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 Director David Hinton’s expansive new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger offers an absorbing mix of film essay and tribute to these cinematic masters, guided by Martin Scorsese’s enlightening narration. Hinton’s documentary offers… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Gorgeously shot on 35mm film, Irish filmmaker Ken Wardrop’s latest documentary So This is Christmas is a tender portrait of lonely people in Ireland trying to make it through the holidays. The observational film goes beyond showing… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: So This is Christmas
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 Pamela Hogan’s documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still recounts the events of October 24th, 1975, when the majority of women in Iceland decided to protest by taking the day off work, to prove their importance to… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Day Iceland Stood Still
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Directed by Michel Gondry’s friend and longtime assistant François Nemeta, the documentary Michel Gondry, Do It Yourself provides a delightful retrospective of the French music video director turned filmmaker’s career, and a joyful ode to the creative… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Michel Gondry, Do It Yourself
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto During the COVID-19 lockdowns in England, out-of-work actors turned gamers Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen found themselves spending their days playing Grand Theft Auto, and decided to stage a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Grand Theft Hamlet
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In Echo of You, filmmaker Zara Zerny interviews a variety of elderly people in Denmark (both straight and gay) who have lost their life partners. They reminisce about how they met, the longevity of their relationships, how… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Echo of You
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In the New York Times short documentary My Disability Road Map, Samuel Habib and his filmmaker dad Dan offered a wonderful portrait of trying to navigate the world as a young adult with a physical disability, who… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Ride Ahead
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In Standing Above the Clouds, filmmaker Jalena Keane-Lee introduces us to the group of Indigenous women across generations who are protesting the construction of a thirty meter telescope on Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain in Hawaii. There… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Standing Above the Clouds
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In American Cats: The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee correspondent Amy Hoggart sets out on a mission to explore America’s love affair with cats. But she ends up doing a deep-dive… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: American Cats: The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly
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 At River Rouge High School in Michigan, the Panthers rule the basketball court, with fourteen state championships to their name. In his documentary Rouge, first time director Hamoody Jafaar offers a portrait of this school and community,… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Rouge
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In 2012, director Jeff Orlowski-Yang released his documentary Chasing Ice, a beautifully shot portrait of National Geographic photographer James Balog. The film followed Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, which saw him capturing stunning time-lapse images of melting… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Chasing Time
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Toto is an aging gold harvester in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, who spends his days panning for gold in the old fashioned way, finding small specks that he carefully separates out from the dirt. In his… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine
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 In The Here Now Project, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel offer a portrait of increasingly severe weather conditions attributed to climate change, culled together from thousands of hours of videos shot by regular people over the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Here Now Project
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 The latest Earth Day release from Disneynature, Tiger takes us deep into the mythical forests of India to follow Ambar, a mama tiger trying to protect her four cubs. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jones, the film follows Ambar and her litter of adorable cubs from birth, as their mother takes them to… Read More Movie Review: Disneynature’s Tiger (Disney+)
By John Corrado Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s previous subjects have included Star Wars fans (The People vs. George Lucas), the shower scene in Psycho (78/52), the movie Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien), and the late director William Friedkin (Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist). Through these works, he has shown a… Read More Movie Review: William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
The Joy of Movies 