By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film from director John Michael McDonagh (older brother of Martin McDonagh), The Forgiven is a talky moral drama that offers a bleak as hell look at rich, bourgeois society folks colliding with the locals in North Africa. Adapting the 2012 novel of the same name by… Read More Review: The Forgiven
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker who turned the words of William Shakespeare into the most ’90s movie imaginable in his 1996 film Romeo & Juliet and last delivered a glitzy 3D take on The Great Gatsby in 2013, is a director who is known as much for his… Read More Review: Elvis
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) is a retired religious ethics teacher in her fifties who hires a male escort named Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) for a series of sexual encounters in a hotel room, in the Sundance drama Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Nancy’s husband, the only man… Read More Review: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Directors Jono Bergmann and Benji Bergmann deliver a glossy portrait of Canadian designer Bruce Mau in their aptly titled Mau, a stylish, slickly assembled documentary that is befitting of the man himself. The film takes us through the highlights of Mau’s career, including first getting noticed with the… Read More VOD Review: Mau
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Brian and Charles is the story of Brian (David Earl), a lonely, eccentric Welsh inventor who makes himself a sentient robot friend named Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward), whose “tummy is a washing machine.” Directed by Jim Archer, and co-written by Earl and Hayward, who are collectively adapting their… Read More Review: Brian and Charles
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) A confident sophomore feature from writer-director-star Cooper Raiff (who also serves as one of the producers and editors), Cha Cha Real Smooth is a delightful and touching heart-on-sleeve dramedy that delivers a pretty big emotional wallop while remaining sensitive to its characters. Raiff stars in the film (which… Read More Review: Cha Cha Real Smooth
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from June 9th to 26th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Filmmaker David Hoffert’s years-in-the-making documentary The Rhapsody recounts the life story of Leo Spellman (born Leon Szpilman), a Polish-Canadian Holocaust survivor and composer who finally… Read More Toronto Jewish Film Festival Review: The Rhapsody
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Pixar’s Lightyear, a spinoff from the Toy Story film series that purports to show the origin story of the famous space ranger, opens with subtitles explaining that, in 1995, a boy named Andy saw a movie that made him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure, and “this is… Read More Review: Lightyear
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Jurassic World Dominion is the sixth film in the Jurassic Park series, and it’s a pretty clear case of diminishing returns. This is not to say that the franchise has ever fully lived up to the greatness of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original (even Spielberg’s own 1997 followup The… Read More Review: Jurassic World Dominion
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In their new documentary Pat Rocco Dared, co-directors Morris Chapdelaine and Bob Christie offer an enjoyable introduction to groundbreaking gay filmmaker Pat… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Pat Rocco Dared
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Directed, written and produced by Canadian filmmaker Kevin Hegge, Tramps! is a documentary that explores the history of the New Romantics, a… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Tramps!
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 26th to June 5th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. A gay dwarf named Peter (Matthew August Jeffers) is roped into taking his sex worker neighbour Winona (Sarah Hay) on an… Read More Inside Out 2022 Review: Unidentified Objects
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) It’s been 36 years since the release of the original Top Gun, but watching the new legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which sees Tom Cruise reprising his iconic role as hot shot fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, it’s almost hard to believe that this much time has passed.… Read More Review: Top Gun: Maverick
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest documentary from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company examines the massive coverup that agrochemical giant Monsanto engaged in to hide the fact that glyphosate, the key ingredient in their weed-killer Roundup, was carcinogenic to humans. The film, which recently… Read More Review: Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is technically the latest in Disney’s long line of live action reboots, reviving the fan favourite Disney Channel cartoon series. But in the hands of director Akiva Schaffer (from comedy troupe The Lonely Island), this one serves as a satirical sendup of the… Read More Disney+ Review: Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A well-meaning parking valet in Beverly Hills gets roped into a scheme pretending to be the boyfriend of a famous movie star to hide her affair with a married man in the new romantic comedy The Valet, which serves as a surprisingly charming remake of the 2006 French… Read More Disney+ Review: The Valet
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Homebound, writer-director Sebastian Godwin’s feature debut, opens with Holly (Aisling Loftus) and her new husband Richard (Tom Goodman-Hill) driving to his ex-wife’s house in the English countryside so that she can meet his three kids and celebrate his youngest daughter Anna’s (Raffiella Chapman) birthday. But they arrive to… Read More VOD Review: Homebound
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sneakerella, the latest Disney+ Original Movie, is a modern, gender-swapped take on Cinderella, that updates the setting to Queens, New York, adds a selection of upbeat hip-hop songs, and centres around sneaker subculture. This sounds like a bit of a mad gambit, but Sneakerella actually works as a… Read More Disney+ Review: Sneakerella
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Canadian director Daniel Roher’s thriller-like documentary Navalny follows Russian opposition leader Alexai Navalny in the aftermath of him being poisoned with the nerve… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Navalny
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 28th to May 8th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In 2002, following the Chinese communist government’s violent crackdown on practitioners of Falun Gong, a group of activists in Changchun hijacked a state-run… Read More #HotDocs22 Review: Eternal Spring
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