By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Arriving in theatres a full five years after Disney’s successful live action fantasy Maleficent, which provided a loose retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale from the perspective of the original story’s villain, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is the epitome of a mildly enjoyable but also kind of… Read More Review: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
By John Corrado The Nickelodeon animated series SpongeBob SquarePants has been on the air since 1999, and it’s still going strong after twenty years. While the show is currently in its twelfth season on TV, the complete tenth season of the series has just been released on DVD this week. Spread over two discs, SpongeBob… Read More DVD Review: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Complete Tenth Season
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen died within three months of each other in 2016. The two never got married or had children together, but they shared a deep bond, with her directly inspiring at least two of Cohen’s classic songs (“So Long, Marianne” and “Bird on a Wire”).… Read More DVD Review: Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) When a massive, Category 5 hurricane hits off the coast of Florida, Hayley (Kaya Scodelario) goes to check in on her father (Barry Pepper), and ends up trapped in the crawl space under his house with a massive alligator that has made its way down through a drainage… Read More Blu-ray Review: Crawl
By John Corrado The sophomore feature from Ari Aster, following up last year’s breakout hit Hereditary, Midsommar is an entirely unique folk horror movie set in broad daylight that offers further proof that the young director is a force to be reckoned with in terms of genre filmmaking. It’s now available on Blu-ray as of… Read More Blu-ray Review: Midsommar
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The one thing you can’t accuse the esteemed, Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee of is repeating himself or making the same movie twice. All it takes is a precursory glance at his incredibly diverse filmography to know that he hasn’t repeated himself. This is, after all, a filmmaker who… Read More Review: Gemini Man
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Rudy Ray Moore was a self-described entrepreneur and fledgling musician who worked in a record shop in the 1970s, when he decided to branch out into doing comedy records. Creating a flamboyant alter-ego named Dolemite, a foul-mouthed pimp who speaks in verse, Moore ended up becoming a massively… Read More Review: Dolemite Is My Name
By John Corrado ★ (out of 4) There are some movies that simply don’t work, and others that are such creative misfires that they almost become fascinating case studies in what not to do. The keyword is “almost.” The bafflingly bad space drama Lucy in the Sky is one such example, a film that swings… Read More Review: Lucy in the Sky
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest entry into the Conjuring franchise, and the third spinoff film focusing on the doll Annabelle who serves as the through line of the series, Annabelle Comes Home is a solid and entertaining sequel that does a good job of expanding upon the mythology of this cinematic… Read More Blu-ray Review: Annabelle Comes Home
By John Corrado It was always a risk for Pixar to make a fourth Toy Story movie. The original trilogy, which concluded at the start of this decade with Toy Story 3 in 2010, is undoubtedly one of the greatest film trilogies of all time, leading to questions of where the story could possibly go… Read More Blu-ray Review: Toy Story 4
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The possibilities of human genome editing through the discovery of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a specific family of DNA sequences, are explored in director Adam Bolt’s documentary Human Nature, which looks at the possibilities of a future where diseases or even certain traits could be cut… Read More Review: Human Nature
By John Corrado Today is October 3rd, which fans of the movie Mean Girls know to be the day when new student Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) was asked by her popular classmate and secret crush Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) what day it was. While last year’s Mean Girls Day was extra special because it actually… Read More Blu-ray Review: Mean Girls: 15th Anniversary Edition
By John Corrado This week, Paramount is releasing a new Blu-ray set that includes both Avatar: The Last Airbender and the followup series The Legend of Korra, bringing together two of the most popular and widely acclaimed animated shows of this generation in one gigantic collection. Running for three seasons between 2005 and 2008 on… Read More Blu-ray Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra – The Complete Blu-ray Collection
By John Corrado Arriving just in time for Halloween, and for the release of the new animated movie on October 11th, Paramount is releasing a new two movie collection that includes both The Addams Family and its sequel Addams Family Values on Blu-ray this week. Both films were directed by Barry Sonnenfeld – who would go on… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Addams Family and Addams Family Values 2-Movie Collection
By John Corrado Originally airing in 1978 on NBC, the mini-series Holocaust is now available for the first time on Blu-ray in a new 2-disc set from Paramount. The series follows a fictional Jewish family throughout the 1930s and 1940s, unfolding over roughly a decade as the Nazis seize power in Europe. The Weiss family is… Read More Blu-ray Review: Holocaust
By John Corrado Originally airing over four nights on ABC back in 1994, the mini-series The Stand has now received a new Collector’s Edition Blu-ray release from Paramount to mark it’s 25th anniversary. Adapted from Stephen King’s mammoth 1978 bestseller, which is one of his longest books at over eight hundred pages, the series unfolds… Read More Blu-ray Review: Stephen King’s The Stand: Collector’s Edition
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Deep in South America, amidst the mountaintops and rainforests of Colombia, a ruthless band of teen soldiers hold an American woman (Julianne Nicholson) captive. They are known simply as the Organization, and when we first meet these rebels in the film Monos, their leader (Wilson Salazar), a short-statured… Read More Review: Monos
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a struggling folk musician in the small English town of Suffolk, who finds himself in a complicated predicament when he gets hit by a bus and knocked off his bike at the exact same moment that a global blackout shuts off the world’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Yesterday
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) When Men in Black: International was being released in theatres this summer, I kept forgetting that the movie even existed, and I say that as someone who grew up with the first two films in the series and was pleasantly surprised by the belated 2012 threequel Men in… Read More Blu-ray Review: Men in Black: International
By John Corrado The remake of Child’s Play, which many assumed would be another needless horror redo, actually ended up being one of the better surprises of the summer moviegoing season for me. It’s a twisted and often very enjoyable film that is more entertaining than it probably had any right to be, and it’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Child’s Play (2019)
The Joy of Movies 