By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The Kabin Crew, a group of aspiring child rappers and musicians in Cork, Ireland, went viral in 2024 with the high energy music video for their upbeat song “The Spark.” The kids behind the viral sensation are… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Gealtra
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In his documentary The Oldest Person in the World, filmmaker Sam Green focuses on people who have lived for over a century. These are the world record holders for longest lifespan, with French woman Jeanne Calment holding… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: The Oldest Person in the World
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Soraya, the young subject at the centre of A Fox Under a Pink Moon, is an Afghan teen girl living in Iran, who is trying to flee across the Turkish border so she can make her way… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: A Fox Under a Pink Moon
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto When it opened fifty years ago in 1976, the CN Tower instantly became a focal point of Toronto. It was the tallest building in the world, and would remain so for decades until the Burj Khalifa was… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: The Tower That Built a City
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Janay Boulos is a Lebanese journalist living in London, working as an Arabic correspondent for the BBC. Abd Alkader Habak is a photographer in Syria, forced to flee from the city of Idlib to Aleppo, as the… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Birds of War
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Director Tommy Avallone’s flashy documentary Myspace is a look at the rise and fall of the original social media platform, taking us back to the internet culture of the early to mid-2000s. Avallone explores the history of… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Myspace
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Kenny Loggins is the latest musical artist to get a career retrospective in the form of a documentary. Directed by Dori Berinstein, Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart is a portrait of the musician, who scored massive… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Quebec filmmaker Jean-François Caissy’s Kindergarten unfolds almost like a nature documentary, only we are following human children instead of animals. Caissy’s film is set in a daycare centre in Quebec, and his approach involves just putting a… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kindergarten
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The latest film from Canadian documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich (The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, Born Hungry), This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino serves as a polished biographical portrait of a man who… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In the slice-of-life documentary On My Own Terms, director Tadeusz Chudy follows teenaged half-siblings Pawel and Julka, who are living together at an orphanage in Poland. Pawel is a promising young boxer, whose coach sees a lot… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: On My Own Terms
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto When Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police in Iran for violating the country’s mandatory hijab laws, and later died in custody, her death sparked the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement when activists would risk and in… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: A War on Women
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The world is facing a loneliness epidemic, with people starved for connection but struggling to meet each other in real life. Dating apps are filling that void, but come with their own set of challenges; these apps… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Love Apptually
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In their documentary Gimme Truth, co-directors Simon Ennis and Brad Abrahams explore modern conspiracy theories, by introducing us to a variety of subjects who believe in them. Their views range from vaccine skeptics to 9/11 truthers. These… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Gimme Truth
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In her documentary Black Zombie, director Maya Annik Bedward ties the modern zombie lore we see in horror movies and TV shows back to the history of Haiti and the ancient spiritual practice of Vodou. Bedward traces… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Black Zombie
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The documentary Nekai Walks opens with a beat-by-beat account of the night that Nekai Foster got shot in the head in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood. It was summer, and he was walking home from playing basketball,… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Nekai Walks
By John Corrado Orangutan is the latest Earth Day release from Disneynature, a tradition that now stretches back over fifteen years. This one follows Indah, a 9-year-old orangutan (we are told that makes her a teenager in human years) in the jungles of Southeast Asia, living with her mother Diann and new baby brother Bimo.… Read More Movie Review: Disneynature’s Orangutan (Disney+)
By John Corrado As a documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville has focused on a variety of celebrity subjects, from Mister Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? to Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner. And, in his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom, he brought backup singers into the spotlight. The subject of Neville’s latest film is another behind the… Read More Movie Review: Lorne
By John Corrado In his previous documentary, the Oscar-winning 2022 film Navalny, Toronto filmmaker Daniel Roher presented a thrilling portrait of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Now Roher turns his attention to the equally timely topic of artificial intelligence in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Roher’s latest, which he… Read More Movie Review: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
By John Corrado In her new documentary The Tale of Silyan, the follow-up to her Oscar-nominated Honeyland, director Tamara Kotevska once again explores the balance between people and nature in North Macedonia. In Honeyland, Kotevska focused on an elderly beekeeper having her traditional way of life – and her livelihood – threatened by a new family… Read More Movie Review: The Tale of Silyan
By John Corrado Director Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less biography of George Orwell, and more heavily slanted video essay that struggles to thread the needle between the British author’s work and selected modern events. It’s a major disappointment. The film’s title, of course, is a reference to Orwell’s most famous book 1984,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Orwell: 2+2=5 (TIFF Docs)
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