By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Shot on luminous 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is a portrait of Agatha Bock, a subject who, in her mid-eighties, is proudly carrying on the traditions of rural farm living in southern Manitoba. The film is directed by… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Agatha’s Almanac
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Director Noam Gonick’s documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, which opens this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, looks at the history of gay rights in Canada, and the origins of our country’s first Pride Parades as… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance
By John Corrado Director Ann Marie Fleming’s Can I Get a Witness? is set in a futuristic version of Canada, where the progressive government has mandated that everybody “voluntarily” gives up their life at the age of fifty for the sake of the planet. It’s a chilling premise that makes for a mostly engaging if… Read More Movie Review: Can I Get a Witness?
By John Corrado The latest Toronto-set psychodrama from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils reimagines the opera Salome through the lens of trauma and the #MeToo movement. It’s also perhaps The Sweet Hereafter filmmaker’s strongest late-career effort. Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is a young theatre director who is hired by the Canadian Opera Company to remount the… Read More Movie Review: Seven Veils
By John Corrado The second feature from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, following his highly stylized Mackenzie King biopic The Twentieth Century, Universal Language is an absurdist dramedy set in an alternate version of Manitoba where everybody speaks Farsi instead of English. It’s a farcical, high-concept setup that the director not only fully commits himself to (even the signs… Read More Movie Review: Universal Language
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. Léo (Pier-Luc Funk) is a lonely pizza delivery driver in Montreal, who becomes the latest target of John (François Papineau), an alien posing as an older cab driver, who… Read More #TIFF24 Review: You Are Not Alone (Discovery)
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. Jean (Olunike Adeliyi) is a single mother who is back living with her own elderly mother (Maxine Simpson), raising two teenaged kids Tamika (Zahra Bentham) and Tristin (Micah Mensah-Jatoe) in… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Village Keeper (Discovery)
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 mumblecore-inspired Toronto indie from micro-budget filmmaker Kazik Radwanski, Matt and Mara captures the rhythms of a unique dynamic between two old friends. Matt (Matt Johnson) and Mara (Deragh… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Matt and Mara (Centrepiece)
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. Inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novella The Sorrows of Young Werther which caused quite the stir in the late-1700s, Toronto filmmaker José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s easily enjoyable feature… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Young Werther (Special Presentations)
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. Set in a small fishing village in Newfoundland, writer-director Melanie Oates crafts a sort of modern day “Scarlet Letter” in her new film Sweet Angel Baby. Michaela Kurimsky stars… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Sweet Angel Baby (Centrepiece)
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 feature debut of Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas, who serve as co-writers and co-directors, Aberdeen is a mix of slice-of-life portrait and more serious melodrama. The film is named… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Aberdeen (Discovery)
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. In his narrative feature debut Shook, Canadian documentary filmmaker Amar Wala (The Secret Trial 5) crafts a character dramedy that is set in Scarborough. While the Toronto suburb has historically… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Shook (Discovery)
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. In her latest film Paying For It, Toronto filmmaker Sook-Yin Lee crafts a tender adaptation of her former partner Chester Brown’s autobiographical 2011 graphic novel of the same name,… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Paying for It (Platform)
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. Do I Know You From Somewhere?, the debut feature from New Brunswick filmmaker Arianna Martinez, aims to capture that slippery, elusive feeling that you are pulling away from someone. And… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Do I Know You From Somewhere? (Discovery)
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. Seeds is an Indigenous B-movie thriller that serves as the feature directorial debut of actress Kaniehtiio Horn, who also wrote and stars in the film. Horn plays Ziggy, an Indigenous woman… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Seeds (Discovery)
By John Corrado The 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 24th to June 1st at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The documentary A Mother Apart (which was one of the finalists for the Hot Docs Audience Award) offers a candid portrait of Staceyann… Read More #InsideOut2024 Review: A Mother Apart
By John Corrado The 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 24th to June 1st at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In honour of her 18th birthday, Elliot (Maisy Stella) decides to do shrooms in the woods with her best friends Ruthie (Maddie… Read More #InsideOut2024 Review: My Old Ass
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In his latest documentary, Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein offers a wide-ranging exploration of the enduring legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece that has remained recognizable over the past two hundred years with its fourth movement Ode… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Barry Avrich’s Born Hungry is a wonderful portrait of Sash Simpson, and his journey from homeless street kid in India to top chef in Toronto. Sash’s earliest memories are of getting lost in India and being unable… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Born Hungry
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto What if the designs on playing cards actually represent the answer to a long-lost mystery about the real cause of death for France’s King Charles VIII? This is the question that the Vancouver sleight-of-hand magician Shawn Farquhar… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Lost in the Shuffle
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