By John Corrado In director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, which won the Directing Award at Sundance earlier this year, Rinko Kikuchi stars as Haru, a Japanese woman who loves ballroom dancing. Haru lives in Tokyo, and performs in ballroom dance competitions with her husband Luis (Alejandro Edda). Then Luis dies suddenly, and… Read More Movie Review: Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
By John Corrado Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the gonzo new comedy from director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer), functions as a mix of crude sex humour, celebrity cameos, and over the top homage to The Wizard of Oz. You see, main character Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is really just a girl… Read More Movie Review: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
By John Corrado What if you made a disaster movie parody in the spirit of Airplane!, but starring a cast of drag queens who play the entire thing in character as women? That’s the premise behind Stop! That! Train!, the new comedy from producer RuPaul and director Adam Shankman. The result is a proudly stupid comedy… Read More Movie Review: Stop! That! Train!
By John Corrado A young girl is selected to bake a cake for her school in honour of President Saddam Hussein’s birthday in Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi’s debut feature The President’s Cake, which serves as a charming neorealist throwback. Hadi’s film is set in Iraq in the early 1990s, where, despite mass starvation caused by… Read More Movie Review: The President’s Cake
By John Corrado The first thing we hear in filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski’s new French-language thriller A Private Life (or Vie privée) is the distinctive strains of The Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer.” The song is leaking into the office of psychiatrist Lillian Steiner (Jodie Foster), as it’s being blasted by her neighbours in the apartment… Read More Movie Review: A Private Life
By John Corrado The Choral is a British period drama set during World War I. But instead of taking us to the Western Front, the story stays focused on the best efforts of a choir in a small English town that is desperate to deliver a distraction from the ongoing war. It’s an approach that… Read More Movie Review: The Choral
By John Corrado In Nuremberg, director James Vanderbilt dramatizes the Nuremberg trials, when members of the Nazi high command were arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity in the wake of World War II. The result is a rock solid old school historical drama that works surprisingly well on every level. Rami Malek… Read More Movie Review: Nuremberg
By John Corrado Kiss of the Spider Woman, the new musical film from Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, is a big screen reimagining of the 1992 stage musical from John Kander and Fred Ebb, that was in turn based on a 1976 novel that had a 1985 film adaptation. Set during Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1983, the… Read More Movie Review: Kiss of the Spider Woman
By John Corrado If, on the surface, Oh, Hi! might seem likely your typical indie romantic dramedy, it’s one with a blackly comic twist. Writer-director Sophie Brooks sets the stage for this in the opening scene, with female lead Iris (Molly Gordon) frantically telling her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) that she “did something bad.”… Read More Movie Review: Oh, Hi!
By John Corrado 40 Acres is a pretty solid Canadian post-apocalyptic survival thriller that imagines a dystopic future where, as the opening title card tells us, a global pandemic led to a second Civil War breaking out and subsequent worldwide famine. This has caused farmland to become the planet’s most valuable resource, with families struggling… Read More Movie Review: 40 Acres
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 Director Ann Marie Fleming’s Can I Get a Witness? is set in a futuristic version of Canada, where the progressive government has mandated that everybody “voluntarily” gives up their life at the age of fifty for the sake of the planet. It’s a chilling premise that makes for a mostly engaging if… Read More Movie Review: Can I Get a Witness?
By John Corrado In his latest film I’m Still Here, which received a surprise Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) offers a portrait of life during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s through the lens of mainly being a family drama. Salles’ film serves as a biography of… Read More Movie Review: I’m Still Here
By John Corrado The first English-language feature from Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door is an involving and morally complex – if occasionally uneven – melodrama, built around a pair of compelling performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. The film (which was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice) opens with Moore’s Ingrid,… Read More Movie Review: The Room Next Door
By John Corrado In 2009, director Adam Elliot, the Australian animator behind the 2003 Oscar-winning short film Harvie Krumpet, released his debut feature Mary & Max. The excellent claymation film had a lovingly hand-crafted feel to it, and told the tender story of the pen-pal friendship between a girl and an autistic man, which Elliot explored with… Read More Movie Review: Memoir of a Snail
By John Corrado The choice to make a Donald Trump biopic at this point in time, when the man himself is already so ubiquitous and overexposed in our media landscape, is both an obvious and somewhat curious one. In our polarized age, the mere presence of a film like this raises questions about what audience… Read More Movie Review: The Apprentice
By John Corrado Saoirse Ronan takes on the role of a young alcoholic in The Outrun. It’s a role that allows the actress to deliver an incredible performance showcasing her full depth and range, as the drama depicts the addiction and recovery process as an ongoing journey. It’s based on author Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the… Read More Movie Review: The Outrun
By John Corrado Between the Temples, the latest work from director and co-writer Nathan Silver, is a sort of indie screwball comedy that reinvents that old trope of finding yourself through an unconventional relationship. The two figures at the centre of it are Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwarzman), a cantor at his synagogue who has found… Read More Movie Review: Between the Temples
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 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
