By John Corrado In his coming-of-age film Olmo, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke finds the right balance between enjoyable portrait of bratty adolescence, and heavier, more dramatic scenes, telling a small but nuanced father-son story. There’s also some star power behind the film, having been produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The titular Olmo (Aivan… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Olmo (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In The Last One for the Road, Italian filmmaker Francesco Sossai crafts a delightful hangout movie around Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla), two hapless, middle-aged vagabonds bopping around their hometown of Veneto. Their nights are spent drifting between local bars, trying to find a spot for one last drink. They pick… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Last One for the Road (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The latest work from Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych, To the Victory! is an interesting and narratively playful portrait of life finding a way in an imagined post-war country, and also a meta-textual look at an artist trying to use the decimated backdrop to create something. Vasyanovych stars in the film as Roman,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: To the Victory! (Platform)
By John Corrado The latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook, following up the gauzy, neo-noir, romantic mystery of 2022’s stunning Decision to Leave, No Other Choice is a wildly entertaining film that moves so seamlessly between dark comedy, drama, and murderous thriller, that it seems to defy genre itself. The story centres around Man-soo… Read More #TIFF50 Review: No Other Choice (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado In his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, formerly imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi crafts another complex and involving portrait of modern day Iran. The film follows a group of people who find themselves at the centre of a moral dilemma, when a worker named Vahid (Vahid… Read More #TIFF50 Review: It Was Just an Accident (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado In his mixing of paranoid espionage thriller and absurdist dark comedy, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a culturally specific portrait of his country in the late 1970s in The Secret Agent, seen through the eyes of a man on the run during the waning days of the military dictatorship. The man… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Secret Agent (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado A man gets off the subway and tries to exit the station. But every time he turns a corner, he ends up back in the same place, stuck in a seemingly endless loop. This is the premise behind the Japanese film Exit 8, a fun and suspenseful little puzzle box thriller from… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Exit 8 (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado Director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât opens on a memorably cinematic scene as a group of outcasts hold a rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert. We see evocative images of massive speakers being set up in the desert, as bodies bop and gyrate in time to the blaring techno music, the beat… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sirât (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Sentimental Value is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s followup to his 2021 modern classic The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. If Worst Person was about a quarter-life crisis and searching for meaning in your twenties, Sentimental Value aims for something even more ambitious in scope.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sentimental Value (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Ne Zha II is the Chinese blockbuster that became the highest grossing animated film of all time, beating the record previously set by Inside Out 2 just last year, almost entirely from what it grossed in China alone. The film had previously been released in North American theatres earlier this year, and now we… Read More Movie Review: Ne Zha II
By John Corrado In his latest film I’m Still Here, which received a surprise Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) offers a portrait of life during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s through the lens of mainly being a family drama. Salles’ film serves as a biography of… Read More Movie Review: I’m Still Here
By John Corrado Director Maura Delpero’s Vermgilio, Italy’s International Feature submission for the Oscars, is set at the end of World War II in 1944, but the war is happening entirely offscreen. Instead, this is a slow-burn slice-of-life portrait of a large family in the mountain village of Vermiglio. The patriarch of the family is Cesare… Read More Movie Review: Vermiglio
By John Corrado Swedish director Magnus von Horn’s highly disturbing but artfully crafted new film The Girl with the Needle is a period piece set in Copenhagen in the direct aftermath of World War I. The timeline is set early on when a town crier shouts out news of the armistice, right after we see… Read More Movie Review: The Girl with the Needle
By John Corrado Payal Kapadia, the filmmaker behind the 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, makes her narrative feature debut with All We Imagine as Light. Kapadia’s film, which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year, is a touching and very heartfelt slice-of-life portrait of women in modern India. The film mainly focuses… Read More Movie Review: All We Imagine as Light
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here. In her new film Sunshine, Filipina writer-director Antoinette Jadaone crafts a gritty and grounded teenage drama, that offers an interesting glimpse at life in the Philippines from a perspective that I hadn’t really seen… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Sunshine (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here. In his second animated feature Flow, following his 2019 debut Away, Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis captures the wordless saga of a group of animals trying to survive a flood on their island. The creatures… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Flow (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here. The latest film from Indonesian action filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto (Headshot, The Night Comes for Us), The Shadow Strays is a totally insane and highly stylized action flick. Right from the opening sequence laying waste… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Shadow Strays (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Emilia Pérez, the latest film from French director Jacques Audiard, is a mix of many things; it’s a pop musical, Mexican melodrama, love story, and cartel crime thriller. It’s a… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Emilia Pérez (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In his latest film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof crafts a layered and unsettling portrait of life in modern day Iran. It’s a film deemed… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Issa (Ibrahima Sambou), the central character in director Milad Tangshir’s stripped down drama, is an undocumented Senegalese migrant trying to scrape by in Turin, Italy. Thanks to a friend (Moussa… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Anywhere Anytime (Centrepiece)
The Joy of Movies 