By John Corrado The 2019 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 26th to May 6th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Midnight Family – ★★★½ (out of 4) High stakes and high speed ambulance chases abound in Midnight Family, a compelling and beautifully shot vérité portrait of a… Read More #HotDocs19: Third Set of Capsule Reviews
By John Corrado The 2019 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 26th to May 6th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In My Blood It Runs – ★★★½ (out of 4) Dujuan is a 10-year-old Aboriginal Australian boy of Arrernte descent who lives in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), and… Read More #HotDocs19: First Set of Capsule Reviews
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Disneynature’s Earth Day releases have become somewhat of a tradition over the last decade, starting with Earth in 2009. While we haven’t gotten one every year, this year the studio is back with Penguins. The film opens with our protagonist, an adorable Adélie penguin named Steve, waddling across… Read More Review: Disneynature’s Penguins
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) There are some films where the very existence of them and the fact that they are even being released at all is cause for celebration, and the concert documentary Amazing Grace is one of those films. Shot over two nights in January of 1972, the film documents the… Read More Review: Amazing Grace
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) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is one of the most beloved literary works of the past century. The story of a lonely pilot who crash lands in the desert and befriends a young boy from asteroid B-612, the beautifully written novella has the ability to connect with… Read More Review: Invisible Essence: The Little Prince
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Flynn McGarry, the young subject of the documentary Chef Flynn, taught himself to cook at a very young age through cookbooks and YouTube videos. When he was 11 years old, he turned his family’s living room into a makeshift restaurant, with the help of his mother and his… Read More Review: Chef Flynn
By John Corrado We have already officially closed the door on 2018, but before we entirely leave the year in the past, I would be remiss not to highlight the many wonderful films that I saw last year. My list of the best movies of 2018 will be dropping shortly, but first I would like… Read More The Best Documentaries of 2018
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) There are eight hundred dogs born every year at Guide Dogs for the Blind, only three hundred of which will actually make the cut as working guide dogs. The stories of five of these adorable Labrador puppies, and the humans who help raise them, are told in Pick… Read More Review: Pick of the Litter
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta turns her attention to another director in Searching for Ingmar Bergman, offering an engaging and often insightful portrait of the late Swedish master as a filmmaker, an artist and a father. An accomplished auteur in her own right, who was inspired by Bergman’s work… Read More Review: Searching for Ingmar Bergman
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Being a tribute artist can be a lucrative and demanding business, even if your fame largely comes from pretending to be someone else. That’s the main takeaway of Almost Almost Famous, a fairly entertaining documentary that follows a group of classic rock impersonators who are on tour together… Read More Review: Almost Almost Famous
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 ★★★½ (out of 4) From ending up in someone’s engagement photos, to serving drinks at a bar, and even doing the dishes at a random house party, there are a lot of urban legends that exist on the internet about encounters that random people have had with Bill Murray. Colloquially known as… Read More Review: The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Gaining fame as a champion weightlifter and bodybuilder, and also serving in the US Marines, Matt “Kroc” Kroczaleski was seen as a symbol of stereotypical masculinity, and came across as a classic “strong man.” But Matt always felt there was something different about himself, which he tried to keep… Read More Review: Transformer
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Directed by her longtime friend Steve Loveridge, and featuring a wealth of her own personal videos alongside concert footage, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. is an engaging and often exciting look at the life and career of the socially conscious Tamil hip hop star M.I.A., and the controversies that she has courted.… Read More Review: Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Filmmaker Bing Liu returns to his hometown of Rockford, Illinois in his remarkably powerful documentary Minding the Gap, to tell the stories of himself and two other young guys who all grew up together skateboarding around the city. There’s Zack Mulligan, who is struggling to come to terms with… Read More Review: Minding the Gap
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) How did America get to the point in 2016 where the ubiquitous businessman turned realty show star Donald Trump was able to win the presidency? This is the basic question fuelling Michael Moore’s latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, a sometimes engaging but mostly frustrating and ultimately overly simplistic and… Read More Review: Fahrenheit 11/9
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) An excellent portrait of the late comic superstar Gilda Radner, Love, Gilda is a documentary that strikes just the right balance between being funny and moving. The film takes us through the entirety of her career, from her early start in the star-studded Toronto production of Godspell, to her big break… Read More Review: Love, Gilda
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 ★★ (out of 4) A disappointingly shallow followup of sorts to her excellent 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth finds photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield painting a much broader portrait of the destruction that can be caused by affluence and greed in modern society. The film serves as a… Read More Review: Generation Wealth
The Joy of Movies 