By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are movies of the moment, and then there is Luce, a race-based dramatic thriller that ignited plenty of conversations at Sundance and weaves so many hot button issues into its narrative that it can’t help but feel heavy-handed. The film centres around Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a… Read More Review: Luce
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Born in 1985, six years after China’s communist government brought in their one child policy in 1979 as a way to combat overpopulation, filmmaker Nanfu Wang grew up intimately effected by the law, which stayed in place until 2015. Now having a child of her own, Wang explores… Read More Review: One Child Nation
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) There are some movies that end up being pleasant surprises simply because they turn out better than anyone rightly expected them to be. Last year’s surprisingly solid Transformers spin-off Bumblebee is just one example that springs to mind, and now we can add Pokémon Detective Pikachu to this list. Based on… Read More Blu-ray Review: Pokémon Detective Pikachu
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) New Line Cinema continues their cornering of the mainstream horror movie market with The Curse of La Llorona, which serves as a loosely connected spin-off of their hugely popular Conjuring franchise, a series that has already been expanded to include last year’s The Nun and the recently completed… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Curse of La Llorona
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Haditze Muratova is the last of the wild bee keepers in Macedonia. Living in an old hut in the Balkan mountains, she spends her time tending to a colony of wild bees, and is careful not to disturb them as she extracts pieces of honeycomb from their hive,… Read More Review: Honeyland
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) There is something appealing about the idea of seeing David Harbour, who we all know and love as the grizzled Chief Hopper on Stranger Things, take over the role of Hellboy, a half-demon hero who works with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence and has dedicated his life to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Hellboy
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) The much hyped ninth film from Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a love letter to the pop culture of the 1960s that features all of the director’s best impulses, and a tribute to the year 1969 in particular. Why 1969 you might ask? Well,… Read More Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Chinese people have a saying; when people get cancer, they die.” Several days after seeing director Lulu Wang’s acclaimed new tragicomedy The Farewell, and struggling to nail down the right tone for my review, this is the line that jumped out at me. It’s what Jian (Diana Lin)… Read More Review: The Farewell
By John Corrado One of my favourite movies of the year so far, Laika’s latest beautifully animated stop motion adventure Missing Link is being released on Blu-ray this week. The film follows a 19th century explorer, Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman), who befriends an eight foot tall Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis) who wants help finding the… Read More Blu-ray Review: Missing Link
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) If Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson had directed Fight Club, the result might have looked something like The Art of Self-Defense, a quirky dark comedy that explores what happens when isolated young men turn to violence as a means of self preservation. The film follows Casey (Jesse Eisenberg),… Read More Review: The Art of Self-Defense
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Kevin Hearn, the keyboard player and guitarist for the beloved Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies, bought a painting by Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau for twenty thousand dollars, he was shocked to find out that the painting was actually a fake, just one of many fake Morrisseau paintings… Read More Review: There Are No Fakes
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) With housing prices at record highs in cities around the world, including here in Toronto, many young people are no longer able to even dream about one day owning a house. This multi-pronged issue is explored in director Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Push, which follows Leilani Farha, the UN’s… Read More Review: Push
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein sets his sights on how propaganda is used to effect political change in his broad-based and often enjoyable new documentary Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, which ponders if all art is propaganda, and how we can tell what’s true in this age of… Read More Review: Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) There is a huge market for nostalgia these days, and this is a big part of what is fuelling Disney’s surge of live action remakes over the past few years, many of which have proven to be hugely popular with audiences. The studio most recently found financial success… Read More Review: The Lion King
By John Corrado This week, Warner Bros. is releasing their superhero hit Shazam! on Blu-ray, a film that injects a much needed jolt of energy into the DC Extended Universe, and remains one of the most flat-out entertaining movies of the year so far. The story of a 14-year-old foster kid named Billy Batson (Asher… Read More Blu-ray Review: Shazam!
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by the filmmaking team of Patrick Imbert and Benjamin Renner, who also brought us the wonderful Ernest & Celestine a few years back, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales is a French animated film that is a real treat to watch from start to finish. After… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales
By John Corrado ★ (out of 4) The college romance After, based on the YA novel by Anna Todd, opens with our protagonist Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) telling us in voiceover about the “moments in our lives that seem to define us” and how her life “before him” was “simple and undecided,” and how “after… Read More Blu-ray Review: After
By John Corrado Max Minghella’s flashy directorial debut Teen Spirit, which premiered at TIFF last year and enjoyed a theatrical release in the spring, is being released on DVD this week. The film follows Violet (Elle Fanning), a 17-year-old from a small town in the UK who dreams of becoming a pop star, and secretly… Read More DVD Review: Teen Spirit
By John Corrado Claire Denis’s High Life was one of the most divisive films of the festival when in premiered at TIFF last year, before becoming one of the year’s most critically acclaimed movies following its theatrical release this spring. It’s now available on DVD. The film follows Monte (Robert Pattinson), a prisoner trapped aboard… Read More DVD Review: High Life
By John Corrado A low-key financial thriller set in the high stakes world of inside trading that premiered at TIFF last year before getting a limited release in theatres this spring, Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s The Hummingbird Project is now available on DVD. The film follows two cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård), who hatch… Read More DVD Review: The Hummingbird Project
