By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou, One Second is a pretty wonderful love letter to cinema itself and the travelling picture shows of his youth. Set in China in the 1970s, the engaging plot of One Second follows three people who are all after a reel… Read More #TIFF21 Review: One Second (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The feature directorial debut of writer-director Camille Griffin, Silent Night is a dark but compelling holiday twist on the “last night of the world” premise, that takes a bold, eerily believable high concept setup and applies it to a stripped down character dramedy set at Christmas. The film… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Silent Night (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) George MacKay plays a young man who believes he’s actually a wolf trapped in a human body in writer-director Nathalie Biancheri’s new film Wolf, which explores the concept of “species dysphoria.” And the film is fine. Neither the total mess nor the instant cult classic that it could… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Wolf (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is the filmmaker’s bittersweet cinematic memoir of growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The story begins in the year 1969, and follows a young boy named Buddy (Jude Hill), a stand-in for Branagh, who lives on a mostly Protestant street in Belfast where the… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Belfast (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sigourney Weaver stars in The Good House as Hildy Good, an older real estate agent with a drinking problem. It’s a plum role for Weaver, as the character chews up the screen and breaks the fourth wall, addressing us directly as she grapples with whether or not to… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Good House (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The latest work from Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti, who won the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room two decades ago, Three Floors is a watchable but somewhat mediocre multi-character drama that follows the denizens of an apartment complex in Rome as their stories collide, sometimes literally. The film… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Three Floors (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Director Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a quirky and enjoyable biopic of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, whose stylized drawings of cats with large eyes are credited with helping turn felines into acceptable house pets. You see, cats were thought of only as rodent-killing… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, Bergman Island is a very enjoyable love letter of sorts to the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The film is set on the Baltic island of Fårö, where the director lived and shot some of his most famous films, which… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Bergman Island (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) Director Rob Savage made waves during the pandemic when he released Host, a horror movie set on Zoom. Now he returns with the Blumhouse-produced Dashcam, another pandemic project that was apparently made on the fly without much of a script and just a basic outline. And it’s a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dashcam (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director Stephen Karam confidently adapts his own Tony-winning play for the screen in The Humans, crafting an intense and engaging family drama that comes to life with the help of a small but mighty six person ensemble cast. The film unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving Day, and… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Humans (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Based on a novel by Laura Santullo, who co-directs the film version alongside Mexican filmmaker Rodrigo Plá, The Other Tom focuses on Elena (Julia Chavez), a single mother living in El Paso, Texas with her nine year old son Tom (Israel Rodriguez). Elena is barely making ends meet,… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Other Tom (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín reinvigorated the biopic formula in 2016 with Jackie, offering a complex portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following her husband’s assassination, featuring a bravura performance by Natalie Portman. Now Larraín pulls off a similar magic trick in Spencer, which similarly hones in on a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Spencer (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Filmmaker Barry Levinson returns to the big screen with The Survivor, a biopic of Holocaust survivor turned boxer Harry Haft, who is played extremely well in the film by Ben Foster, delivering one of the finest performances of his career. The screenplay by Justine Juel Gillmer focuses on Haft… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Survivor (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest animated film from Waltz With Bashir filmmaker Ari Folman, Where is Anne Frank is a valuable and often moving animated history lesson that draws parallels between past and present discrimination. The film serves as an adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, but it takes a… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Where is Anne Frank (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by Eric Warin and Tahir Rana, Charlotte is an animated biopic of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley), whose magnum opus was a biography in pictures titled Life? Or Theatre? painted during World War II, that is often credited as being the first graphic novel.… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Charlotte (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the French Canadian filmmaker’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel of the same name. And the movie, which focuses on the beginning half of Herbert’s book and is intended as the first in a two-part saga (the opening title card says Dune:… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dune (Special Events)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nostalgia and ghosts of the past collide in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, the British filmmaker’s very dark, stylish, and gloriously entertaining tribute to both London in the Swinging Sixties and Italian giallo films. This fondness for the past is represented through the movie’s heroine, Eloise (Thomasin… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Last Night in Soho (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The feature debut of writer-director Haya Waseem, who has made a number of short films, Quickening is a young adult drama told from the unique perspective of a young Pakistani-Canadian woman in the GTA suburbs. The film centres around Sheila (Arooj Azeem), who is in her first year… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Quickening (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Frank Farelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is an out of work sad-sack who is hired as the new “middle man” in the fictional town of Karmack, USA. The job involves being dispatched out to deliver bad news to residents when people die or accidents happen, a surprisingly common occurrence… Read More #TIFF21 Review: The Middle Man (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Stephen Chbosky’s big screen take on Dear Evan Hansen, the Broadway musical with songs by Benji Pasek and Justin Paul that swept the Tonys in 2017, is a pretty good stage to screen adaptation. Even if the material is not quite as impactful onscreen as it was onstage,… Read More #TIFF21 Review: Dear Evan Hansen (Gala Presentations)
The Joy of Movies 