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
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Filmmaker Tova Krentzman offers an intriguing glimpse into the lives of lookouts in her documentary Fire Tower, introducing us to some of the people who spend six months of the year in towers a hundred feet above… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Fire Tower
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Director Josephine Anderson follows a girls curling team from British Columbia in her excellent and surprisingly poignant documentary Curl Power. But more so than just being a sports movie about the under appreciated nature of curling, her… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Curl Power
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary, Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard explores the efforts to reintroduce herds of wild buffalo to Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Hubbard, who also narrates the film, explores the work of Blackfoot Elder… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Singing Back the Buffalo
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto When Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban after the United States withdrawal in 2021, women almost immediately lost all of the progress that they had slowly made in the country. Girls weren’t allowed to continue school, and… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: An Unfinished Journey
By John Corrado Irena’s Vow dramatizes the inspiring true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nélisse), a Polish nurse who helped shelter a group of Jewish workers during World War II. At a factory in occupied Poland, Irena is put in charge of supervising a group of Jewish workers in the laundry, who wash and… Read More Movie Review: Irena’s Vow
By John Corrado In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing… Read More Movie Review: With Love and a Major Organ
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. The latest collaboration between director Sean Garrity and star Jonas Chernick, The Burning Season is a simmering romantic drama with a dark secret at its centre that starts at the end and… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: The Burning Season (Closing Night Film)
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. Director Audrey Cummings’ Place of Bones is an old school Western that plays as an affectionate riff on classic B-movies. Heather Graham stars in the film as Pandora, a frontier woman in… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Place of Bones
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. Named after the beloved Trinidadian street food, the Canadian drama Doubles follows Dhani (Sanjiv Boodhu), a humble street vendor living with his mother (Leela Sitahal) in Trinidad, who is growing tired of… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Doubles (Opening Night Film)
By John Corrado Director Chris Eyre’s 1998 coming-of-age film Smoke Signals was a landmark for both American indie cinema and Indigenous self-representation, with its Native American cast and crew telling a story featuring authentic characters. Among the film’s cast was Cody Lightning, the child actor who played the younger version of Adam Beach’s lead character… Read More Movie Review: Hey, Viktor!
By John Corrado The feature directorial debut of Canadian filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown, Seagrass is a patient character drama that captures the slow deterioration of a biracial family unit. Judith (Ally Maki) is a Japanese-Canadian woman who is experiencing difficulties in her marriage to non-Asian husband Steve (Luke Roberts). These challenges are amplified by Judith’s mother… Read More Movie Review: Seagrass
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In the Canadian time travel comedy Relax, I’m From the Future, New Zealand comedian Rhys Darby is delightfully able to take centre stage as Casper, a time traveller from an unspecified point in the future, who lands back in the 2020s. The title comes from Casper’s reassurance to… Read More Review: Relax, I’m From the Future
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Solo, which recently won the Best Canadian Film prize at TIFF, is a character drama set in Montreal’s drag scene. In her third feature, Quebec writer-director Sophie Dupuis (Family First, Underground) captivatingly explores the dynamics between the performers at a Montreal gay bar. The film centres around the… Read More Review: Solo
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The rescue pups are back for another big screen adventure in PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, a worthy sequel to 2021’s surprisingly good PAW Patrol: The Movie. This new spinoff film from the popular Canadian children’s TV series and toys, which serves as another co-production between Nickelodeon, Paramount… Read More Review: PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 7th to 17th. Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe (which was voted the winner of the TIFF People’s Choice Award for Documentary) is a heartwarming documentary about a childhood icon, that also touches on the history of Canadian children’s… Read More #TIFF23 Review: Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe (TIFF Docs)
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