By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) For his directorial debut, Bradley Cooper has delivered the third remake of A Star is Born, following the 1937 original which received new iterations in 1954 and 1976, and the results are pretty great. This time around, the story involves Jackson Maine (Cooper), a washed up country star… Read More #TIFF18 Review: A Star is Born

By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a working class Italian-American family man who works as a bouncer at a New York night club. Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is a renowned classical pianist of Jamaican descent who is embarking on a tour throughout the Deep South of 1962, a… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Green Book

By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Claire Denis does sci-fi in High Life, and the results are as confounding and maybe even weirder than you expect from the French auteur, who is also working in English for the first time. The film opens with Monte (Robert Pattinson) alone on a spaceship, tending to his baby… Read More #TIFF18 Review: High Life

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) When Bridget (Hilary Swank) returns home to help deal with her mother (Blythe Danner), who is rapidly progressing into Alzheimer’s, she also finds herself having to deal with the drama of her father (Robert Forster) not being ready to have his high school sweetheart leave home, as her… Read More #TIFF18 Review: What They Had

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Franky (Josh Wiggins) is a popular high schooler who has his world upended after his 17th birthday party leads to a drunken but reciprocal sexual encounter with his best friend Ballas (Darren Mann). The encounter leaves Franky struggling to define his own sexuality, as bullying amps up at… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Giant Little Ones

By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Jonah Hill, in his directorial debut, has delivered one of the best movies of the festival with Mid90s. The indie flick follows Stevie (Sunny Suljic), a kid in 1995 who is looking for a sense of belonging that he isn’t getting at home with his single mother (Katherine… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Mid90s

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following up his Oscar-winning masterpiece Moonlight, Barry Jenkins brings James Baldwin’s work to the screen with a highly lyrical sensibility in his latest film If Beale Street Could Talk. Based on Baldwin’s 1974 novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne)… Read More #TIFF18 Review: If Beale Street Could Talk

By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) When an anonymous hacker starts leaking the personal data of everyone in the town of Salem, four high school girls – Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) and Em (Abra) – end up having their worlds upended after their photos and texts are made public.… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Assassination Nation

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Colette is a biopic of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley), a French writer at the turn of the 20th Century who marries into money when she meets the charismatic Willy (Dominic West). Seeking new material for his publishing house, Willy puts out a novel written by Colette, but he… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Colette

By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) When rogue LAPD detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) starts investigating the reemergence of Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of a brutal California gang, she is forced to finally confront the past trauma of a sting operation gone wrong that involved her former partner Chris (Sebastian Stan). Director Karyn… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Destroyer

By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Paul Dano, who co-wrote the script with his wife Zoe Kazan, Wildlife is told from the point of view of Joe Brinson (Ed Oxenbould), a young teenager in 1960s Montana who is forced to watch his family fall apart when his father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Wildlife

By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Ben (Lucas Hedges) cuts out of rehab to return home for Christmas, his mother Holly (Julia Roberts) agrees to let him stay the night despite disasters over the past two holidays, but she goes into panic mode and tries desperately to help him stay clean overnight. Written… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Ben is Back

By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Based on a pair of memoirs written by father and son, Beautiful Boy depicts the struggles faced by writer David Sheff (Steve Carell) to help his drug-addicted young adult son Nic (Timothée Chalamet) get clean, after he started using crystal meth as a teenager. The English language debut… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Beautiful Boy

By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film from Dan Fogelman, best known as the creator of the hit show This Is Us, Life Itself follows a collection of characters who are all connected in various ways, with the through line being Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde), a New York couple… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Life Itself

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Based on Canadian author Patrick deWitt’s acclaimed book of the same name, The Sisters Brothers follows Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), a pair of outlaw brothers in 1851, Oregon who are hired to kill an eccentric prospector (Riz Ahmed), who is also being tracked… Read More #TIFF18 Review: The Sisters Brothers

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The second feature by Brady Corbet, Vox Lux focuses on the anatomy of a modern pop star whose life has been impacted by violence. The first half shows us our protagonist Celeste as a teenager (Raffey Cassidy) who survives a school shooting, and finds fame as a pop… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Vox Lux

By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) TIFF decided to embrace streaming services by choosing the Netflix-produced Outlaw King to officially open the festival last night, and even though I still have some reservations about the predominantly non-theatrical distribution model used by the company – which notably got them blacklisted from Cannes this year –… Read More #TIFF18 Review: Outlaw King