By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here. In her new film Sunshine, Filipina writer-director Antoinette Jadaone crafts a gritty and grounded teenage drama, that offers an interesting glimpse at life in the Philippines from a perspective that I hadn’t really seen… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Sunshine (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 5th to 15th, more information can be found right here. The latest film from Indonesian action filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto (Headshot, The Night Comes for Us), The Shadow Strays is a totally insane and highly stylized action flick. Right from the opening sequence laying waste… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Shadow Strays (Midnight Madness)
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. Emilia Pérez, the latest film from French director Jacques Audiard, is a mix of many things; it’s a pop musical, Mexican melodrama, love story, and cartel crime thriller. It’s a… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Emilia Pérez (Special Presentations)
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 his latest film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof crafts a layered and unsettling portrait of life in modern day Iran. It’s a film deemed… Read More #TIFF24 Review: The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Centrepiece)
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. Issa (Ibrahima Sambou), the central character in director Milad Tangshir’s stripped down drama, is an undocumented Senegalese migrant trying to scrape by in Turin, Italy. Thanks to a friend (Moussa… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Anywhere Anytime (Centrepiece)
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. Fabian Stumm is the writer, director and star of Sad Jokes, and he uses his impeccably dry comedic voice to craft a German dramedy that uses long takes to… Read More #TIFF24 Review: Sad Jokes (Discovery)
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto Toto is an aging gold harvester in Tierra del Fuego in Chile, who spends his days panning for gold in the old fashioned way, finding small specks that he carefully separates out from the dirt. In his… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine
By John Corrado French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a sweeping romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers reconnecting and being torn apart across moments in time. Bonello’s film is set in a future where AI controls the world, and strong feelings are discouraged. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing a process to… Read More Movie Review: The Beast
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 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 latest work from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, About Dry Grasses is an involving character drama that uses its lengthy running time to absorb us in the lives its of its subjects. The film follows Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a middle-aged… Read More Movie Review: About Dry Grasses
By John Corrado The latest film directed by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah), the Oscar-nominated International Feature Io Capitano largely serves as a dramatization of the challenges faced by African refugees who make the long, perilous trek to reach the shores of Europe. The film tells the fictional story of Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa… Read More Movie Review: Io Capitano
By John Corrado The Taste of Things, the latest work from French-Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng who was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes for his work, is a piece of high-class “food porn” mixed with a swooning, bittersweet culinary romance. In the grand tradition of other “foodie” films, The Taste of Things offers many beautifully… Read More Review: The Taste of Things
By John Corrado The Promised Land is a historical drama set in Denmark in the mid-1700s, with director Nikolaj Arcel spinning a near-epic tale out of a humble man trying to carve out his own piece of the land while going up against an arrogant nobleman. The protagonist is Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), who… Read More Review: The Promised Land
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 The Teachers’ Lounge is Nominated for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards Stolen cash leads to accusations of racial profiling and a growing culture of distrust between faculty and students in director Ilker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated film The Teachers’ Lounge, a tautly executed middle school drama that often moves like a… Read More Review: The Teachers’ Lounge
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 There were a lot of good movies released in 2023, but one of the best things about the year that just ended is that it finally felt like the movies were truly, fully back following the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a year when a talky, three-hour biopic like Oppenheimer could make nearly… Read More The Best Movies of 2023
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The latest from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron (which had its North American premiere as the opening night film at TIFF) is an enchanting, gorgeously animated fantasy about life and death. The film is Miyazaki’s first since The Wind Rises a decade ago, which… Read More Review: The Boy and the Heron
The Joy of Movies 