By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Directed by Richard Eyre, and based on a 2018 stage play by Alan Bennett that has been adapted for the screen by Heidi Thomas, the British film Allelujah follows various staff and patients at the Bethlehem… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Allelujah (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider is an Iranian serial killer thriller that works as a tense game of cat and mouse between a murderer and a journalist, while also morphing into a piece of equally disturbing… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Holy Spider (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave is a puzzle box of a movie from the Korean master that offers a beguiling mix of murder mystery and romantic melodrama, tied together through brilliant editing and narrative choices. The… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Decision to Leave (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Jennifer Lawrence makes a long-awaited return to more indie roles in Causeway, portraying a soldier returning from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury. She delivers a stripped down performance that recalls her earlier work, but the… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Causeway (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Documentary filmmaker Elegance Bratton makes his narrative directorial debut with The Inspection, a good autobiographical drama that he wrote based on his own experiences as a young gay black man joining the Marine Corps to try… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Inspection (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title of Sisu, the latest from Finnish genre filmmaker Jalmari Helander (whose previous films Rare Exports and Big Game have become cult classics), comes from a hard to translate word that essentially means a form… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Sisu (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. “Weird Al” Yankovic is the undisputed king of parody songs, and now he gets the biopic treatment in director Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. But, in true Yankovic fashion, this is less a biopic… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The second feature from Canadian filmmaker Lindsay MacKay, following her very good (and equally memorably titled) debut Wet Bum, The Swearing Jar is an ambitiously structured romantic drama that grabs us right from the opening scene;… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Swearing Jar (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) are a married couple with two kids who realize they have lost the sexual spark in their marriage. So when their daughters are away for a week at winter… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The End of Sex (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Something You Said Last Night, the evocative debut film from writer-director Luis De Filippis, follows an Italian-Canadian family on vacation in a beach town. Ren (Carmen Madonia) and her younger sister Siena (Paige Evans) are spending… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Something You Said Last Night (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The debut film from writer-director Sophie Jarvis, Until Branches Bend is an engaging character study of Robin (Grace Glowicki), a cannery worker in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Robin’s job is to grade peaches, but her life… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Until Branches Bend (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title character in Rosie, the feature debut of Métis filmmaker Gail Maurice, is an Indigenous girl (Keris Hope Hill) living in Montreal in the 1980s, who gets taken in by her Francophone aunt Frédèrique (Mélanie… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Rosie (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Broker, the latest family drama from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda working in Korea for the first time, opens in the dead of night with new mother So-young (Lee Ji-eun) leaving her baby in a box for… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Broker (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Ruben Östlund is a filmmaker known for satirically taking aim at any number of targets, ranging from traditional gender roles to class divides and elite society folks, skewering them all through his darkly comic films. And… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Triangle of Sadness (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The feature directorial debut of Chandler Levack, a film critic for the Globe and Mail, I Like Movies is the story of Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), a 17-year-old cinephile in Burlington, ON circa 2002, who dreams… Read More #TIFF22 Review: I Like Movies (Discovery)
The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th, and you can keep it right here for all of your TIFF coverage, including reviews of some of the hottest titles at this year’s festival! This post will serve as the main directory of all my #TIFF22 coverage, and will be updated as more… Read More Welcome to #TIFF22! (Review Directory)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from June 9th to 26th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Filmmaker David Hoffert’s years-in-the-making documentary The Rhapsody recounts the life story of Leo Spellman (born Leon Szpilman), a Polish-Canadian Holocaust survivor and composer who finally… Read More Toronto Jewish Film Festival Review: The Rhapsody
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In their new documentary Pat Rocco Dared, co-directors Morris Chapdelaine and Bob Christie offer an enjoyable introduction to groundbreaking gay filmmaker Pat… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Pat Rocco Dared
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Directed, written and produced by Canadian filmmaker Kevin Hegge, Tramps! is a documentary that explores the history of the New Romantics, a… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Tramps!
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. A gay dwarf named Peter (Matthew August Jeffers) is roped into taking his sex worker neighbour Winona (Sarah Hay) on an… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Unidentified Objects
The Joy of Movies 