By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada The title subject of the documentary Misha and the Wolves is Misha Defonseca, a Belgian Holocaust survivor who settled in Massachusetts, where her incredible… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Misha and the Wolves
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada In her short documentary Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again, filmmaker Courtney Montour explores the legacy of Indigenous women’s rights activist Mary Two-Axe… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Director Sheona McDonald’s short documentary Into Light explores the experience of a single mother in Yellowknife, as she helps her young transgender daughter through… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Into Light
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Directors Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams follow a group of people from Vancouver’s LGBTQ+ community who are working together to sponsor a gay… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Someone Like Me
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Set in the world of competitive tablescaping, Set! is one of those quirky, special interest documentaries that does a good job of introducing us… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Set!
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada In the opening scene of The Face of Anonymous, novelist Ian Thornton recounts how he met a panhandler in Toronto some years back. He… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: The Face of Anonymous
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada The “ISIS brides” as they are called, the Western woman who travelled overseas from Europe and North America to join the terrorist group in… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: The Return: Life After ISIS
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Based on the book by Michael Davis, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is a heartwarming documentary that explores the history of… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada June and Jean Millington are sisters who moved to California from the Philippines in the early 1960s, and formed a band as teenagers, with… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Fanny: The Right to Rock
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada In the 1960s, brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward fulfilled their dream of becoming music producers when they turned their family farm in Wales into… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Directed by Margaret Byrne, a filmmaker who herself is living with mental illness, Any Given Day is a candid portrait of people struggling to… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Any Given Day
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Shawn Bath, the main subject of the engaging and appropriately titled documentary Hell or Clean Water, is a commercial diver in Newfoundland who has… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Hell or Clean Water
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Documentary filmmaker Jesse McCracken returns to his hometown of Markdale, Ontario in Grey Roads, to explore how the town has changed since he grew… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Grey Roads
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2021 Hot Docs Festival is running virtually from April 29th to May 9th, all films are available to stream for audiences across Canada Director Ann Shin explores the concept of “digital immortality” in A.rtifical I.mmortality, the opening night film of this year’s virtual Hot Docs, a thought-provoking… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: A.rtificial I.mmortality
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) 2021 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature Among this year’s many Oscar nominees from the streaming giant Netflix is My Octopus Teacher, a surprisingly touching nature documentary that captures the unexpected friendship between a scuba diver and an octopus, from captivating beginning to poignant end. The film… Read More Netflix Review: My Octopus Teacher
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) 2021 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature A dark horse contender for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, The Mole Agent is a low-key charmer of a film that follows an elderly gentleman in Chile who is hired to go undercover in a nursing home to investigate suspected mistreatment,… Read More Review: The Mole Agent
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Women make up less than three percent of all technical and production roles in the music industry, and in 2019, only five out of the top one hundred DJs were women. These are some of the surprising stats presented to us in director Stacey Lee’s documentary Underplayed, which… Read More VOD Review: Underplayed
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Five students from different parts of the world who all share a similar entrepreneurial spirit come together to compete at the 2019 Global Student Entrepreneur Awards in the new National Geographic documentary Own the Room, which is premiering on Disney Plus this weekend. The five students that the… Read More Disney+ Review: Own the Room
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Six songs by famed Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim are used to provide deeper insight into his life and career as a whole in director James Lapine’s documentary Six By Sondheim. The film, which premiered on HBO in 2013 and has just been released on Blu-ray as… Read More Blu-ray Review: Six By Sondheim
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In 2019, for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, director and editor Todd Douglas Miller delivered Apollo 11, a documentary that brilliantly assembled never before seen archival footage of the event into a compelling narrative feature. Now Miller has returned to this historic event, or, rather,… Read More Review: Apollo 11: Quarantine (Digital Release)
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