By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The Kabin Crew, a group of aspiring child rappers and musicians in Cork, Ireland, went viral in 2024 with the high energy music video for their upbeat song “The Spark.” The kids behind the viral sensation are… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Gealtra
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In his documentary The Oldest Person in the World, filmmaker Sam Green focuses on people who have lived for over a century. These are the world record holders for longest lifespan, with French woman Jeanne Calment holding… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: The Oldest Person in the World
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Soraya, the young subject at the centre of A Fox Under a Pink Moon, is an Afghan teen girl living in Iran, who is trying to flee across the Turkish border so she can make her way… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: A Fox Under a Pink Moon
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto When it opened fifty years ago in 1976, the CN Tower instantly became a focal point of Toronto. It was the tallest building in the world, and would remain so for decades until the Burj Khalifa was… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: The Tower That Built a City
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Janay Boulos is a Lebanese journalist living in London, working as an Arabic correspondent for the BBC. Abd Alkader Habak is a photographer in Syria, forced to flee from the city of Idlib to Aleppo, as the… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Birds of War
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Director Tommy Avallone’s flashy documentary Myspace is a look at the rise and fall of the original social media platform, taking us back to the internet culture of the early to mid-2000s. Avallone explores the history of… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Myspace
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Kenny Loggins is the latest musical artist to get a career retrospective in the form of a documentary. Directed by Dori Berinstein, Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart is a portrait of the musician, who scored massive… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Quebec filmmaker Jean-François Caissy’s Kindergarten unfolds almost like a nature documentary, only we are following human children instead of animals. Caissy’s film is set in a daycare centre in Quebec, and his approach involves just putting a… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kindergarten
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The latest film from Canadian documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich (The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, Born Hungry), This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino serves as a polished biographical portrait of a man who… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In the slice-of-life documentary On My Own Terms, director Tadeusz Chudy follows teenaged half-siblings Pawel and Julka, who are living together at an orphanage in Poland. Pawel is a promising young boxer, whose coach sees a lot… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: On My Own Terms
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto When Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police in Iran for violating the country’s mandatory hijab laws, and later died in custody, her death sparked the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement when activists would risk and in… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: A War on Women
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The world is facing a loneliness epidemic, with people starved for connection but struggling to meet each other in real life. Dating apps are filling that void, but come with their own set of challenges; these apps… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Love Apptually
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In their documentary Gimme Truth, co-directors Simon Ennis and Brad Abrahams explore modern conspiracy theories, by introducing us to a variety of subjects who believe in them. Their views range from vaccine skeptics to 9/11 truthers. These… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Gimme Truth
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In her documentary Black Zombie, director Maya Annik Bedward ties the modern zombie lore we see in horror movies and TV shows back to the history of Haiti and the ancient spiritual practice of Vodou. Bedward traces… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Black Zombie
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The documentary Nekai Walks opens with a beat-by-beat account of the night that Nekai Foster got shot in the head in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood. It was summer, and he was walking home from playing basketball,… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Nekai Walks
By John Corrado The 20th anniversary edition of the Canadian Film Fest begins tonight and runs until March 29th at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. I’ve had the privilege of covering this festival a number of times in the past, and I’m always impressed by the range of homegrown films on display. This year’s milestone… Read More The 2026 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 24th to 29th in Toronto
By John Corrado In his coming-of-age film Olmo, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke finds the right balance between enjoyable portrait of bratty adolescence, and heavier, more dramatic scenes, telling a small but nuanced father-son story. There’s also some star power behind the film, having been produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The titular Olmo (Aivan… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Olmo (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In their latest film collaboration Dead Lover, real life couple Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie craft a German Expressionist parody with a real handmade quality to it. Glowicki, who directs the film from a screenplay that she co-wrote with Petrie, stars as a lonely gravedigger. We are told that she smells really,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Dead Lover (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The entire setup for director Nick Corirossi’s The Napa Boys is itself an elaborate joke; it’s fashioned as the fourth film in a franchise, that has already received a series of spinoffs. Only none of these other entries exist, and the film that is supposed to have spawned this franchise is Alexander… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Napa Boys (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado A prequel to his 2017 stop-motion film Junk Head, which was in turn based on a 2014 short, Junk World finds Japanese filmmaker Takahide Hori playing around on an even larger canvass. Hori’s film is set in a world of people and clones (called “Mulligans”), who rise up against the humans, leading… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Junk World (Midnight Madness)
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