By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Eight years after the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 in 2015, director Francis Lawrence returns to this franchise with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, an adaptation of author Suzanne Collins’ 2020 prequel novel of the same name. The story is… Read More Review: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
By Jon Corrado ★½ (out of 4) The 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Marvels is both a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel and a continuation of the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, and it’s honestly kind of a mess. Directed by Nia DaCosta (the Candyman remake), this is the weakest film yet in a… Read More Review: The Marvels
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Director Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia offers a compelling glimpse inside North Korea, through the eyes of those who risk their lives trying to escape the country. The real pull of Gavin’s film is the secret, handheld footage shot by defectors themselves, showing us the perilous journey that… Read More Review: Beyond Utopia
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Awkwafina and Sandra Oh star in the female-led comedy Quiz Lady as mismatched sisters who end up on a road trip together to compete on a popular quiz show, and it’s an example of a film that is elevated by its leads. Anne (Awkwafina) has always been obsessed… Read More Review: Quiz Lady (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the writer-director’s best film since Lost in Translation, is a biopic of Priscilla Presley that focuses on her relationship to Elvis, offering an unglamorous but authentic look at their troubled romance. In its own way, Priscilla also serves as the subdued, melancholic counterpart to the… Read More Review: Priscilla
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Strays is an R-rated talking dog comedy that stars Will Ferrell as the voice of a little dog named Reggie, who teams up with a streetwise Boston Terrier named Bug (voiced by Jamie Foxx) to get revenge on his mean owner. More specifically, Reggie plans to get back… Read More Blu-ray Review: Strays (Unleashed Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following his Old Hollywood passion project Mank, director David Fincher returns to the thriller genre with The Killer, a slickly crafted adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s French graphic novel exploring the daily grind of a professional assassin. Fincher’s film opens with its unnamed titular assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) staying… Read More Review: The Killer
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) After completing his Halloween trilogy last year with the divisive Halloween Ends, director David Gordon Green now sets his sights on rebooting another classic horror property with The Exorcist: Believer, though the results are largely disappointing this time around. Like Green’s 2018 legacy sequel Halloween, The Exorcist: Believer positions… Read More Review: The Exorcist: Believer
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Persian Version, which premiered at Sundance in January, finds writer-director Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance) dipping into her own background as an Iranian-American woman to craft an enjoyable, ambitious mother-daughter dramedy. The film centres around Leila (Layla Mohammadi), an Iranian-American aspiring filmmaker living in New York City. She has… Read More Review: The Persian Version
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Based on a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a vampire horror movie that takes place aboard a merchant ship in 1897, and fleshes out the backstory of the doomed voyage carrying Count Dracula. The Demeter is a Russian schooner that is travelling… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is already one of the biggest selling concert tours of all time, a massive juggernaut that has generated billions of dollars in profits, providing a boost to local economies wherever she goes. The success of this tour one hundred percent speaks to the cultural… Read More Review: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following her 2017 nun drama Novitiate, writer-director Maggie Betts takes a real life contract law case from the 1990s about the haves and have-nots in the world of funeral home owners, and crafts it into an entertaining legal drama in The Burial (which recently had its world premiere… Read More Review: The Burial (Prime Video)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The new English-language short film from writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, Strange Way of Life is an enjoyable queer Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal that serves as the Spanish filmmaker’s “answer” to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which he was offered to direct but declined. The short, which premiered… Read More Review: Strange Way of Life
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The latest film from New York writer-director Rebecca Miller (her first since Maggie’s Plan in 2015), She Came to Me is an absurd, operatic melodrama that takes the bones of a romantic comedy and remixes it into a sort of soap opera. The result is somewhat of an… Read More Review: She Came to Me
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In the Canadian time travel comedy Relax, I’m From the Future, New Zealand comedian Rhys Darby is delightfully able to take centre stage as Casper, a time traveller from an unspecified point in the future, who lands back in the 2020s. The title comes from Casper’s reassurance to… Read More Review: Relax, I’m From the Future
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Solo, which recently won the Best Canadian Film prize at TIFF, is a character drama set in Montreal’s drag scene. In her third feature, Quebec writer-director Sophie Dupuis (Family First, Underground) captivatingly explores the dynamics between the performers at a Montreal gay bar. The film centres around the… Read More Review: Solo
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The rescue pups are back for another big screen adventure in PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, a worthy sequel to 2021’s surprisingly good PAW Patrol: The Movie. This new spinoff film from the popular Canadian children’s TV series and toys, which serves as another co-production between Nickelodeon, Paramount… Read More Review: PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Nearly twenty years after the original Saw in 2004, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) returns in Saw X, the tenth film in the franchise that somewhat cleverly serves as a sort of “midquel” by positioning itself between the events of Saw and Saw II. There is only so much… Read More Review: Saw X
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The title of Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, the latest film from DreamWorks Animation, tells you basically everything you need to know about the movie; it’s about a 15-year-old girl named Ruby Gillman (voiced by Lana Condor), who, well, happens to be a kraken. Ruby is living on land… Read More Blu-ray Review: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A mix of home invasion thriller and alien invasion movie, No One Will Save You is a pretty good little sci-fi flick from writer-director Brian Duffield (Spontaneous), that does some stylistically interesting things with its premise. This includes unfolding with minimal dialogue to focus on the more visceral… Read More Review: No One Will Save You (Disney+)
