By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The other day, I had a chance to review the first two episodes of Inside Pixar, the very good new docuseries on Disney Plus that introduces us to some of the individuals who help tell the stories we all know and love at Pixar Animation Studios. The show… Read More Disney+ Review: Inside Pixar (Episodes 3, 4 & 5)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Pixar Animation Studios is one of those places that I have always been fascinated by and have long dreamed of visiting. Not only am I a huge fan of their movies and characters, but as a studio, the place seems to be a bastion of creativity. The new… Read More Disney+ Review: Inside Pixar (Episodes 1 & 2)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Disney’s Mulan, the studio’s big budget live action remake of their 1998 animated classic, has had a pretty rough time getting in front of audiences. The film became one of the first major cinematic casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic when its theatrical release got cancelled back in March,… Read More Review: Mulan (Digital Release)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are so many different ways people grieve, that there is really no “right” way to deal with the death of a close family member, especially one that you had a complicated relationship with. This becomes a main theme in writer/director Josh Melrod’s micro budget indie film Major… Read More VOD Review: Major Arcana
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Did you ever wonder what that loveable snowman sidekick Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad) was doing in the movie Frozen between the time when Elsa (Idina Menzel) brought him to life while belting out “Let It Go” on the side of a snowy mountain, but before he met… Read More Disney+ Review: Once Upon a Snowman
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Aaron Sorkin has a way with words and a real knack for writing film dialogue, as we already saw, or rather heard, in his scripts for David Fincher’s brilliant Facebook drama The Social Network and Danny Boyle’s structurally inventive biopic Steve Jobs. Sorkin’s gift for writing memorable, rapid… Read More Netflix Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Clouds, a new teen drama that was recently acquired by Disney Plus and is dropping on the streaming service today, is a biopic of Zach Sobiech, the young singer-songwriter with terminal cancer whose bittersweet folk-pop song “Clouds” became a viral hit in 2012 when he was seventeen years… Read More Disney+ Review: Clouds
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) A dramatic revenge thriller set in the American suburbia of the 1950s, The Secrets We Keep follows Maja (Noomi Rapace), a Romanian woman who fled her home country following World War II, and has tried her best to forget the past. Maja has established a quiet life in… Read More VOD Review: The Secrets We Keep
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Jane (Sally Hawkins), the lead character in the indie dramedy Eternal Beauty, is a woman living in Wales who has paranoid schizophrenia. At first, Jane just comes across as sort of quirky, including an amusing early scene where she brings herself pre-wrapped Christmas presents for her family members… Read More VOD Review: Eternal Beauty
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) How much you enjoy The Glorias, director Julie Taymor’s highly stylized biopic of the trailblazing women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem, will partially depend on how much you enjoy Taymor’s other work. As someone who generally admires her audacious theatrical impulses, as bold as they may sometimes be, (I’ve… Read More VOD Review: The Glorias
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The year 2016 was a very strange time to be on the internet. That’s the thought I kept having while watching Feels Good Man, director Arthur Jones’ documentary about Pepe the Frog, a comic strip character that somehow played a role in getting Donald Trump elected president. Pepe… Read More VOD Review: Feels Good Man
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are many things that could be said about Tito, an offbeat Canadian character study from multi-hyphenated writer-director-star Grace Glowicki, but the one thing you can’t say is that it is in any way conventional. In fact, Tito is completely unconventional, often defiantly and interestingly so. The film… Read More VOD Review: Tito
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) It’s a strange experience to watch a film that does almost nothing for you only to go online afterwards to find out that it has a high score on Rotten Tomatoes. This is what happened to me with My Days of Mercy, a lesbian romance about the death… Read More VOD Review: My Days of Mercy
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Written and directed by playwright Jessica Swale, making her feature directorial debut, Summerland is an enjoyably low-key character drama set in the English countryside during the height of World War II. The film centres around Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton), a reclusive writer who lives alone in the country.… Read More VOD Review: Summerland
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) In writer/director Lisa Langseth’s film Euphoria, two sisters, Ines (Alicia Vikander) and Emilie (Eva Green), are travelling together through Europe. They have grown somewhat estranged since their rocky childhood, and are seeing each other for the first time in years. The purpose of their trip, which involves going… Read More VOD Review: Euphoria
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The crime comedy Lucky Grandma, which had its Canadian premiere at the Reel Asian Film Festival in Toronto last fall and is being released digitally this week, opens with the main character, an elderly but feisty Chinese grandmother affectionately known as Nai Nai (Tsai Chin), visiting a fortune… Read More VOD Review: Lucky Grandma
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs), the main character in the new indie dramedy I Used to Go Here, is a writer in her mid-thirties who has just published her first novel, only to have her book tour cancelled by the publisher due to poor sales. With the man she… Read More VOD Review: I Used to Go Here
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Pitched somewhere between horror movie, psychological thriller, dark comedy, and hallucinatory fever dream, while refusing to settle for any single one of those things, She Dies Tomorrow functions as an intriguing look at anxiety and mass hysteria. Written and directed by Amy Seimetz, an actor who starred in… Read More VOD Review: She Dies Tomorrow
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) First published in 1911, British author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s novel The Secret Garden has been adapted for the big and small screen numerous times over the years, with the most famous adaptations being the movie versions that were released in 1949 and 1993. This story, which… Read More VOD Review: The Secret Garden
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Written, directed, edited, produced by and starring comic actor Romany Malco, Tijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison is a fairly amusing mockumentary that follows an ex-convict’s attempts to go from prison inmate to life coach. Tijuana Jackson (Malco) is a fast-talking inmate at a Florida prison who has dreams… Read More VOD Review: Tijuana Jackson: Purpose Over Prison
The Joy of Movies 