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)
By John Corrado A month ago, I shared my picks for the best movies of 2020, and now it’s time to make my selections for the best documentaries of last year. This list has been a long time coming, I know, and It took me a while to put it together, from deciding on the… Read More The Best Documentaries of 2020
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The other day, I had a chance to review the first two episodes of Inside Pixar, the very good new docuseries on Disney Plus that introduces us to some of the individuals who help tell the stories we all know and love at Pixar Animation Studios. The show… Read More Disney+ Review: Inside Pixar (Episodes 3, 4 & 5)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In 2003, co-directors Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar released The Corporation, a documentary based upon a book by Canadian professor Joel Bakan that sought to psychoanalyze corporations as if they were people, and came to the conclusion that they would be diagnosed as psychopaths. Now, seventeen years later,… Read More Review: The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Pixar Animation Studios is one of those places that I have always been fascinated by and have long dreamed of visiting. Not only am I a huge fan of their movies and characters, but as a studio, the place seems to be a bastion of creativity. The new… Read More Disney+ Review: Inside Pixar (Episodes 1 & 2)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Growing up, writer/director Trevor Cameron was always fascinated by stories of his great-great-great-uncle, Gabriel Dumont. A Métis leader and lieutenant to Louis Riel, Dumont is a legendary figure for his involvement in the North-West Rebellions of 1885, gaining him the nickname the “Métis Braveheart.” Wanting to learn more… Read More imagineNATIVE 2020 Review: Shadow of Dumont
