By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In Echo of You, filmmaker Zara Zerny interviews a variety of elderly people in Denmark (both straight and gay) who have lost their life partners. They reminisce about how they met, the longevity of their relationships, how… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Echo of You
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In Standing Above the Clouds, filmmaker Jalena Keane-Lee introduces us to the group of Indigenous women across generations who are protesting the construction of a thirty meter telescope on Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain in Hawaii. There… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Standing Above the Clouds
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Director Josephine Anderson follows a girls curling team from British Columbia in her excellent and surprisingly poignant documentary Curl Power. But more so than just being a sports movie about the under appreciated nature of curling, her… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Curl Power
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary, Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard explores the efforts to reintroduce herds of wild buffalo to Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Hubbard, who also narrates the film, explores the work of Blackfoot Elder… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Singing Back the Buffalo
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto When Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban after the United States withdrawal in 2021, women almost immediately lost all of the progress that they had slowly made in the country. Girls weren’t allowed to continue school, and… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: An Unfinished Journey
By John Corrado In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing… Read More Movie Review: With Love and a Major Organ
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
By John Corrado Based on the real life case of the Littlehampton Letters (with an opening title card assuring us that “this is more true than you’d think”), Wicked Little Letters is an amusing trifle set in a small English town in 1920. The story centres around the scandal involving a series of insulting letters… Read More Movie Review: Wicked Little Letters
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 A young nun begins to discover ominous things are afoot after arriving in Italy. This is the basic plot of the indie horror film Immaculate released two weeks ago. But it’s also the setup for director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen. Stevenson’s film serves as a surprisingly solid prequel to The Omen,… Read More Movie Review: The First Omen
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. Director Audrey Cummings’ Place of Bones is an old school Western that plays as an affectionate riff on classic B-movies. Heather Graham stars in the film as Pandora, a frontier woman in… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: Place of Bones
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 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 latest work from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (the Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin), the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters is a chilling and fascinating study of how radicalization takes hold. The film is formally audacious in its mix of documentary and dramatic reenactments, blending subjects and actors to tell… Read More Review: Four Daughters
By John Corrado Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ artful, unconventional documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood follows a group of women in Southern Estonia, who are gathered together in a traditional smoke sauna hidden deep in the woods. Shot over several years, Hints follows a variety of subjects over the backdrop of changing seasons. As they sit naked… Read More Review: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
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 ★★½ (out of 4) Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, the writer-director’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning debut Promising Young Woman, is an overly ambitious mixed bag of a film. The film’s two stars, Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, are good in the leading roles as young men with palpable homoerotic tension between them, and there… Read More Review: Saltburn
By Jon Corrado ★½ (out of 4) The 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Marvels is both a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel and a continuation of the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, and it’s honestly kind of a mess. Directed by Nia DaCosta (the Candyman remake), this is the weakest film yet in a… Read More Review: The Marvels
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