By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto At River Rouge High School in Michigan, the Panthers rule the basketball court, with fourteen state championships to their name. In his documentary Rouge, first time director Hamoody Jafaar offers a portrait of this school and community,… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Rouge
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In 2012, director Jeff Orlowski-Yang released his documentary Chasing Ice, a beautifully shot portrait of National Geographic photographer James Balog. The film followed Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, which saw him capturing stunning time-lapse images of melting… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Chasing Time
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Toto is an aging gold harvester in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, who spends his days panning for gold in the old fashioned way, finding small specks that he carefully separates out from the dirt. In his… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary, Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard explores the efforts to reintroduce herds of wild buffalo to Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Hubbard, who also narrates the film, explores the work of Blackfoot Elder… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Singing Back the Buffalo
By John Corrado New releases for the week of April 26th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Challengers (Wide Release): This latest film from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All) centres around a steamy ménage à trois between three tennis players, played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. I’m hearing it’s electric filmmaking, with… Read More New This Week (04/26/2024): Challengers, Boy Kills World, & More!
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In The Here Now Project, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel offer a portrait of increasingly severe weather conditions attributed to climate change, culled together from thousands of hours of videos shot by regular people over the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Here Now Project
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto When Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban after the United States withdrawal in 2021, women almost immediately lost all of the progress that they had slowly made in the country. Girls weren’t allowed to continue school, and… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: An Unfinished Journey
By John Corrado The stop-motion animated movie The Inventor is best described as an elaborate, lovingly crafted tribute to old school Rankin/Bass specials, inspired by the final years of Leonardo da Vinci’s life. The film begins in Rome circa 1515, where da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry) is a kooky inventor with a long white… Read More Movie Review: The Inventor
By John Corrado The latest Earth Day release from Disneynature, Tiger takes us deep into the mythical forests of India to follow Ambar, a mama tiger trying to protect her four cubs. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jones, the film follows Ambar and her litter of adorable cubs from birth, as their mother takes them to… Read More Movie Review: Disneynature’s Tiger (Disney+)
By John Corrado New releases for the week of April 19th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: Sasquatch Sunset (Limited Release): This unique and ambitious indie dramedy from the Zellner Brothers unfolds without dialogue and follows a family of sasquatches (played by Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Nathan Zellner, and Christophe Zajac-Denek) in the wild. It plays like a mix… Read More New This Week (04/19/2024): Sasquatch Sunset, Irena’s Vow, & More!
By John Corrado French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a sweeping romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers reconnecting and being torn apart across moments in time. Bonello’s film is set in a future where AI controls the world, and strong feelings are discouraged. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing a process to… Read More Movie Review: The Beast
By John Corrado Irena’s Vow dramatizes the inspiring true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nélisse), a Polish nurse who helped shelter a group of Jewish workers during World War II. At a factory in occupied Poland, Irena is put in charge of supervising a group of Jewish workers in the laundry, who wash and… Read More Movie Review: Irena’s Vow
By John Corrado Directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), Sasquatch Sunset is a unique and ambitious indie dramedy that unfolds without dialogue and follows a family of sasquatches living off the land, played by actors in realistic fursuits. There’s the gruff, older patriarch (Nathan Zellner), the mama bear matriarch (Riley… Read More Movie Review: Sasquatch Sunset
By John Corrado We’ve all heard of haunted houses, but how about a haunted swimming pool? That’s the premise behind the Blumhouse horror movie Night Swim, which introduces us to the unique concept of a family being terrorized by a cursed pool in their new backyard. The film centres around the Waller family. Ray Waller… Read More Blu-ray Review: Night Swim (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado New releases for the week of April 12th, 2024 Theatrical Releases: Civil War (Wide Release): Alex Garland’s Civil War is a taut, intense ride through an America that has broken up into warring factions, shown from the fascinatingly apolitical perspective of journalists and war photographers. Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, who is… Read More New This Week (04/12/2024): Civil War, With Love and a Major Organ, & More!
By John Corrado In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing… Read More Movie Review: With Love and a Major Organ
By John Corrado Alex Garland’s Civil War, the filmmaker’s visceral near-future portrait of an America on the brink, doesn’t divide things into Red States and Blue States. In fact, the story’s imagined alliance between California and Texas doesn’t even make much sense along current political lines. But this neutral stance is also what makes the… Read More Movie Review: Civil War
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
By John Corrado New releases for the week of April 5th, 2024. Theatrical Releases: The First Omen (Wide Release): Director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen is a surprisingly solid horror prequel that dovetails pretty seamlessly into Richard Donner’s 1976 original film, charting the events leading up to the birth of the spawn of Satan. Set… Read More New This Week (04/05/2024): The First Omen, Monkey Man, The Old Oak, & More!
By John Corrado Based on the real life case of the Littlehampton Letters (with an opening title card assuring us that “this is more true than you’d think”), Wicked Little Letters is an amusing trifle set in a small English town in 1920. The story centres around the scandal involving a series of insulting letters… Read More Movie Review: Wicked Little Letters
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