By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Swedish filmmaker Magnus Gertten’s new documentary Nelly & Nadine reveals the unlikely love story between Nadine Hwang, the Spanish-born daughter of a Chinese… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Nelly & Nadine
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The title of director Cody Sheehy’s thought provoking documentary Make People Better comes from the three words that James Watson, one of… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Make People Better
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Early on in director Nils Gaup’s documentary Images of a Nordic Drama, art collector Haakon Mehren recalls the moment he first laid… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Images of a Nordic Drama
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The women-in-the-workplace comedy 9 to 5, which starred Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as three women dealing with office harassment… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Still Working 9 to 5
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. Director Marie-Geneviève Chabot’s documentary Beneath the Surface follows three adult brothers who reunite with their father for a fishing trip in Quebec, in hopes… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Beneath the Surface
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. In horseback riding terms, a “long rider” is someone who has done over a thousand miles in a single equestrian trip. Director Sean Cisterna’s… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: The Long Rider
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. A few years back, Canadian filmmaker Jeremy LaLonde and actor Jonas Chernick collaborated together on the Canadian time travel comedy James vs. His Future… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Ashgrove
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. If you stumbled upon a bag of cash with no one around and no apparent owner, would you keep it for yourself, or report… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: A Small Fortune
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. Alexandre (Robert Naylor) is a firearms instructor working at the Canadian customs college, training customs officers how to fire guns that the government has… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: The Noise of Engines
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Canadian Film Fest starts tonight and runs in two segments from March 22nd to 26th and March 29th to April 2nd, exclusively on Super Channel. Tehranto, writer-director Faran Moradi’s crowdfunded feature debut, is a Canadian romantic dramedy that explores the very different experience of two Iranian… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Tehranto
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou, One Second is a pretty wonderful love letter to cinema itself and the travelling picture shows of his youth. Set in China in the 1970s, the engaging plot of One Second follows three people who are all after a reel… Read More #TIFF21 Review: One Second (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The feature directorial debut of writer-director Camille Griffin, Silent Night is a dark but compelling holiday twist on the “last night of the world” premise, that takes a bold, eerily believable high concept setup and applies it to a stripped down character dramedy set at Christmas. The film… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Silent Night (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) George MacKay plays a young man who believes he’s actually a wolf trapped in a human body in writer-director Nathalie Biancheri’s new film Wolf, which explores the concept of “species dysphoria.” And the film is fine. Neither the total mess nor the instant cult classic that it could… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Wolf (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is the filmmaker’s bittersweet cinematic memoir of growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The story begins in the year 1969, and follows a young boy named Buddy (Jude Hill), a stand-in for Branagh, who lives on a mostly Protestant street in Belfast where the… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Belfast (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sigourney Weaver stars in The Good House as Hildy Good, an older real estate agent with a drinking problem. It’s a plum role for Weaver, as the character chews up the screen and breaks the fourth wall, addressing us directly as she grapples with whether or not to… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Good House (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The latest work from Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti, who won the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room two decades ago, Three Floors is a watchable but somewhat mediocre multi-character drama that follows the denizens of an apartment complex in Rome as their stories collide, sometimes literally. The film… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Three Floors (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Director Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a quirky and enjoyable biopic of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, whose stylized drawings of cats with large eyes are credited with helping turn felines into acceptable house pets. You see, cats were thought of only as rodent-killing… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman Island is a very enjoyable love letter of sorts to the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The film is set on the Baltic island of Fårö, where the director lived and shot some of his most famous films, which… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Bergman Island (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Neil Bennett (Tim Roth) is a wealthy Englishman vacationing at a resort in Acapulco, Mexico with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two kids Colin (Samuel Bottomley) and Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan). Their holiday gets cut short when Alice receives a phone call informing them of a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Sundown (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) Director Rob Savage made waves during the pandemic when he released Host, a horror movie set on Zoom. Now he returns with the Blumhouse-produced Dashcam, another pandemic project that was apparently made on the fly without much of a script and just a basic outline. And it’s a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dashcam (Midnight Madness)
The Joy of Movies 