By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) In his unconventional but excellent new documentary Flee, Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his high school friend Amin Nawabi, an Afghan refugee who reveals for the first time the harrowing story of how he escaped Afghanistan as a child and fled to Europe. The twist is that… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Flee (TIFF Docs)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Del Close himself may have never achieved household name status, but odds are you’ve heard of Bill Murray, John Candy, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and any number of the other Saturday Night Live and SCTV stars who were trained in his school of long-form improvisational comedy. Close… Read More Review: For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The latest Disney+ show, Behind the Attraction, is a very good ten-part docuseries that sheds light on some of the famous attractions at Disney Parks and Resorts around the world. Five of the ten episodes in the series, which features Dwayne Johnson as one of its executive producers… Read More Disney+ Review: Behind the Attraction (First Five Episodes)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Filmmaker Morgan Neville’s new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is as much about the life of the celebrity chef and TV personality as it is about his death. But the question of why Bourdain ended up killing himself in a hotel room in France in 2018… Read More Review: Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Filmmaker Joshua Zemen sets out in search of the “52 Hertz Whale” in his documentary The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52, which follows Zemen and a team of marine biologists as they try to track the elusive whale’s signal across the Pacific Ocean. Because this specific creature… Read More VOD Review: The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Shot in black-and-white and entirely free of dialogue, Russian filmmaker Viktor Kosakovskiy’s documentary Gunda is an often hypnotic piece of experiential cinema that captures the day to day lives of a group of farm animals. The film, which boasts actor and noted animal rights activist Joaquin Phoenix as an… Read More VOD Review: Gunda
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Captain Ramadan is training the next generation of female weightlifters in Egypt, with his outdoor facility surrounded by chain link fencing on a street corner in the port city of Alexandria providing both a training ground and safe haven for girls who want to get into the sport.… Read More Review: Lift Like a Girl
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Wolfgang Puck is credited as being the first “celebrity” chef, a title that he obtained by attracting a dedicated guest list of Hollywood stars to his restaurant Spago, before gaining a broader following through charming TV appearances, and building a food empire around frozen pizzas. Puck’s story is… Read More Disney+ Review: Wolfgang
By John Corrado Hot Docs has officially come to a close, with the final announcement of the coveted Audience Awards revealing the top twenty films that resonated the most with viewers during the virtual festival. In first place is director Franz Böhm’s Dear Future Children, which follows three young female activists in Chile, Hong Kong… Read More #HotDocs21 Audience Award Winners
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 Titled after his old motto “we are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the documentary We Are As Gods offers… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: We Are As Gods
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 There have been several documentaries made so far about the COVID-19 pandemic, and filmmaker Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath is by far the… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: In the Same Breath
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 Yung Chang, who was brought onboard to assemble the film out of three hundred hours of footage that was shot by a… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Wuhan Wuhan
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 Josiah Wilson was born in Haiti and adopted as a baby by a Heiltsuk father and a white mother, and raised as part of… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: One of Ours
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 Filmmaker Katherine Knight crafts an engaging portrait of acclaimed Canadian artist Max Dean in her documentary Still Max, which offers an interesting look at… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Still Max
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 Shot during the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which saw hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to fight against the… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Faceless
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 At Dagmarsminde, a nursing home in Denmark for people with dementia, the staff operate on principles of kindness and compassion, instead of just using… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: It Is Not Over Yet
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 After leaving his older boyfriend in Mexico City, young filmmaker Isidore Bethel returns to Chicago, where he embarks on a new film project. He… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: Acts of Love
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 British filmmaker Edgar Wright makes his documentary debut with The Sparks Brothers, an ode to the musical stylings of the band Sparks, which is… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: The Sparks Brothers
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 Fabio Zaffagnini wanted to attract the attention of the Foo Fighters in hopes that the band would play a show in his hometown of… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: We Are the Thousand
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 Adam Neumann, the founder and former CEO of WeWork, essentially got rich off of selling office space to millennials. But it was more the… Read More #HotDocs21 Review: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
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