollywood. Featuring interviews… Read More Review: The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, and his first in English, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan is still a work that is distinctly his, featuring the same soaring cinematography, musical interludes set to pop songs, and underlying themes of mother-son love as his other films. The… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton Zalesky (Alexander Skarsgård) are cousins who hatch a scheme to make money by drilling a four inch wide tunnel running fiber optic cables from Kansas to New York that will speed up transactions on the Stock Exchange by a millisecond, but they face… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Hummingbird Project
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) are best friends who are both trapped in the small Ontario town where they grew up, and they are trying to save up enough money so that they can hitch a ride to New York. But their plans to escape are… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Firecrackers
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Adapted from Lee-Anne Poole’s stage play, Splinters follows Belle (Sofia Benzhaf), a young woman who returns to Nova Scotia for her father’s funeral, forcing her to finally confront her overbearing mother (Shelley Thompson), who became distant after she came out as a teenager. But this time Belle has… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Splinters
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest short film directed by Zack Russell and starring Kayla Lorette – who previously collaborated on the fascinating She Stoops to Conquer which played at the festival in 2015 – 7A takes place in a single location and involves a young woman (Lorette) who is alone in… Read More #TIFF18 Review: 7A
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Named for the Spanish word for “heaven,” Cielo is a documentary that takes a long look at the night sky in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Directed by Alison McAlpine, the film focuses on the scientists and astronomers who have devoted their lives to studying what goes on up above at… Read More Review: Cielo
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Set in the seedy underground world of Toronto tow-truck drivers, 22 Chaser follows Ben (Brian J. Smith), a driver for the Jackrabbit towing company who is trying to make an honest living, but is stuck doing by-law duty and finds himself struggling to support his wife (Tiio Horn) and… Read More Review: 22 Chaser
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Based on the novel by the late author Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse tells the story of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe boy who is taken from his family in Northwestern Ontario in the 1960s, and brought to a Catholic Residential School. At the school, Saul is faced with abuse and is… Read More Review: Indian Horse
By John Corrado The 12th edition of the Canadian Film Fest starts tomorrow night at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto, showcasing a selection of ten features and twenty shorts, all from homegrown filmmakers. I had the chance to preview six of the features, including opening and closing night films Becoming Burlesque and The Go-Getters, and… Read More Previewing the 2018 Canadian Film Fest
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Saxon Gamble (Jack Kesy) is a young outlaw who returns to the hometown where he grew up following his mother’s sudden death, dredging back to the surface problems with his brother Dean (David Cubitt) and father Leonard (Peter McRobbie). But things take a darker turn when Saxon becomes… Read More Review: Juggernaut
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Bea (Charlotte Salisbury) is a shy and awkward tween girl from Toronto who travels with her mother (Delphine Roussel) to a small town in Northern Ontario, where her father (Christopher Bolton) has inherited the local diner. While her parents struggle to patch up their fraying marriage, Bea strikes up… Read More Review: Porcupine Lake
The Joy of Movies 