By John Corrado 40 Acres is a pretty solid Canadian post-apocalyptic survival thriller that imagines a dystopic future where, as the opening title card tells us, a global pandemic led to a second Civil War breaking out and subsequent worldwide famine. This has caused farmland to become the planet’s most valuable resource, with families struggling… Read More Movie Review: 40 Acres
By John Corrado In their debut feature Sorry, Baby, writer-director-star Eva Victor blends elements of comedy and drama to craft a unique, emotionally resonant portrait of a traumatic incident and its aftermath. Victor stars in the film as Agnes, a college literary professor living alone in small town Massachusetts. When the film opens, Agnes’ friend… Read More Movie Review: Sorry, Baby
By John Corrado One of the themes of Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the franchise that arrives 32 years after Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park, is how dinosaurs are no longer as popular as they once were, in the three decades since they were first brought back to life. It would be a… Read More Movie Review: Jurassic World Rebirth
By John Corrado In F1: The Movie, director Joseph Kosinski aims to do for race car drivers and Brad Pitt what his 2022 legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick did for fighter pilots and Tom Cruise, and he delivers another crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster. Kosinski’s latest is once again an example of adrenaline-fuelled filmmaking. If Maverick was… Read More Movie Review: F1: The Movie
By John Corrado A Minecraft Movie is the recent box office phenomenon based on the popular video game from Sweden’s Mojang Studios, and it’s one of those films that is basically critic proof. For fans of the game, it’s loaded with Easter Eggs and references, with director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and a… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: A Minecraft Movie
By John Corrado Elio, the very sweet new animated film from Pixar, uses the age old question of “are we alone in the universe?” to explore the very real topic of loneliness, namely that of the titular Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab). Elio is a space-obsessed kid who has been left living on a military… Read More Movie Review: Elio
By John Corrado The animated documentary Endless Cookie, which won the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs, offers a quirky portrait of half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver. Seth is a white animator living in Toronto, using a government grant to make a film about his Indigenous half-brother Pete, who lives in… Read More Movie Review: Endless Cookie
By John Corrado Not to be outdone by Disney, who have made a business out of releasing live-action remakes of their beloved animated films, DreamWorks and Universal now get in on the (live) action with How to Train Your Dragon. The studio’s first live-action update of a DreamWorks Animation film, Dragon is mostly a beat-for-beat… Read More Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon
By John Corrado In Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song delivered one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time, reinvigorating a love triangle premise to offer a deeply moving exploration of longing and potentially meeting the right person at the wrong time. Expectations have been set incredibly high for Song’s sophomore feature Materialists, which finds… Read More Movie Review: Materialists
By John Corrado The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson’s twelfth feature film, and by this point, you either vibe with his style or you don’t. Anderson’s latest is another immaculately designed work that doesn’t find him straying from his signature style, but rather doubling down on it; the panning camera moves, the intricate, dollhouse-like sets,… Read More Movie Review: The Phoenician Scheme
By John Corrado Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, we get Dangerous Animals, a clever, entertaining spin on killer shark movies from director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones). In Byrne’s film, the sharks aren’t the real villains, and the main threat is actually a different type of predator;… Read More Movie Review: Dangerous Animals
By John Corrado The real life exorcism of Emma Schmidt is said to be the most well documented case of an exorcism and demonic possession in North America. Which is why it’s so disappointing that The Ritual, director David Midell’s dramatized version of these events from nearly a hundred years ago, is so poorly handled.… Read More Movie Review: The Ritual
By John Corrado Set between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4, Ballerina (full title From the World of John Wick: Ballerina) is the first spinoff film in the action franchise. The film is directed by Len Wiseman, taking over the mantle from original series director Chad Stahelski, who… Read More Movie Review: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
By John Corrado Two Women, the latest film from Quebec director Chloé Robichaud (Sarah Prefers to Run), is a raunchy, female-centric comedy that serves as a modern remake of Claude Fournier’s 1970 film Two Women in Gold. Fournier’s original remains an influential piece of Quebec cinema, and Robichaud’s version, which has been adapted and updated… Read More Movie Review: Two Women
By John Corrado Bring Her Back is the unnerving sophomore feature from Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who began their career as YouTubers (under the pseudonym RackaRacka), before branching out and getting noticed with their A24-backed directorial debut Talk to Me. The same studio, A24, is behind their latest effort as well, which finds… Read More Movie Review: Bring Her Back
By John Corrado A recently widowed mother stuck in a farmhouse with her two kids notices a mysterious woman sitting in her yard. At first the woman, who is covered by a black veil, is at a distance, but her chair keeps moving closer to the house. Who is she? Where did she come from?… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Woman in the Yard (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) is an aspiring romance novelist who works as a shopkeeper at Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company. She fantasizes about Jane Austen, and longs for her own love story, but is perpetually single, and struggling with writer’s block. Agathe is the protagonist of writer-director Laura Piani’s delightful new romantic… Read More Movie Review: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
By John Corrado Spending time with future in-laws can be awkward. Add an interfaith dynamic – and a freak accident – into the mix, and you have the recipe for Bad Shabbos, the entertaining and distinctly Jewish indie comedy from director Daniel Robbins. The film, which won the Audience Award at Tribeca in 2024, centres… Read More Movie Review: Bad Shabbos
By John Corrado Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the eighth entry in the action franchise, and it’s fashioned as a sort of swan song for the series that began nearly thirty years ago in 1996. Over the course of this franchise – especially in the last three directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who returns… Read More Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
By John Corrado Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp (who previously made the small gem Marcel the Shell with Shoes On), Lilo & Stitch is a delightful, big-hearted family movie that stands out as one of Disney’s best live-action remakes. The original animated film from 2002, about the friendship between a girl and her pet alien,… Read More Movie Review: Lilo & Stitch
The Joy of Movies 