By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 8th to 18th. The directorial debut of Korean actor Lee Jung-jae (the Emmy-winning star of Squid Game), Hunt is a political thriller set at the height of tensions between North and South Korea in the 1980s. Lee stars in… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Hunt (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 8th to 18th. Pakistani filmmaker Saim Sadiq makes his feature debut with Joyland, firmly establishing himself as a very exciting new voice in international cinema. Adapted from his 2019 short film Darling, Sadiq’s film, which was awarded the Un… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Joyland (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 8th to 18th. The latest film from the currently imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, No Bears is a work of meta filmmaking that weaves together two narratives. Panahi casts himself as a filmmaker who is directing his latest work… Read More #TIFF22 Reviews: No Bears (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Paul Mescal, the breakout star of the Irish miniseries Normal People, delivers a poignant performance in the film Aftersun as a young father on vacation in Turkey. Calum (Mescal) is on holiday with his 11-year-old daughter… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Aftersun (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The latest from writer-director Mia Hansen-Love, One Fine Morning is another resonant and engaging romantic drama from the French filmmaker. Léa Seydoux stars as Sandra, a translator whose father Georg (Pascal Greggory) is suffering from a… Read More #TIFF22 Review: One Fine Morning (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. 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) A lone toll booth operator (Michael Smiley) in the middle of Wales has been robbed of his cash, watch and sandwich by a gang of girls wearing balaclavas. When local traffic cop Catrin (Annes Elwy), starts digging into his claims, she starts to discover a criminal past he… Read More VOD Review: Tollbooth
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Early on in director Stephen Fingleton’s Nightride, a new single take thriller shot in Belfast, two characters discuss Michael Mann movies. One character says Miami Vice is his favourite. The other scoffs slightly. Is he more of a Heat man? No, Mann’s debut Thief is his personal favourite.… Read More VOD Review: Nightride
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Julie (Renate Reinsve), the protagonist in Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, is not actually as bad as the knowingly hyperbolic title suggests. Well, not really, anyway. Sure, she makes some bad decisions and struggles with selfish choices, but the same is true of… Read More Review: The Worst Person in the World
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 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) 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 ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria is his first film made outside his home country of Thailand. But the film, which is set in Colombia and unfolds through a mix of English and Spanish, still feels at one with the rest of his filmography. Tilda… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Memoria (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Julia Ducournau’s Titane surprised a lot of people when it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes a few months ago, becoming not only the second female-directed film to win, but also the rare genre flick to take home the top prize. Now that I’ve seen the film I… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Titane (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) There was always some question as to how French filmmaker Céline Sciamma would follow up her acclaimed 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which has been lauded by many as one of the finest films of the past decade. Now we have the answer with Petite… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Petite Maman (Special Presentations)
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) 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
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