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
By John Corrado The 1999 coming-of-age sports movie Varsity Blues is now available for the first time on 4K Ultra HD, in honour of the film’s 25th anniversary this month. The film is set in West Canaan, Texas, a fictional all-American small town that revolves around their high school football team, the Coyotes. James Van… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Varsity Blues
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The latest work from writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 breakout film Weekend remains an essential piece of queer cinema, All of Us Strangers is a tender, dreamlike meditation on grief and loneliness. Working from the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Haigh’s film is a ghost story… Read More Review: All of Us Strangers
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Watching Killers of the Flower Moon, the absorbing latest work from master filmmaker Martin Scorsese, it’s impossible not to think about legacy, and the types of stories that he is choosing to tell in the twilight of his career. It’s obviously hard to confront the feeling that each… Read More Review: Killers of the Flower Moon
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Director Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple is a big screen adaptation of the Broadway musical that serves as a glitzy reimagining of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel and Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film of the same. Produced by Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey (who was Oscar-nominated for her breakout role as… Read More Review: The Color Purple
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Director Michael Mann returns with Ferrari, a biopic of Italian automaker Enzo Ferrari, that focuses more on his relationships and personal life. The film is set in 1957, a decade after Enzo (a silver-haired Adam Driver) opened the factory with his wife Laura Ferrari (Penelope Cruz) in post-War… Read More Review: Ferrari
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) George Clooney’s latest film as a director, The Boys in the Boat is a familiar but mostly enjoyable underdog sports movie that serves as another they don’t make ’em like they used to effort from the actor turned filmmaker, following his coming-of-age drama The Tender Bar. Adapted from… Read More Review: The Boys in the Boat
By John Corrado James Cameron’s 1997 romantic epic Titanic is being released for the first time on 4K Ultra HD this week, presenting a sparkling new transfer of the iconic film. Detailing the fated maiden voyage of White Star Line cruise ship the Titanic in 1912, the film follows star-crossed lovers Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Titanic
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following her 2017 nun drama Novitiate, writer-director Maggie Betts takes a real life contract law case from the 1990s about the haves and have-nots in the world of funeral home owners, and crafts it into an entertaining legal drama in The Burial (which recently had its world premiere… Read More Review: The Burial (Prime Video)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The title of Dreamin’ Wild, the new music drama from writer-director Bill Pohlad, comes from the name of an album first recorded by teenage brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson on their rural Washington farm in the late 1970s. The album flew under the radar, before finding unexpected success… Read More Review: Dreamin’ Wild
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from American indie film director Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, Little Men), which premiered at Sundance and was the opening night film at the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival in Toronto, Passages charts the sexually charged and emotionally messy dynamics between three people in modern Paris. The… Read More Review: Passages
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Canadian drama North of Normal is an adaptation of Cea Sunrise Person’s 2014 memoir of the same name, following her coming of age in the city after an unconventional upbringing in the Yukon wilderness with her free-loving teen mother (played in the film by Sarah Gadon). The… Read More Review: North of Normal
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Taken from Sanskrit, these were the famous words spoken by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer following the test of his atomic bomb in the Los Alamos desert, an invention that would be used to take countless lives when it was… Read More Review: Oppenheimer
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Tamil Canadian filmmaker V.T. Nayani, This Place (which premiered at last year’s TIFF) is a queer love story between two young women from different backgrounds that finds its strengths in being so culturally specific to Toronto. Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs, who also co-wrote the screenplay… Read More Review: This Place
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film written and directed by Zach Braff (Garden State, Wish You Were Here), A Good Person is an addiction drama that follows Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who becomes hooked on painkillers following a car accident. The film opens with Allison excited to marry her… Read More Blu-ray Review: A Good Person
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Past Lives, the gorgeous directorial debut of playwright Celine Song, opens with its trio of main characters Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) sitting together at a bar, as an off-screen voice wonders what their connections are to each other. From here, Song’s… Read More Review: Past Lives
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director Laurel Parmet explores the push and pull between religion and sexuality in her confident debut film The Starling Girl, which centres around an inappropriate relationship between a teen girl and her youth pastor, and the circumstances that allow it to develop. Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) is a… Read More Review: The Starling Girl
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The opening scene of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener will be very familiar to those who watched the writer-director’s previous two movies The Card Counter and First Reformed. A man sits hunched over at a desk in a dimly lit room writing in a journal, as voiceover narration reveals… Read More Review: Master Gardener
John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Brother, the Scarborough-set drama from writer-director Clement Virgo that is up for fourteen Canadian Screen Awards, follows two brothers, Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), over the course of more than a decade. Much of the film takes place in the 1990s, with the Jamaican-Canadian brothers living in… Read More Review: Brother
The Joy of Movies 