By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title of Sisu, the latest from Finnish genre filmmaker Jalmari Helander (whose previous films Rare Exports and Big Game have become cult classics), comes from a hard to translate word that essentially means a form… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Sisu (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. “Weird Al” Yankovic is the undisputed king of parody songs, and now he gets the biopic treatment in director Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. But, in true Yankovic fashion, this is less a biopic… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The second feature from Canadian filmmaker Lindsay MacKay, following her very good (and equally memorably titled) debut Wet Bum, The Swearing Jar is an ambitiously structured romantic drama that grabs us right from the opening scene;… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Swearing Jar (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) are a married couple with two kids who realize they have lost the sexual spark in their marriage. So when their daughters are away for a week at winter… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The End of Sex (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Something You Said Last Night, the evocative debut film from writer-director Luis De Filippis, follows an Italian-Canadian family on vacation in a beach town. Ren (Carmen Madonia) and her younger sister Siena (Paige Evans) are spending… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Something You Said Last Night (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The debut film from writer-director Sophie Jarvis, Until Branches Bend is an engaging character study of Robin (Grace Glowicki), a cannery worker in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Robin’s job is to grade peaches, but her life… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Until Branches Bend (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title character in Rosie, the feature debut of Métis filmmaker Gail Maurice, is an Indigenous girl (Keris Hope Hill) living in Montreal in the 1980s, who gets taken in by her Francophone aunt Frédèrique (Mélanie… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Rosie (Discovery)
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) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Ruben Östlund is a filmmaker known for satirically taking aim at any number of targets, ranging from traditional gender roles to class divides and elite society folks, skewering them all through his darkly comic films. And… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Triangle of Sadness (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The feature directorial debut of Chandler Levack, a film critic for the Globe and Mail, I Like Movies is the story of Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), a 17-year-old cinephile in Burlington, ON circa 2002, who dreams… Read More #TIFF22 Review: I Like Movies (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Disney’s new version of Pinocchio, which is being released direct to streaming as part of this year’s Disney+ Day programming, is the studio’s latest live action remake of a beloved animated classic, and it’s maybe the weakest one they have put out yet. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, who… Read More Disney+ Review: Pinocchio
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Carmen, the third feature from writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, is a Canadian-Maltese co-production (it closed the Canadian Film Fest earlier this year) that is set in a small village in Malta. The title character, Carmen (Natasha McElhone), is the sister of the local priest (Henry Zammit Cordina), whose life… Read More Review: Carmen
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Please note that there are spoilers for the 2009 film Orphan in this review. The idea of making a prequel to the 2009 film Orphan thirteen years after the fact with lead actress Isabelle Fuhrman, who was a child at the time and is now in her mid-20s, reprising… Read More Review: Orphan: First Kill
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Emily (Aubrey Plaza), the central character in the aptly titled Sundance crime drama Emily the Criminal, is a young woman in Los Angeles whose designation as a law-breaker is one that she seemingly can’t escape from. The opening scene finds her being blindsided by a job interviewer who tries… Read More Review: Emily the Criminal
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Mr. Malcolm’s List is a romantic dramedy set in the 1800s that mainly serves as a sincere tribute to Jane Austen (I would say “fan fiction,” but that perhaps has a more negative connotation than what I wish to convey here), offering a fairly enjoyable entry into the… Read More VOD Review: Mr. Malcolm’s List
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Ali & Ava, the latest film from British writer-director Clio Barnard, is a low-key love story between Ali (Adeel Akhtar) and Ava (Claire Rushbrook), two lonely working class folks in the United Kingdom who come from different backgrounds (him British-Pakistani and her Irish-born), but form a close bond… Read More Review: Ali & Ava
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nope, the third film written and directed by Jordan Peele, completes the trifecta of modern genre movies that he started with Get Out and Us, and continues his winning streak as a filmmaker. While it’s worth addressing up front that Nope doesn’t have the same type of social… Read More Review: Nope
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) How does Netflix take a $200 million budget, a couple of movie stars, and the directors behind some of the biggest movies of all time, and make something as bland as The Gray Man? That’s the question audiences will be left with after watching this latest film from… Read More Review: The Gray Man
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens with a tennis ball rolling around and bouncing down the stairs. We soon learn that our pint-sized protagonist Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a one-inch tall shell wearing pink sneakers who will steal our hearts over the next ninety minutes, is… Read More Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latest puzzle piece in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the fourth solo film for Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and it very much plays in the same vein as its direct predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok. Waititi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, builds… Read More Review: Thor: Love and Thunder
The Joy of Movies 