By John Corrado In his acceptance speech at the SAG Awards earlier year, when he won the Best Actor trophy for his uncanny portrayal of Bob Dylan in music biopic A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet unabashedly spoke about wanting to be one of the greats. The young actor took some heat for it online. Surely… Read More Movie Review: Marty Supreme
By John Corrado NEON has just released a new trailer for Sentimental Value. This is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow up to The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. I saw this one during TIFF, and it’s easily one of the best movies of the year, if not… Read More New Trailer for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value
By John Corrado Shelby Oaks is a horror movie that serves as the crowdfunded feature directorial debut of YouTuber and film critic Chris Stuckmann, now fully dipping his toes into the world of genre filmmaking. It’s easy to root for a film critic making the jump to actually directing (for me at least), and Stuckmann’s… Read More Movie Review: Shelby Oaks
By John Corrado Director Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less biography of George Orwell, and more heavily slanted video essay that struggles to thread the needle between the British author’s work and selected modern events. It’s a major disappointment. The film’s title, of course, is a reference to Orwell’s most famous book 1984,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Orwell: 2+2=5 (TIFF Docs)
By John Corrado In her sophomore feature Blood Lines, Métis writer, director, and actress Gail Maurice (Rosie) crafts a family melodrama steeped in Métis culture. This cultural specificity is the main point of intrigue for Maurice’s film, which is also presented largely in the traditional Michif language. The main character is Beatrice (Dana Solomon), a… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Blood Lines (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook, following up the gauzy, neo-noir, romantic mystery of 2022’s stunning Decision to Leave, No Other Choice is a wildly entertaining film that moves so seamlessly between dark comedy, drama, and murderous thriller, that it seems to defy genre itself. The story centres around Man-soo… Read More #TIFF50 Review: No Other Choice (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado There is something objectively funny about Canadian filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson using the money and industry cred that he received from his 2023 movie BlackBerry to make Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, an idiosyncratic and gloriously entertaining big screen resurrection of his cult web series from 2008. In doing… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The Canadian genre film Honey Bunch serves as both the latest collaboration between actors and real life partners Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, and the sophomore feature from co-directors Madeline Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli. In their debut film, the ultra-gritty revenge thriller Violation, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli showed an appetite for extreme violence.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Honey Bunch (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, formerly imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi crafts another complex and involving portrait of modern day Iran. The film follows a group of people who find themselves at the centre of a moral dilemma, when a worker named Vahid (Vahid… Read More #TIFF50 Review: It Was Just an Accident (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado In his mixing of paranoid espionage thriller and absurdist dark comedy, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a culturally specific portrait of his country in the late 1970s in The Secret Agent, seen through the eyes of a man on the run during the waning days of the military dictatorship. The man… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Secret Agent (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado A man gets off the subway and tries to exit the station. But every time he turns a corner, he ends up back in the same place, stuck in a seemingly endless loop. This is the premise behind the Japanese film Exit 8, a fun and suspenseful little puzzle box thriller from… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Exit 8 (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado Director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât opens on a memorably cinematic scene as a group of outcasts hold a rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert. We see evocative images of massive speakers being set up in the desert, as bodies bop and gyrate in time to the blaring techno music, the beat… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sirât (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Sentimental Value is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s followup to his 2021 modern classic The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. If Worst Person was about a quarter-life crisis and searching for meaning in your twenties, Sentimental Value aims for something even more ambitious in scope.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sentimental Value (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Splitsville is the new relationship comedy from director Michael Angelo Covino and his real life friend Kyle Marvin. The two previously teamed up to make the 2020 film The Climb, a portrait of male friendship told with impressive technical precision through a series of long takes and fluid camerawork. Covino and Marvin… Read More Movie Review: Splitsville
By John Corrado A couple find themselves being increasingly bound together in Together, the new body horror rom-com from writer-director Michael Shanks. But the real selling point of the film is the casting of actual couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco, whose chemistry adds an extra layer of interest. The real-life married couple star as… Read More Movie Review: Together
By John Corrado NEON has just put out the first trailer for Splitsville, the new relationship comedy from director, co-writer and co-star Michael Angelo Covino. This is Covino’s second collaboration with co-writer and co-star Kyle Marvin, following their promising feature debut The Climb. Covino and Marvin’s latest (which premiered out of competition at Cannes in… Read More First Trailer for Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville
By John Corrado Bring Her Back is the unnerving sophomore feature from Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who began their career as YouTubers (under the pseudonym RackaRacka), before branching out and getting noticed with their A24-backed directorial debut Talk to Me. The same studio, A24, is behind their latest effort as well, which finds… Read More Movie Review: Bring Her Back
By John Corrado In his sophomore feature Sharp Corner, Canadian writer-director Jason Buxton (Blackbird) presents an offbeat character study of a man who becomes obsessed with the car crashes happening on his front lawn. A film about a car crash fixation could have gone in many different directions (like David Cronenberg’s Crash, one of the… Read More Movie Review: Sharp Corner
By John Corrado You have to respect a film title that tells you exactly what to expect. Think Snakes on a Plane. Or Clown in a Cornfield. That’s the pretty self-explanatory title of this mostly fun new killer clown movie from director Eli Craig, best known for his cult favourite 2010 horror comedy Tucker &… Read More Movie Review: Clown in a Cornfield
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
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