By John Corrado In Nuremberg, director James Vanderbilt dramatizes the Nuremberg trials, when members of the Nazi high command were arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity in the wake of World War II. The result is a rock solid old school historical drama that works surprisingly well on every level. Rami Malek… Read More Movie Review: Nuremberg
By John Corrado As an actor, Harris Dickinson has already impressed us with his performances in Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness. So it’s fitting that, in his confident feature directorial debut Urchin, a stripped down drama about poverty and addiction, he gives another young performer the chance to take centre stage. That actor is Frank… Read More Movie Review: Urchin
By John Corrado Regretting You is an adaptation of the Colleen Hoover book, that comes to us from The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone. These two things should tell you what to expect from this film, which is a mix of dramatic weepie and teen romance. Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and her husband… Read More Movie Review: Regretting You
By John Corrado The opening shot of writer-director Mary Bronstein’s intense and suffocating but occasionally darkly funny If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a tight closeup on lead actress Rose Byrne’s face. She is in a doctor’s appointment for her sick daughter (Delaney Quinn), with some disagreement about her treatment plan. The doctor… Read More Movie Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
By John Corrado Anemone, the feature directorial debut of Ronan Day-Lewis, is notable for bringing the filmmaker’s father, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, out of retirement. This is his first acting role since starring in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, a film that has only grown in stature in the near-decade since it was released. This already… Read More Movie Review: Anemone
By John Corrado The first trailer has just been released for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. This is, of course, the Bruce Springsteen biopic (kind of unmistakable now that they added his name to the title), starring Jeremy Allen White as the iconic musician. It’s directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart). We get a glimpse… Read More First Trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
By John Corrado In her feature debut, the crowd-pleasing dramedy Bob Trevino Likes It, writer-director Tracie Laymon crafts a surprisingly tender portrait of an unlikely friendship, drawn from her own life. Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is a bubbly but insecure young woman who has a strained relationship with her self-absorbed father Robert (French Stewart). When… Read More Movie Review: Bob Trevino Likes It
By John Corrado When Magazine Dreams premiered at Sundance in 2023, it was touted as a defining role for Jonathan Majors, who was instantly in the Oscar conversation when Searchlight Pictures picked up the film and positioned it for an awards run. And then everything fell apart. Majors was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend (and… Read More Movie Review: Magazine Dreams
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 Distributor NEON has just released the first teaser trailer for director Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, which they acquired following last year’s TIFF, where it won the festival’s coveted People’s Choice Award. Tom Hiddleston stars as the titular Chuck, alongside a host of others. Like the poster that was released a… Read More First Teaser Trailer for The Life of Chuck
By John Corrado Black Bag is the new sexy spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, with an ensemble cast of characters dealing with the prospect of a double agent in their midst while navigating their own personal relationships. Michael Fassbender stars as George Woodhouse, an English spy married to fellow agent Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In… Read More Movie Review: Black Bag
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 At 94 years old, and over five decades into a directing career that includes two Best Picture Oscar winners (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby), actor-turned-filmmaker Clint Eastwood has proven himself to be the steadiest of hands behind the camera. The courtroom drama Juror #2 is now Eastwood’s 40th film as director, and… Read More Blu-ray Review: Juror #2
By John Corrado In his latest film I’m Still Here, which received a surprise Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) offers a portrait of life during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s through the lens of mainly being a family drama. Salles’ film serves as a biography of… Read More Movie Review: I’m Still Here
By John Corrado Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the lead character in British writer-director Mike Leigh’s new movie Hard Truths, is a bitter woman with a chip perpetually on her shoulder. She is miserable every time she steps out into the world, but not much happier at home either, where she is constantly nagging after husband… Read More Movie Review: Hard Truths
By John Corrado The first English-language feature from Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door is an involving and morally complex – if occasionally uneven – melodrama, built around a pair of compelling performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. The film (which was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice) opens with Moore’s Ingrid,… Read More Movie Review: The Room Next Door
By John Corrado It’s rare to come across a film that feels like it is reinventing the form. Yet, in bringing Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys to the screen, director RaMell Ross takes a radically new approach to adapting a novel; he presents the entire film from the perspective of his characters, through unique,… Read More Movie Review: Nickel Boys
By John Corrado Director Maura Delpero’s Vermgilio, Italy’s International Feature submission for the Oscars, is set at the end of World War II in 1944, but the war is happening entirely offscreen. Instead, this is a slow-burn slice-of-life portrait of a large family in the mountain village of Vermiglio. The patriarch of the family is Cesare… Read More Movie Review: Vermiglio
By John Corrado Director James Mangold arguably perfected the modern biopic structure with Walk the Line, his Oscar-winning 2005 portrait of country singer Johnny Cash. Mangold now returns to this genre and time period with his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (in fact, Cash is even featured here as well, as a contemporary of Dylan’s). Dylan, one… Read More Movie Review: A Complete Unknown
By John Corrado Writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is a compelling modern twist on the erotic thriller, that centres around a woman with power who gets turned on by giving it up, as she embarks on an inappropriate workplace relationship with a male intern. These fascinating power dynamics are portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson,… Read More Movie Review: Babygirl
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