By John Corrado A24 has released the first trailer for The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour post-war epic shot on VistaVision that first drew raves at Venice. I saw the film at TIFF, presented in 70mm, and it’s a staggering achievement. This is a great first trailer that gives viewers a glimpse at Lol Crowley’s… Read More First Trailer for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist
By John Corrado A24 has released the first trailer for the movie Babygirl starring Nicole Kidman, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice for the role. She is also getting Best Actress Oscar buzz for the film. Written and directed by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), Kidman stars in the film as… Read More Trailer Released for Babygirl
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The latest film from Irish director John Crowley (Brooklyn), We Live in Time mostly works as a genuine romantic tear-jerker, centred around a young couple in London. Tobias (Andrew Garfield)… Read More #TIFF24 Review: We Live in Time (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado The title of Sing Sing refers to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, located on the Hudson River. But the film’s title, with its evocation of music and singing, also serves as a jubilant nod to the spirited performances being staged by the men within the maximum security prison. It’s… Read More Movie Review: Sing Sing
By John Corrado The first trailer has been released for the upcoming A24 movie We Live in Time. The romantic drama from director John Crowley (Brooklyn) stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, and is described as a “decade-spanning, deeply moving romance.” It was just announced yesterday that the film will have it’s world premiere at… Read More Trailer Released for We Live in Time
By John Corrado Death comes in the form of a talking macaw that can change sizes in Tuesday, an ambitious but uneven fantasy melodrama that marks the feature directorial debut of Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusić. The film is named for Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a teen girl with terminal cancer, whose mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is… Read More Movie Review: Tuesday
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 There were a lot of good movies released in 2023, but one of the best things about the year that just ended is that it finally felt like the movies were truly, fully back following the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a year when a talky, three-hour biopic like Oppenheimer could make nearly… Read More The Best Movies of 2023
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the writer-director’s best film since Lost in Translation, is a biopic of Priscilla Presley that focuses on her relationship to Elvis, offering an unglamorous but authentic look at their troubled romance. In its own way, Priscilla also serves as the subdued, melancholic counterpart to the… Read More Review: Priscilla
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In his genre-bending surrealist comedy Dream Scenario, Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) teams up with acting legend Nicolas Cage to explore what happens when… Read More #TIFF23 Review: Dream Scenario (Platform)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes), is a transcendent meditation on the capacity for regular people to carry… Read More #TIFF23 Review: The Zone of Interest (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Expanded from an underground musical comedy act that co-writers Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp used to perform together in New York, Dicks: The Musical finds Borat… Read More #TIFF23 Review: Dicks: The Musical (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Past Lives, the gorgeous directorial debut of playwright Celine Song, opens with its trio of main characters Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) sitting together at a bar, as an off-screen voice wonders what their connections are to each other. From here, Song’s… Read More Review: Past Lives
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) What do you do when you accidentally overhear a loved one giving their honest opinion about something you’ve done? This is the basic setup for You Hurt My Feelings, the latest film from writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said). The main character is Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a writer in… Read More Review: You Hurt My Feelings
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Beau Is Afraid, the wildly ambitious, three-hour-long third film from writer-director Ari Aster, has been described as a “nightmare comedy,” and that’s a pretty apt description for what the filmmaker has cooked up this time around. I also saw the film last week and am still not entirely… Read More Review: Beau Is Afraid
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The eighth feature from American indie auteur Kelly Reichardt, Showing Up is recognizably a part of her impressive oeuvre of slice-of-life films about ordinary people going about their lives in Oregon, while also adding some levity to it. The film stars Michelle Williams as Lizzy, a struggling sculptor… Read More Review: Showing Up
By John Corrado Presented by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Film Critics (of which I am a fairly new member), the winners of the 14th Dorian Film Awards have just been announced. Leading the pack is Everything Everywhere All at Once, which swept with wins for Film of the Year and LGBTQ Film of the… Read More Winners of the 14th Dorian Film Awards, presented by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Film Critics
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The feature debut of Benjamin Caron, a TV director whose credits include Andor, The Crown and, perhaps most notably, the final episode of Sherlock, Sharper is a slick A24 and Apple TV+ thriller that keeps shifting perspectives to keep us on our toes. The film opens with a… Read More Review: Sharper (Apple TV+)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Being made to feel self-conscious about who are as a child is a hell of a thing. Belgian director Lukas Dhont powerfully explores this feeling in his Oscar-nominated coming of age drama Close, which tells the story of Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele), two 13-year-old… Read More Review: Close
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg, When You Finish Saving the World (which had its premiere at Sundance in 2022) is a quirky comedic story about a self-absorbed mother and son who are struggling to reconnect. The son, Ziggy Katz (Finn Wolfhard), is a budding teenage singer-songwriter… Read More Review: When You Finish Saving the World
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