By John Corrado Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, is a competent enough filmmaking start for the actress, that is held back by a questionable and awkwardly handled story. The film features a decent performance from June Squibb, with Johansson providing a much-deserved leading role for the actress in her mid-90s. But the screenplay… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Eleanor the Great (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado In her narrative debut Meadowlarks, Canadian filmmaker Tasha Hubbard adapts her 2017 documentary Birth of a Family into a deeply moving family drama. The film follows four Cree siblings – brother Anthony (Michael Greyeyes, delivering one of his finest performances) and his three sisters Connie (Carmen Moore), Gwen (Michelle Thrush), and Marianne… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Meadowlarks (Special Presentations)
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 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 Focus Features has now released the first teaser trailer for Hamnet. This is Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloe Zhao’s return to the awards season race, after her Marvel foray Eternals. This one stars Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes, telling the tragic story that inspired Hamlet. Their… Read More Teaser Trailer for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet
By John Corrado My Mother’s Wedding, which actually premiered at TIFF two years ago under the original title North Star, is the directorial debut of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who also appears in the film as the titular mother getting married. But this uneven comedy-drama mainly focuses on her character Diana Frost’s three adult daughters;… Read More Movie Review: My Mother’s Wedding
By John Corrado A belated sequel to Disney’s 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter who switch places with each other, could have easily gone off the rails. Especially since that film was already a remake of an earlier movie from 1976 (starring Jodie Foster),… Read More Movie Review: Freakier Friday
By John Corrado Elio, the very sweet new animated film from Pixar, uses the age old question of “are we alone in the universe?” to explore the very real topic of loneliness, namely that of the titular Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab). Elio is a space-obsessed kid who has been left living on a military… Read More Movie Review: Elio
By John Corrado In Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song delivered one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time, reinvigorating a love triangle premise to offer a deeply moving exploration of longing and potentially meeting the right person at the wrong time. Expectations have been set incredibly high for Song’s sophomore feature Materialists, which finds… Read More Movie Review: Materialists
By John Corrado Two Women, the latest film from Quebec director Chloé Robichaud (Sarah Prefers to Run), is a raunchy, female-centric comedy that serves as a modern remake of Claude Fournier’s 1970 film Two Women in Gold. Fournier’s original remains an influential piece of Quebec cinema, and Robichaud’s version, which has been adapted and updated… Read More Movie Review: Two Women
By John Corrado Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) is an aspiring romance novelist who works as a shopkeeper at Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company. She fantasizes about Jane Austen, and longs for her own love story, but is perpetually single, and struggling with writer’s block. Agathe is the protagonist of writer-director Laura Piani’s delightful new romantic… Read More Movie Review: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
By John Corrado The Cannes film festival is still going strong over in France, and NEON has just put out the first teaser trailer for French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, one of the most anticipated films in the Official Competition. This is, of course, Ducournau’s follow-up to her 2021 shock Palme d’Or winner Titane (and… Read More Teaser Trailer for Julia Ducournau’s Alpha
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto If you didn’t know that Excel spreadsheets were a thing you could be the best at, well, have I got news for you. There’s a whole competition for it, where students come from around the world to… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Spreadsheet Champions
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In her documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, director Shoshannah Stern crafts an engaging, intimate portrait of actress Marlee Matlin, who become the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar for her lead performance in the 1986… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In their documentary Marriage Cops, co-directors Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess take us inside a police station in northern India, where a team of female officers provide marriage counselling to couples experiencing marital problems. It’s a way… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marriage Cops
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Shot on luminous 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is a portrait of Agatha Bock, a subject who, in her mid-eighties, is proudly carrying on the traditions of rural farm living in southern Manitoba. The film is directed by… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Agatha’s Almanac
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 Following the poster debut yesterday, A24 has just released the first trailer for writer-director Celine Song’s Materialists. This is Song’s highly anticipated second feature following her acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2023 debut Past Lives. This one is a romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. Johnson plays a New York matchmaker,… Read More First Trailer for Celine Song’s Materialists
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 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
The Joy of Movies 