By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Despite unceremoniously shutting down Blue Sky Studios last year following their acquisition of 20th Century Fox, Disney continues the company’s signature prehistoric franchise with The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, an in-house spinoff that is being released straight to Disney Plus. The sixth film in the Ice… Read More Disney+ Review: The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradoxical thought experiment that involves a hypothetical cat in a box with a vile of poison, and asks if the cat is alive or dead. As the thought experiment goes, it’s both and neither. Either outcome remains possible until we open the box to… Read More VOD Review: Marionette
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Tender Bar, George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, is an adaptation of writer J.R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name about growing up on Long Island and hanging out at his uncle’s bar. The result is a pretty standard coming of age movie that still has a decent… Read More Review: The Tender Bar
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, following his Oscar-nominated courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7, Being the Ricardos is a surprisingly enjoyable biopic of actress Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and her real life husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), who starred alongside her as… Read More Review: Being the Ricardos
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Denzel Washington doing Shakespeare. That’s the pitch for The Tragedy of Macbeth, which finds the actor returning to the pool of William Shakespeare following his supporting turn in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, to take on the plum leading role of Macbeth. Washington’s… Read More Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza opens with a tracking shot through a high school that introduces us to its two protagonists; the 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and the 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim). It’s picture day. Gary is a child actor who is there to get his… Read More Review: Licorice Pizza
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 27th film in the episodic Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the eighth live action Spider-Man solo movie in two decades with the third actor to take on the role, Spider-Man: No Way Home has a lot of mythology to draw upon and has to bring together a lot… Read More Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The opening scene of writer-director JJ Winlove’s Australian dramedy June Again tries to put us in the mind of its protagonist, June Wilton (Noni Hazlehurst), a woman suffering from vascular dementia following a stroke five years earlier. People around her seem to appear and disappear as the camera… Read More VOD Review: June Again
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Sean Baker makes films about the types of Americans that don’t usually get shown on movie screens, or, worse, get looked down upon by the coastal elites. You know, like sex workers, those living in abject poverty, and the types of “forgotten people” that may have voted for… Read More Review: Red Rocket
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nightmare Alley is Guillermo del Toro’s followup to his surprise Oscar winner The Shape of Water. It serves as both a remake of the 1947 film noir of the same name and a new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel from a year earlier, with the beloved filmmaker delivering… Read More Review: Nightmare Alley
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) In his five decades of making feature films, Steven Spielberg has never directed a full-on musical, but his visual style and cinematic sense of scope has always suggested he would be good at one. This all changes with West Side Story, his long-gestating remake of the 1961 Oscar-winning… Read More Review: West Side Story
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Adam McKay is a director who has gone from making off the wall comedies like Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers to Oscar-winning prestige pictures like the financial satire The Big Short (which was genuinely very good) and the Dick Cheney biopic Vice (which was uneven but still… Read More Review: Don’t Look Up
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir was a low-key, semi-autobiographical drama about a film student, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), in the 1980s entering into an unexpectedly complicated relationship with a slightly older man, Anthony (Tom Burke). The film ended on a sombre note, followed by a title card… Read More Review: The Souvenir Part II
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) C’mon C’mon, the latest film from writer-director Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women), opens with documentary-style interviews with kids talking about the future. The film’s protagonist, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), is a radio journalist in New York, and he is working on a project compiling comments from children about… Read More Review: C’mon C’mon
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Encanto is Disney’s 60th animated feature, and it’s a bright and colourful film that feels like somewhat of a return to the studio’s musical roots, while also pushing things forward in terms of cultural representation by setting its story in Colombia. While this is technically not Disney’s first film to… Read More Review: Encanto
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the long-awaited canonical followup to the iconic 1984 horror comedy about a group of four ghost catchers in New York City and its 1989 sequel, is a movie that really embraces its status as a legacy sequel. Not only does it tell a story about legacy, establishing… Read More Review: Ghostbusters: Afterlife
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) An Indigenous community in rural Alberta that is in the process of being surveyed for a mining project is the evocative setting for Don’t Say Its Name, a Canadian supernatural horror movie from first time feature director Rueben Martell. A shadowy mining corporation called WEC has just struck… Read More VOD Review: Don’t Say Its Name
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Leave it to Jane Campion, the filmmaker behind 1993’s The Piano who hasn’t directed a feature since Bright Star in 2009, to craft one of the finest explorations of so-called toxic masculinity in her stunning Western The Power of the Dog. Masterfully directed by Campion, who understands how long… Read More Review: The Power of the Dog
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The stress of turning thirty, and measuring yourself against other artists who found success at a young age, is one of the prevailing themes in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s very good directorial debut tick, tick…BOOM!, a musical film adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical stage show of the same name. This… Read More Review: tick, tick…BOOM!
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) The inevitable downside of the Disney-Fox merger was always going to be that the Mouse House would take advantage of having even more beloved franchises in their roster to capitalize on with remakes, reboots and retreads, all the “re’s” that studios turn to in order to make a… Read More Disney+ Review: Home Sweet Home Alone
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