By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Born in 1985, six years after China’s communist government brought in their one child policy in 1979 as a way to combat overpopulation, filmmaker Nanfu Wang grew up intimately effected by the law, which stayed in place until 2015. Now having a child of her own, Wang explores… Read More Review: One Child Nation
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Haditze Muratova is the last of the wild bee keepers in Macedonia. Living in an old hut in the Balkan mountains, she spends her time tending to a colony of wild bees, and is careful not to disturb them as she extracts pieces of honeycomb from their hive,… Read More Review: Honeyland
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) The much hyped ninth film from Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a love letter to the pop culture of the 1960s that features all of the director’s best impulses, and a tribute to the year 1969 in particular. Why 1969 you might ask? Well,… Read More Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Chinese people have a saying; when people get cancer, they die.” Several days after seeing director Lulu Wang’s acclaimed new tragicomedy The Farewell, and struggling to nail down the right tone for my review, this is the line that jumped out at me. It’s what Jian (Diana Lin)… Read More Review: The Farewell
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) If Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson had directed Fight Club, the result might have looked something like The Art of Self-Defense, a quirky dark comedy that explores what happens when isolated young men turn to violence as a means of self preservation. The film follows Casey (Jesse Eisenberg),… Read More Review: The Art of Self-Defense
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Kevin Hearn, the keyboard player and guitarist for the beloved Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies, bought a painting by Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau for twenty thousand dollars, he was shocked to find out that the painting was actually a fake, just one of many fake Morrisseau paintings… Read More Review: There Are No Fakes
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) With housing prices at record highs in cities around the world, including here in Toronto, many young people are no longer able to even dream about one day owning a house. This multi-pronged issue is explored in director Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Push, which follows Leilani Farha, the UN’s… Read More Review: Push
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein sets his sights on how propaganda is used to effect political change in his broad-based and often enjoyable new documentary Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, which ponders if all art is propaganda, and how we can tell what’s true in this age of… Read More Review: Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) There is a huge market for nostalgia these days, and this is a big part of what is fuelling Disney’s surge of live action remakes over the past few years, many of which have proven to be hugely popular with audiences. The studio most recently found financial success… Read More Review: The Lion King
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) As cities and communities become increasingly gentrified, the people who built them up and made these spaces what they were end up getting pushed out in favour of populations that might not even recognize the history of where they have come to inhabit. It’s a frustrating phenomenon that… Read More Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Ari Aster burst onto the scene last year with his debut feature Hereditary, a horror movie that offered superior genre thrills through the dramatic story of a family being ravaged by grief. It was always going to be a tough act to follow, but Aster has handily done… Read More Review: Midsommar
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann looks at the bond between six people and their service dogs in her latest documentary Buddy. The subjects here include an elderly German lady who was blinded by an explosion in World War II and has had many service dogs over the years;… Read More Review: Buddy
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Made without the involvement of original series creator Don Mancini, the 2019 version of Child’s Play serves as a completely new reimagining of the 1988 killer doll classic and the multiple sequels that it spawned. The result is a surprisingly solid and fun horror remake that is actually a… Read More Review: Child’s Play
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) I spent the better part of this decade thinking that I didn’t need a fourth Toy Story. The Pixar series that began in 1995 received a heartbreaking and almost unexpectedly perfect conclusion with Toy Story 3 in 2010, so the natural assumption was that the story was done… Read More Review: Toy Story 4
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is an award-winning late night talk show host, whose comedy and interview show Tonight With Katherine Newbury was once a huge ratings draw for her network. But she is quickly losing her place as queen of late night hosts, with her all white and all… Read More Review: Late Night
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Ed Hemsler (John Lithgow) is a doomsday prepper in small town America who stockpiles supplies for an apocalypse that he believes is coming. When he spots Ronnie Meisner (Blythe Danner) in the grocery store buying the same brand of canned tuna, he mistakes her for a fellow survivalist… Read More Review: The Tomorrow Man
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The general idea behind Mouthpiece, the latest film from Canadian director Patricia Rozema, is to show the many different sides of a character by having them literally be portrayed by two separate actors. Listed in the credits as Tall Cassandra (Amy Nostbakken) and Short Cassandra (Norah Sadava), Mouthpiece… Read More Review: Mouthpiece
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce explore the rise and fall of infamous automobile mogul John DeLorean in Framing John DeLorean, a hybrid of documentary and narrative film that shifts between interviews and dramatic reenactments featuring Alec Baldwin wearing prosthetics and a wig to portray DeLorean. The… Read More Review: Framing John DeLorean
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Dexter Fletcher, the director who was brought on to patch up last year’s massively popular Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was fired from the project, reinvigorates the usual biopic formula by turning Elton John’s life into a full-on musical in Rocketman. Tonally, the film is similar to… Read More Review: Rocketman
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Filmmaker Tasha Hubbard uses the tragic case of Colton Boushie, a young man from the Red Pheasent Cree Nation who was shot to death by white farmer Gerald Stanley on his Saskatchewan farm back in 2016, to explore how Canada’s legal system is still stacked against Indigenous peoples… Read More Review: nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up
The Joy of Movies 