By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In her latest film Paying For It, Toronto filmmaker Sook-Yin Lee crafts a tender adaptation of her former partner Chester Brown’s autobiographical 2011 graphic novel of the same name,… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Paying for It (Platform)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Do I Know You From Somewhere?, the debut feature from New Brunswick filmmaker Arianna Martinez, aims to capture that slippery, elusive feeling that you are pulling away from someone. And… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Do I Know You From Somewhere? (Discovery)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. Seeds is an Indigenous B-movie thriller that serves as the feature directorial debut of actress Kaniehtiio Horn, who also wrote and stars in the film. Horn plays Ziggy, an Indigenous woman… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Seeds (Discovery)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5th to 15th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In her showbiz sendup The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) crafts her own bloody take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, mixing extreme body horror and absurd satire of… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Substance (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado In her confident feature directorial debut Good One, emerging filmmaker India Donaldson uses the premise of a father-daughter camping trip to offer an engaging, fascinatingly stripped down character study. The protagonist is Sam (Lily Collias), a 17-year-old girl who ends up on a weekend camping trip to the Catskills with her dad… Read More Movie Review: Good One
By John Corrado Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy, Fifty Shades of Grey), Back to Black is a biopic of British singer Amy Winehouse, who passed away at age 27 from alcohol poisoning. The film is named after her (still incredible) Grammy-winning 2006 album Back to Black, which catapulted her from working-class Camden girl to… Read More Blu-ray Review: Back to Black (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado The title of director Hannah Pearl Utt’s (Before You Know It) sophomore feature Cora Bora refers to the affectionate nickname given to Cora (Megan Stalter), a millennial musician struggling to make it in Los Angeles. Following the breakdown of her moderately successful band, Cora is now trying to strike a solo record… Read More Movie Review: Cora Bora
By John Corrado Directed, co-written by and starring French actress Maïwenn, Jeanne du Barry (which was the opening night film of Cannes last year) is a period biopic of Madame du Barry, the final mistress of King Louis XV. The film charts how “commoner” Jeanne Vaubernier (played by Maïwenn) rose through the ranks of French… Read More Movie Review: Jeanne du Barry
By John Corrado Death comes in the form of a talking macaw that can change sizes in Tuesday, an ambitious but uneven fantasy melodrama that marks the feature directorial debut of Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusić. The film is named for Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a teen girl with terminal cancer, whose mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is… Read More Movie Review: Tuesday
By John Corrado Director Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is a slow-burn Norwegian zombie movie that takes place in the aftermath of an event that allows the dead to return to life. Based on a book by Let the Right One In scribe John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl), the film… Read More Movie Review: Handling the Undead
By John Corrado The 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 24th to June 1st at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. The documentary A Mother Apart (which was one of the finalists for the Hot Docs Audience Award) offers a candid portrait of Staceyann… Read More #InsideOut2024 Review: A Mother Apart
By John Corrado The 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 24th to June 1st at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. In honour of her 18th birthday, Elliot (Maisy Stella) decides to do shrooms in the woods with her best friends Ruthie (Maddie… Read More #InsideOut2024 Review: My Old Ass
By John Corrado The feature directorial debut of actress Pamela Adlon, Babes is a comedy about motherhood and adult friendship, that explores the bond between Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau), and how it changes when the former becomes pregnant with her first child after the latter has just had her second. Eden and… Read More Movie Review: Babes
By John Corrado Made by Sony to capitalize on the success of the MCU, and take advantage of the fact that they still own the Spider-Man rights, Madame Web falls into the Venom or Morbius category of modern comic book movies. The feature directorial debut of S.J. Clarkson, whose previous credits are all in TV,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Madame Web
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 Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is an awkward high school loner in 1989 who falls for the reanimated corpse of a man from the Victorian era whose grave she likes to visit in the horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, written by Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body). Following the horror movie death of her mother,… Read More Blu-ray Review: Lisa Frankenstein (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Maria Gros Vatne and her husband Nik Payne were homeschooling their four kids on a farm in Norway, giving their children a free-range upbringing that included growing their own food and subsisting off the land as much… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: A New Kind of Wilderness
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In their documentary Daughters, co-directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton offer a moving, tender look at a daddy-daughter dance for girls whose fathers are in prison. Patton is the creator of Date with Dad, a program run… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Daughters
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Standing on the edge of a cliff or tall building and taking the leap with only a parachute or wingsuit to catch you might not be everyone’s idea of a good time. But it’s the regular pursuit… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Fly
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary Look Into My Eyes, Director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana) introduces us to a selection of New York City psychics as well as their clients. While psychics are usually thought to be the domain… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Look Into My Eyes
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