By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Six songs by famed Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim are used to provide deeper insight into his life and career as a whole in director James Lapine’s documentary Six By Sondheim. The film, which premiered on HBO in 2013 and has just been released on Blu-ray as… Read More Blu-ray Review: Six By Sondheim
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In 2019, for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, director and editor Todd Douglas Miller delivered Apollo 11, a documentary that brilliantly assembled never before seen archival footage of the event into a compelling narrative feature. Now Miller has returned to this historic event, or, rather,… Read More Review: Apollo 11: Quarantine (Digital Release)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The lines between faith, fundamentalism, and religious extremism get increasingly blurred in Saint Maud, an unsettling mix of slow-burn horror and psychological drama that serves as a promising feature directorial debut for British writer-director Rose Glass. The film, which premiered at TIFF in 2019 as part of the… Read More VOD Review: Saint Maud
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Vince Vaughn acting like a teenage girl is the main attraction in Freaky, the very entertaining new horror comedy from Blumhouse and Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon that is arriving on Blu-ray this week. Vaughn stars in the film as a serial killer nicknamed The Butcher, who’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Freaky
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Malcolm & Marie, writer-director Sam Levinson’s new Netflix film that you’ve probably seen people arguing about on social media, is, at the very least, somewhat of an interesting experiment. It’s a black and white, dialogue-driven drama that centres around only two people, unfolds entirely in one house, and… Read More Netflix Review: Malcolm & Marie
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) An Australian remake of director Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 Icelandic film of the same name, which was a hit on the festival circuit, Rams follows two estranged brothers known for their prize-winning sheep. Colin (Sam Neil) and Les (Michael Caton) live in separate houses on the same farm in… Read More VOD Review: Rams
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is the third feature length adventure for the cartoon sea sponge, and also the first fully computer generated one. The result is something that, while far from being the best SpongeBob movie (which is still the 2004 original), still serves as… Read More Blu-ray Review: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) Breach, a new sci-fi horror movie that is being sold pretty much solely on the presence of Bruce Willis in its supporting cast, is one of those films that feels like its plot has been copied and pasted from much better sources. The film is set in the… Read More DVD Review: Breach
By John Corrado Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are an old married couple who fight to save their grandson when their daughter-in-law (Kayli Carter) marries into a violent hillbilly family. This is the basic premise behind filmmaker Thomas Bezucha’s neo-Western thriller Let Him Go, which is arriving on Blu-ray this week. This is a prime… Read More Blu-ray Review: Let Him Go
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
The Joy of Movies 