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
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens with a tennis ball rolling around and bouncing down the stairs. We soon learn that our pint-sized protagonist Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a one-inch tall shell wearing pink sneakers who will steal our hearts over the next ninety minutes, is… Read More Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
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