By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Adult Adoption is the Toronto-set feature directorial debut of Karen Knox, best known as the creator of the CBC Gem series Homeschooled. The film is written by Canadian actress and playwright Ellie Moon, who also stars in it as Rosy, a 25-year-old woman living in Toronto who has… Read More Review: Adult Adoption
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Drinkwater is a 1980s-inspired Canadian coming of age film set in Penticton, B.C. that centres around Mike Drinkwater (Daniel Doheny), an awkward teen boy who wants to get the girl and hopefully get into college to get out of his small town. The Bruce Lee-obsessed Mike is stuck… Read More Review: Drinkwater
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Billed as being “directed, produced, adapted by & starring Katie Boland,” We’re All in This Together is a somewhat ambitious Canadian dramedy that follows a young woman who has her life thrown into turmoil after her mother Kate (Martha Burns) goes viral on social media by attempting to… Read More Review: We’re All in This Together
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Sarah Polley, whose previous trio of films Away from Her, Take This Waltz and Stories We Tell are all in the established canon of celebrated Canadian cinema, makes her long awaited return to directing with Women Talking. An adaptation of the… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Women Talking (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The second feature from Canadian filmmaker Lindsay MacKay, following her very good (and equally memorably titled) debut Wet Bum, The Swearing Jar is an ambitiously structured romantic drama that grabs us right from the opening scene;… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Swearing Jar (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) are a married couple with two kids who realize they have lost the sexual spark in their marriage. So when their daughters are away for a week at winter… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The End of Sex (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Something You Said Last Night, the evocative debut film from writer-director Luis De Filippis, follows an Italian-Canadian family on vacation in a beach town. Ren (Carmen Madonia) and her younger sister Siena (Paige Evans) are spending… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Something You Said Last Night (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The debut film from writer-director Sophie Jarvis, Until Branches Bend is an engaging character study of Robin (Grace Glowicki), a cannery worker in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Robin’s job is to grade peaches, but her life… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Until Branches Bend (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title character in Rosie, the feature debut of Métis filmmaker Gail Maurice, is an Indigenous girl (Keris Hope Hill) living in Montreal in the 1980s, who gets taken in by her Francophone aunt Frédèrique (Mélanie… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Rosie (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The feature directorial debut of Chandler Levack, a film critic for the Globe and Mail, I Like Movies is the story of Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), a 17-year-old cinephile in Burlington, ON circa 2002, who dreams… Read More #TIFF22 Review: I Like Movies (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Carmen, the third feature from writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, is a Canadian-Maltese co-production (it closed the Canadian Film Fest earlier this year) that is set in a small village in Malta. The title character, Carmen (Natasha McElhone), is the sister of the local priest (Henry Zammit Cordina), whose life… Read More Review: Carmen
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest documentary from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company examines the massive coverup that agrochemical giant Monsanto engaged in to hide the fact that glyphosate, the key ingredient in their weed-killer Roundup, was carcinogenic to humans. The film, which recently… Read More Review: Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In 2002, following the Chinese communist government’s violent crackdown on practitioners of Falun Gong, a group of activists in Changchun hijacked a state-run… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Eternal Spring
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Filmmaker Barri Cohen’s perception of her happy family was shattered when her father revealed that he had two other children from a previous relationship,… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Unloved: Huronia’s Forgotten Children
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In her documentary Hunting in Packs, director Chloe Sosa-Sims follows a trio female politicians across three countries whose views vary across the political… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Hunting in Packs
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The ASD Band is a musical group made up of guitarist and vocalist Jackson Begley, lead singer Rawan Tuffaha, drummer Spenser Murray, and… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Okay! (The ASD Band Film)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Director Stacey Tenenbaum’s documentary Scrap opens in White, Georgia, which is the site of Old Car City. Known as the world’s oldest… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Scrap
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Back in 2018, filmmaker Jackie Torrens premiered her short film Bernie Langille Wants to Know Who Killed Bernie Langille at Hot Docs,… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) At the heart of All My Puny Sorrows, the latest emotional work from Canadian filmmaker Michael McGowan (Saint Ralph, One Week, Still Mine), is the push and pull between one person not wanting to live and another trying to show them that there is a reason to go… Read More Review: All My Puny Sorrows
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director Martin Edralin’s debut feature Islands is a simmering and powerful portrait of the loneliness epidemic as seen through the eyes of Joshua (Rogelio Balagtas), a very shy Filipino immigrant living in Toronto. Joshua is a middle-aged man who still lives with his elderly parents. He’s never had… Read More Review: Islands
The Joy of Movies 