By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg, When You Finish Saving the World (which had its premiere at Sundance in 2022) is a quirky comedic story about a self-absorbed mother and son who are struggling to reconnect. The son, Ziggy Katz (Finn Wolfhard), is a budding teenage singer-songwriter… Read More Review: When You Finish Saving the World
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Andrea Riseborough’s Best Actress nod for To Leslie was maybe the biggest surprise of this year’s Oscar nominations. Despite no real studio push behind the indie drama, she got in through a last minute campaign from her industry friends (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon), who… Read More Review: To Leslie
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Roman Liubiy, Iron Butterflies is a documentary that sets itself up as an investigation into the downing of Malaysian airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, which was accidentally shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. But… Read More #Sundance2023 Review: Iron Butterflies
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Slow, a very good drama from Lithuanian writer-director Marija Kavtaradze, begins with what feels like it could be a classic meet-cute. Elena (Greta Grineviciute) is a contemporary dancer hopping between sexual partners, and Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas) is a sign language interpreter. They meet when she is teaching a… Read More #Sundance2023 Review: Slow
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Belgian actress Veerle Baetens (The Broken Circle Breakdown), When It Melts is an adaptation of author Lize Spit’s book Het Smelt that explores childhood trauma through the eyes of a young woman finally confronting her past. Beatens takes an unflinching and provocative approach to… Read More #Sundance2023 Review: When It Melts
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A madcap reimagining of the Pied Piper story centred around a swindler cat and his band of talking rats, the European animated film The Amazing Maurice – playing in the Kids section at Sundance – serves as a colourful and often amusing adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s award-winning 2001… Read More #Sundance2023 Review: The Amazing Maurice
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The narrative feature debut of documentary filmmaker Alice Diop, Saint Omer (France’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature) is an extremely understated and slow-moving legal drama that unfolds almost entirely within a French courtroom. The film centres around Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor and novelist who travels… Read More Review: Saint Omer
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Bill Nighy’s performance in Living, a remarkably tender remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru written by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, is a thing of quiet beauty. Nighy stars as Mr. Williams, a worker drone in 1950s London whose job as a civil servant at the public works department… Read More Review: Living
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Door Mouse, a Canadian mystery involving missing girls and dirty nightclubs, is a pretty good little homegrown neo-noir exercise done on a budget that serves as the feature directorial debut of Canadian actor Avan Jogia. The film is named for Mouse (Hayley Law), who works by night dancing… Read More Review: Door Mouse
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Adult Adoption is the Toronto-set feature directorial debut of Karen Knox, best known as the creator of the CBC Gem series Homeschooled. The film is written by Canadian actress and playwright Ellie Moon, who also stars in it as Rosy, a 25-year-old woman living in Toronto who has… Read More Review: Adult Adoption
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Damien Chazelle’s Babylon feels like the movie you make after narrowly losing the Best Picture Oscar for La La Land; a go-for-broke epic about the early days of Hollywood that suggests you love the movie industry as much as you might hate it. Because as much as Chazelle’s… Read More Review: Babylon
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A fictionalized biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (played by Vicky Krieps), Corsage is the sort of reimagined period piece that takes some artistic liberties to offer a more modern portrait of a dissatisfied monarch. Set in 1877 and 1878, around Elisabeth’s 40th birthday, the film charts her… Read More Review: Corsage
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Tom Hanks stars in A Man Called Otto as Otto Anderson, an old grouch who we first meet buying a hook and exactly five feet of rope from a hardware store. An English-language remake of the 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, which was itself based on… Read More Review: A Man Called Otto
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) How long can you keep running from death before it catches up to you? That’s the surprisingly deep question being asked at the centre of DreamWorks Animation’s almost shockingly good sequel Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. As a followup to 2011’s Puss in Boots, which was itself… Read More Review: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) It’s been thirteen years since director James Cameron first took us to Pandora in his 2009 sci-fi blockbuster Avatar, a film that some have erroneously claimed had no cultural impact, but won a trio of Oscars, lit the box office on fire, and ushered in a new 3D… Read More Review: Avatar: The Way of Water
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) In Emancipation, a runaway slave drama that is somewhat okay as an action movie but feels heavy-handed as awards bait, Antoine Fuqua directs the story of Peter (Will Smith), a slave who escapes to find freedom following Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1861. In the opening scenes, Peter… Read More Review: Emancipation (Apple TV+)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (official title) is a passion project for the Mexican filmmaker, who crafts an emotional stop-motion retelling of author Carlo Collodi’s classic book. The story of the wooden boy brought to life has been adapted for the screen countless times, perhaps most famously in Disney’s… Read More Review: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Leave it to Noah Baumbach to follow up his stunning 2019 drama Marriage Story with White Noise, an apocalyptic dark comedy about the existential fear of dying that still feels distinctly like a part of his filmography. Baumbach’s latest finds the writer-director tackling Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” 1985 post-modernist… Read More Review: White Noise
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Based on Michael Ausiello’s autobiographical book Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, the point of the movie Spoiler Alert (and the book that preceded it) is to tell a sweeping love story where we already know the tragic outcome. The film succeeds at this with mostly satisfying but somewhat… Read More Review: Spoiler Alert
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a love story between Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), two lonely young cannibals who are both on the run from family problems and their own desires, when they meet on a road trip through the Midwest in the 1980s. After… Read More Review: Bones and All
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