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
By John Corrado The latest work from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (the Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin), the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters is a chilling and fascinating study of how radicalization takes hold. The film is formally audacious in its mix of documentary and dramatic reenactments, blending subjects and actors to tell… Read More Review: Four Daughters
By John Corrado Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ artful, unconventional documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood follows a group of women in Southern Estonia, who are gathered together in a traditional smoke sauna hidden deep in the woods. Shot over several years, Hints follows a variety of subjects over the backdrop of changing seasons. As they sit naked… Read More Review: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
John Corrado Inspired by Pixar’s 1998 second feature A Bug’s Life, the Disney Plus series A Real Bug’s Life puts us on the ground to document the lives of real insects around the world across five half-hour episodes narrated by Awkwafina. Produced by National Geographic, A Real Bug’s Life begins on the streets of New… Read More Review: A Real Bug’s Life (Disney+)
By John Corrado Director Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary Radical Dreamer: Werner Herzog offers an enjoyable overview of the iconic German filmmaker’s career, known both for his accent and bold, inquisitive filmmaking style. The documentary chronologically explores Herzog’s early films as part of the New German Cinema movement, which gave way to his reputation as a… Read More Review: Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Director Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia offers a compelling glimpse inside North Korea, through the eyes of those who risk their lives trying to escape the country. The real pull of Gavin’s film is the secret, handheld footage shot by defectors themselves, showing us the perilous journey that… Read More Review: Beyond Utopia
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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