By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from May 30th to June 9th in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Noam Stein (Charlie Korman) is a closeted teenager keeping his sexuality a secret from his Orthodox family and community. After his grandfather dies, he discovers a love… Read More #TJFF2024 Review: Unspoken
By John Corrado In We Grown Now, writer-director Minhal Haig offers a vivid portrait of childhood and growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects circa 1992. Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are two young Black boys who are best friends. They hang out together in an abandoned unit, and the film… Read More Movie Review: We Grown Now
By John Corrado French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a sweeping romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers reconnecting and being torn apart across moments in time. Bonello’s film is set in a future where AI controls the world, and strong feelings are discouraged. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing a process to… Read More Movie Review: The Beast
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 Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the Italian filmmaker’s latest following The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, is itself a bit of a chimeric creature. The film unfolds with a loose, shifting narrative structure that morphs between magical realism, absurdist comedy and character drama, shone through with a wistful nostalgia for the past. The… Read More Movie Review: La Chimera
By John Corrado The latest and possibly final film from British director Ken Loach, The Old Oak is another poignant social realist drama exploring themes of unrest in modern England, this time centred around the migrant crisis. Done in his usual neorealist style, the film focuses on the clash between a group of Syrian immigrants… Read More Movie Review: The Old Oak
By John Corrado A group of students fall under the sway of their new teacher Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) in Club Zero, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s offbeat and unsettling satire of cliques, social pressure, and radical movements. Miss Novak arrives as the new teacher at the Talent Campus, an international private school where she is… Read More Movie Review: Club Zero
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. 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 Napoleon is Nominated for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design and Best Visual Effects at the 96th Academy Awards Throughout his long career as a director, Ridley Scott has been no stranger to big budget filmmaking and risk-taking, and his latest film Napoleon – the result of a complicated, months-long production –… Read More Movie Review: Napoleon (Apple TV+)
By John Corrado The latest work from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, About Dry Grasses is an involving character drama that uses its lengthy running time to absorb us in the lives its of its subjects. The film follows Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a middle-aged… Read More Movie Review: About Dry Grasses
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 The Taste of Things, the latest work from French-Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng who was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes for his work, is a piece of high-class “food porn” mixed with a swooning, bittersweet culinary romance. In the grand tradition of other “foodie” films, The Taste of Things offers many beautifully… Read More Review: The Taste of Things
By John Corrado The 1984 film Footloose is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and Paramount is honouring the occasion by releasing it for the first time on 4K Ultra HD this week. Kevin Bacon stars as Ren McCormack, the rebel kid from Chicago who moves to the small town of Bomont, where loud music… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Footloose: 40th Anniversary Edition
By John Corrado The Promised Land is a historical drama set in Denmark in the mid-1700s, with director Nikolaj Arcel spinning a near-epic tale out of a humble man trying to carve out his own piece of the land while going up against an arrogant nobleman. The protagonist is Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), who… Read More Review: The Promised Land
By John Corrado British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut How to Have Sex, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at last year’s Cannes, is an often vibrant mix of party movie and subtle social commentary on the post-#MeToo generation. Walker’s film centres around Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), three… Read More Review: How to Have Sex
By John Corrado Fran (Daisy Ridley) is an office worker in Oregon who thinks a lot about dying. She sits in a daze at her cubicle, imagining her dead body decaying in the woods or being hung from the crane outside her window. Fran’s morbid daydreams provide the basis for the title of director Rachel… Read More Review: Sometimes I Think About Dying
By John Corrado The Teachers’ Lounge is Nominated for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards Stolen cash leads to accusations of racial profiling and a growing culture of distrust between faculty and students in director Ilker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated film The Teachers’ Lounge, a tautly executed middle school drama that often moves like a… Read More Review: The Teachers’ Lounge
By John Corrado The title of Memory, the latest film from Mexican writer-director Michel Franco, takes on a few different meanings throughout the course of this tender, stripped down character drama. It refers to repressed memories and the lingering impacts of childhood trauma that Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) carries with her every day, as well as… Read More Review: Memory
By John Corrado Ava DuVernay’s Origin is an ambitious film that aims to adapt Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents for the screen. It serves as both an exploration of the ideas within Wilkerson’s book, and a dramatization of Isabel’s experiences while writing it. DuVernay’s film finds… Read More Review: Origin
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