John Corrado Inspired by Pixar’s 1998 second feature A Bug’s Life, the Disney Plus series A Real Bug’s Life puts us on the ground to document the lives of real insects around the world across five half-hour episodes narrated by Awkwafina. Produced by National Geographic, A Real Bug’s Life begins on the streets of New… Read More Review: A Real Bug’s Life (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) ‘Tis the season for direct-to-streaming Christmas movies. The latest offering from Disney+ is Dashing Through the Snow, a mildly watchable if overly familiar comedy from director Tim Story (Barbershop, The Blackening) that imagines Santa as a wise-cracking fellow played by comedian Lil Rel Howery. The film stars Chris… Read More Review: Dashing Through the Snow (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following her 2017 nun drama Novitiate, writer-director Maggie Betts takes a real life contract law case from the 1990s about the haves and have-nots in the world of funeral home owners, and crafts it into an entertaining legal drama in The Burial (which recently had its world premiere… Read More Review: The Burial (Prime Video)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A mix of home invasion thriller and alien invasion movie, No One Will Save You is a pretty good little sci-fi flick from writer-director Brian Duffield (Spontaneous), that does some stylistically interesting things with its premise. This includes unfolding with minimal dialogue to focus on the more visceral… Read More Review: No One Will Save You (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Prem Patel (Manny Magnus), the protagonist of the Disney Plus movie World’s Best, is a 12-year-old kid who is so good at math that he takes classes with the high school kids and is a shoo-in for a spot at the Mathlympics. This knack for numbers doesn’t exactly… Read More Review: World’s Best (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) A remake of Ron Shelton’s 1992 comedy of the same name that starred Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, White Men Can’t Jump is an updated version of the story that strips away a lot of the original’s grit and personality. Like the original, the film is set in… Read More Review: White Men Can’t Jump (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The year is 2257, and a group of kids are living in a mining colony on the moon. For most of them, life on the third rock from the sun is all they have ever known. This is the premise behind Crater, a new sci-fi movie being released… Read More Review: Crater (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah), the two protagonists of British filmmaker Raine Allen-Miller’s directorial debut Rye Lane, have their initial meet-cute through the dividing walls in the unisex bathroom of a South London art gallery. Dom is crying in one of the stalls after a bad… Read More Review: Rye Lane (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman is a very enjoyable mix of music documentary, concert film, and docu-special that finds Letterman interviewing U2’s lead singer Bono and guitarist… Read More Review: Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Written and directed by Matt Ruskin, Boston Strangler is a pretty good direct-to-streaming serial killer thriller that dramatizes the events around the real life Boston Strangler murders, seen from the perspective of Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley), one of the female journalists who helped break the story in 1962.… Read More Review: Boston Strangler (Disney+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The solo debut of Chris Williams (who co-directed Bolt, Big Hero 6 and Moana for Disney), the Oscar-nominated The Sea Beast is a pretty good animated adventure movie from Netflix that imagines a world where pirates sail the high seas, killing sea monsters at the behest of the… Read More Review: The Sea Beast
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) EO, the Oscar-nominated latest film from 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, is an engaging portrait of a donkey travelling around Poland, seen mostly through the animal’s eyes. Styled as a modern cinematic counterpart to Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic Au Hasard Balthazar, the film opens with a show donkey… Read More Review: EO
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Director Edward Berger’s Oscar-nominated All Quiet on the Western Front is a new adaptation of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I classic, which was most famously turned into an Oscar-winning 1930 film. Whether you categorize it as a remake of that previous Best Picture winner or… Read More Review: All Quiet on the Western Front
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The Oscar-nominated (and Golden Globe-winning) International Feature Argentina, 1985 is a compelling historical drama detailing the lengthy legal process that took place in Argentina in the 1980s to hold members of the country’s former military dictatorship to account for their brutal treatment of political dissidents. The film is… Read More Review: Argentina, 1985
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The feature debut of Benjamin Caron, a TV director whose credits include Andor, The Crown and, perhaps most notably, the final episode of Sherlock, Sharper is a slick A24 and Apple TV+ thriller that keeps shifting perspectives to keep us on our toes. The film opens with a… Read More Review: Sharper (Apple TV+)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who cut her teeth in the romantic comedy genre writing films like 27 Dresses and The Devil Wears Prada, Your Place or Mine is a Netflix rom-com ready made for Valentine’s Day that delivers exactly what you expect from both… Read More Review: Your Place or Mine (Netflix)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Canadian co-production Alice, Darling is a drama starring Anna Kendrick in the titular role of Alice, a career-oriented young woman in Toronto living with her emotionally abusive partner, a visual artist named Simon (Charlie Carrick). On the surface, Alice seems to have an enviable relationship, as she… Read More Review: Alice, Darling
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Made on a budget of $15,000 dollars, Canadian director Kyle Edward Ball’s lo-fi horror film Skinamarink has become something of a sensation, having now grossed $1.9 million in theatres. This success is all the more impressive considering the heavily experimental nature of the film itself, which eschews conventional… Read More Review: Skinamarink
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter is a documentary portrait of the brilliant but troubled celebrity chef, whose self-named Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter’s became known as one of the best restaurants in the world during its heyday. Directed by Rebecca Halpern, Love, Charlie mainly… Read More Review: Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Jonah Hill and Eddie Murphy star as a Jewish man and his future father-in-law in You People, a new Netflix romantic comedy from director Kenya Barris. Co-written by Barris and Hill, the film is first and foremost a cringe comedy about the racial divide in current America that… Read More Review: You People (Netflix)
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