By John Corrado One of the movies that I really enjoyed last year that seemed to sort of slip through the cracks was the horror film Come Play, which is now available on Blu-ray. The film did receive a limited theatrical release in Canada for Halloween when cinemas were briefly reopen, but the pandemic unfortunately… Read More Blu-ray Review: Come Play
By John Corrado A month ago, I shared my picks for the best movies of 2020, and now it’s time to make my selections for the best documentaries of last year. This list has been a long time coming, I know, and It took me a while to put it together, from deciding on the… Read More The Best Documentaries of 2020
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Climb, Michael Angelo Covino’s bittersweet comedy about male friendship, opens with the camera following two friends cycling up a hill in France. It’s an incredible long take that goes on for nearly nine whole minutes, moving seamlessly between wide shots and medium closeups, only getting more impressive… Read More VOD Review: The Climb
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) is a teenager in 1935, who lives on a Texas farm in a dustbowl town that has been hit hard by the Great Depression and never recovered. He finds his escape through stories of outlaws on the run from the law, fuelling his dream… Read More Blu-ray Review: Dreamland
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) In Wander, the latest film from Canadian director April Mullen, a paranoid private investigator named Arthur Bretnik (Aaron Eckhart) is hired to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in an American small town called Wander. Arthur is a former cop who worked in the homicide division,… Read More DVD Review: Wander
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Kaminski brothers, Stanley (Charlie Hunnam) and Lion (Jack O’Connell), are working class guys struggling to make ends meet in the gritty drama Jungleland. Stanley acts as a promoter for his brother’s career as a bare-knuckle boxer, booking him scrappy local fights in order to earn some cash.… Read More DVD Review: Jungleland
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is the titular “promising young woman” in director Emerald Fennell’s ultra stylish and unforgettable feature debut of the same name. Cassie used to be in med school and was on her way to becoming a doctor, until a shocking and traumatic incident forced her to… Read More VOD Review: Promising Young Woman
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Mixing elements of a kidnapping thriller with dark Hoodoo magic, Spell is a B-grade horror movie that had the potential to bring something unique to the genre with its almost entirely African-American cast and folklore, but ends up feeling derivative of better films. Marquis T. Woods (Omari Hardwick)… Read More Blu-ray Review: Spell
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Over the past few years, Jordan Peele has gone from comedy star to one of our finest horror filmmakers, an unexpected but genuinely exciting career reinvention. In 2019, Peele leveraged his power to get a reboot of Rod Serling’s classic show The Twilight Zone on the air, updating… Read More DVD Review: The Twilight Zone (2019): Season Two
By John Corrado SpongeBob SquarePants has been on the air for over two decades now, and the complete twelfth season of the Nickelodeon cartoon is being released on DVD this week. The set comes with all 25 episodes from the season spread across three discs, and the Bikini Bottom adventures included herein serve as familiar… Read More DVD Review: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Complete Twelfth Season
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) A Filipino girl, who is living in Texas as an undocumented immigrant, dreams of being a country music star. This simple logline, which could have easily been the premise behind an exploitive movie of the week, instead provides the basis for the often touching Yellow Rose. Directed, produced… Read More VOD Review: Yellow Rose
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) I will never forget the first time that I watched the original film version of The Boys in the Band. Directed by William Friedkin, and adapted from the late Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking play of the same name, the 1970 film details the lives of a group of gay… Read More Netflix Review: The Boys in the Band (2020)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Ryan Murphy’s flashy gay rights musical The Prom, which is based on the Broadway musical of the same name, is a prime example of a film that has some enjoyable moments, but feels like an uneven mishmash overall. It tells the story of Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman),… Read More Netflix Review: The Prom
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) It’s hard to write about Hillbilly Elegy, director Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir about growing up poor in rural Appalachia, without getting into the discourse around it. Take, for example, the awards season hopeful’s duelling scores on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has a “rotten” critics… Read More Netflix Review: Hillbilly Elegy
By John Corrado How do you even begin to summarize 2020, a year that is ending today but probably won’t be fondly remembered by pretty much anyone? It was, as we all know, a year that began with news of a novel Coronavirus emerging in Wuhan, China, which would quickly spread around the world to… Read More The Best Movies of 2020
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Pixar’s latest film Soul, which is premiering on Disney Plus on Christmas Day after having its theatrical release cancelled due to ongoing theatre closures, shares a lot of common DNA with the studio’s 2015 film Inside Out. Now in case you think I’m saying that Soul feels like… Read More Disney+ Review: Soul
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) When Chadwick Boseman passed away from colon cancer at the far too young age of 43 in August of this year, it was one of those celebrity deaths that took everyone by surprise and hit really hard. Boseman’s compelling portrayal of the superhero Black Panther made him not… Read More Netflix Review: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) If things were different in the world right now, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which is being released on Blu-ray this week, would have been one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer movie season. Instead, a global pandemic got in the way, and the British filmmaker’s latest high concept… Read More Blu-ray Review: Tenet
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Disney’s latest sports drama Safety, which premieres on Disney+ today, is based on the true story of Clemson University football safety Ray McElrathbey, who put his promising athletic career on the line to care for his little brother Fahmarr and keep him out of foster care. At the… Read More Disney+ Review: Safety
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III has always had somewhat of a reputation as the black sheep of the trilogy. Released on Christmas Day in 1990, nearly two decades after the first film in 1972 and sixteen years after the second one in 1974, the film has… Read More Blu-ray Review: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
The Joy of Movies 