By John Corrado The Luckiest Man in America is the based-on-a-true-story tale of Michael Larson (played by Paul Walter Hauser), an ice cream truck driver from Ohio who had an incredible winning streak on the game show Press Your Luck in the 1980s. Like other contemporary films about live TV from a similar era such… Read More Movie Review: The Luckiest Man in America
By John Corrado Director James Griffiths’ entirely enjoyable dramedy The Ballad of Wallis Island opens with musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) arriving on the remote Wallis Island to play what he believes is an intimate solo gig. Herb is formerly one half of the fictional folk music duo McGwyer & Mortimer, and has been brought… Read More Movie Review: The Ballad of Wallis Island
By John Corrado DreamWorks Animation has always had two modes, which is what allows the studio to balance prestige animated films with more cartoony efforts. So for every How to Train Your Dragon, there’s a Boss Baby. This is why the studio is able to so effortlessly follow up a great film like last year’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Dog Man (Collector’s Edition 2000)
By John Corrado Love Hurts is a new romantic action comedy that is mainly set up as a star vehicle for recent supporting actor Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. Quan, of course, is the former child star of The Goonies and Temple of Doom who won Best Supporting Actor for his big… Read More Blu-ray Review: Love Hurts (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado In her feature debut, the crowd-pleasing dramedy Bob Trevino Likes It, writer-director Tracie Laymon crafts a surprisingly tender portrait of an unlikely friendship, drawn from her own life. Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is a bubbly but insecure young woman who has a strained relationship with her self-absorbed father Robert (French Stewart). When… Read More Movie Review: Bob Trevino Likes It
By John Corrado When Magazine Dreams premiered at Sundance in 2023, it was touted as a defining role for Jonathan Majors, who was instantly in the Oscar conversation when Searchlight Pictures picked up the film and positioned it for an awards run. And then everything fell apart. Majors was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend (and… Read More Movie Review: Magazine Dreams
By John Corrado Disney has built a reliable business model over the past decade around creating live-action remakes of their various animated classics. The latest such film is Snow White, their beleaguered reimagining of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which holds an extra special place in the studio’s history as their first ever… Read More Movie Review: Disney’s Snow White
By John Corrado Director Leigh Whannell is no stranger to taking horror properties and turning them into domestic dramas, having already followed this model in his 2020 film The Invisible Man. Now Whannell and producer Jason Blum shift their attention to another one of the Universal Classic Monsters in Wolf Man, turning the lycanthropic tale… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Wolf Man (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado Director Ann Marie Fleming’s Can I Get a Witness? is set in a futuristic version of Canada, where the progressive government has mandated that everybody “voluntarily” gives up their life at the age of fifty for the sake of the planet. It’s a chilling premise that makes for a mostly engaging if… Read More Movie Review: Can I Get a Witness?
By John Corrado Black Bag is the new sexy spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, with an ensemble cast of characters dealing with the prospect of a double agent in their midst while navigating their own personal relationships. Michael Fassbender stars as George Woodhouse, an English spy married to fellow agent Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In… Read More Movie Review: Black Bag
By John Corrado The latest Toronto-set psychodrama from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils reimagines the opera Salome through the lens of trauma and the #MeToo movement. It’s also perhaps The Sweet Hereafter filmmaker’s strongest late-career effort. Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is a young theatre director who is hired by the Canadian Opera Company to remount the… Read More Movie Review: Seven Veils
By John Corrado Director Alex Parkinson dramatizes his own 2019 documentary of the same name in Last Breath, a decent survival thriller following a group of deep sea divers rescuing a trapped crew mate. The first act is all about introducing the characters, a group of saturation divers repairing a stretch of pipeline deep below… Read More Movie Review: Last Breath
By John Corrado Fresh off the surprise success of serial killer thriller Longlegs, director Osgood Perkins now returns with a different kind of horror movie in The Monkey. This time it’s a horror comedy, adapted from a Stephen King short story of the same name. Re-teaming with Longlegs distributor NEON, Perkins’ latest finds him playing… Read More Movie Review: The Monkey
By John Corrado Captain America: Brave New World is the fourth Captain America film, serving as the big screen debut of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) donning the red, white and blue vibranium shield that got passed to him by Chris Evans’ now-retired version of the character. In that way, this 35th film in the Marvel… Read More Movie Review: Captain America: Brave New World
By John Corrado At 94 years old, and over five decades into a directing career that includes two Best Picture Oscar winners (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby), actor-turned-filmmaker Clint Eastwood has proven himself to be the steadiest of hands behind the camera. The courtroom drama Juror #2 is now Eastwood’s 40th film as director, and… Read More Blu-ray Review: Juror #2
By John Corrado The second feature from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, following his highly stylized Mackenzie King biopic The Twentieth Century, Universal Language is an absurdist dramedy set in an alternate version of Manitoba where everybody speaks Farsi instead of English. It’s a farcical, high-concept setup that the director not only fully commits himself to (even the signs… Read More Movie Review: Universal Language
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the 4K Ultra HD release of Wicked. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my full review right here. After becoming a box office hit over the holidays, director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked is now… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Wicked
By John Corrado In his latest film I’m Still Here, which received a surprise Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) offers a portrait of life during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s through the lens of mainly being a family drama. Salles’ film serves as a biography of… Read More Movie Review: I’m Still Here
By John Corrado Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the lead character in British writer-director Mike Leigh’s new movie Hard Truths, is a bitter woman with a chip perpetually on her shoulder. She is miserable every time she steps out into the world, but not much happier at home either, where she is constantly nagging after husband… Read More Movie Review: Hard Truths
By John Corrado Flight Risk is the new movie directed by Mel Gibson. It’s the actor-turned-filmmaker’s first since the World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge in 2016, which provided a stunning Hollywood comeback for him when he received a Best Director Oscar nomination. Gibson’s latest is also his most constrained and straight-forward directorial effort yet;… Read More Movie Review: Flight Risk
The Joy of Movies 