By John Corrado When Japanese director Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One was released in 2023, it became a surprise breakout hit. It even took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, a huge testament to what Yamazaki – also serving as visual effects supervisor – and his team were able to pull off on a… Read More Movie Review: Godzilla Minus Zero
By John Corrado A few weeks ago, I shared the teaser trailer for The Man with the Bag, an upcoming Christmas comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Santa Claus. Now we have a longer “official” trailer for the film. This looks like it has the potential to be a fun Christmas action comedy, and I’m admittedly… Read More Official Trailer for The Man with the Bag
By John Corrado Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is the third film in a trilogy of sorts following 2013’s Ida and 2018’s exceptional Cold War, offering a triptych of portraits exploring post-WWII Europe. This film is set in 1949, and follows the writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a… Read More Movie Review: Fatherland
By John Corrado Harry Lehman (John Turturro) is the sort of older gentleman who always dresses nicely and takes pride in his profession, which just so happens to be that of a pickpocket. Turturro’s Harry is the protagonist of writer-director Noah Segan’s very enjoyable The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, with the film’s title,… Read More Movie Review: The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
By John Corrado Based on the short story The Wicker Husband by author Ursula Wills-Jones, Wicker is a clever and enjoyable medieval romp starring Olivia Colman as the unnamed Fisherwoman, a spinster who gets herself a husband made of wicker. The film’s co-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, fully… Read More Movie Review: Wicker
By John Corrado Since their debut film Coraline in 2009, the Oregon-based animation studio LAIKA has not only been keeping stop-motion alive as an art form, but also pushing it forward in exciting ways. Across their subsequent films (ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link), LAIKA has been pioneering new techniques, building… Read More Movie Review: Wildwood
By John Corrado Director Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder is a very enjoyable portrait of The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith, that works around the clever concept of being both a literary biopic and an imagined version of a sixth story featuring her most famous creation, Tom Ripley. Set in 1995, the film… Read More Movie Review: A Talent for Murder
By John Corrado One Night Only is the latest romantic comedy directed by Will Gluck (Friends With Benefits, Easy A), following up his surprise 2023 hit Anyone But You. That film, which was built around the chemistry between stars Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, fully embraced the conventions of a traditional rom-com to charming effect.… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: One Night Only (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado In the hands of Nathan Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim, a nearly three-hour documentary about Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes becomes one of the most compelling films of the year. This is You Can See Everything, a highly adventurous gambit from A24 that finds Fielder embedding himself in the home… Read More Movie Review: You Can See Everything
By John Corrado Sometimes a basic premise is all you need to sell a movie. Such is the case with Whalefall, which follows a young diver who gets swallowed by a whale, and has to survive inside of the creature as his oxygen runs out. But it’s what director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save… Read More Movie Review: Whalefall
By John Corrado Before David Fincher’s The Social Network was released in 2010, there was a lot of talk about whether or not we actually needed a movie about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. It turned out to not only be one of the most prescient films of that decade, but one of the… Read More Movie Review: The Social Reckoning
By John Corrado Apple Original Films has just put out the official trailer for Being Heumann, director Siân Heder’s follow-up to her surprise Best Picture winner CODA. I saw this one when it premiered as the opening night film at TIFF last month (you can read my full review right here), and enjoyed it quite… Read More Official Trailer for Siân Heder’s Being Heumann
By John Corrado In his entertaining directorial debut California Schemin’, actor James McAvoy takes on the wild story of early-2000s rap duo Silibil N’ Brains, whose flash in the pan success was built on a lie. Silibil and Brains were the stage names of Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley) and Gavin Bain (Séamus McLean Ross), two… Read More Movie Review: California Schemin’
By John Corrado Digger, the latest film from Birdman and The Revenant filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, stars Tom Cruise in the titular role of Digger Rockwell, an aging Texas oil tycoon. Cruise, appearing in old man makeup, has been the main selling point of Iñárritu’s film. Returning to non-action roles, Digger gives the actor the… Read More Movie Review: Digger
By John Corrado Director Michael Showalter’s Verity, the latest adaptation of a novel by It Ends With Us and Regretting You author Colleen Hoover, is a throwback to the psychological thrillers of the 1990s and 2000s, that themselves were inspired by the films of Brian De Palma who borrowed liberally from Alfred Hitchcock. This leaves… Read More Movie Review: Verity
By John Corrado Focus Features has just put out the first official trailer for Elsinore, fresh off the film winning the International People’s Choice Award at TIFF. Andrew Scott stars in the film as Chariots of Fire actor Ian Charleson, with the film focusing on his performance in a production of Hamlet while he was… Read More Official Trailer for Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott
By John Corrado Perhaps the funniest thing about director John Wilson’s The History of Concrete, the comedian and documentarian’s endearingly offbeat feature debut, is that we actually do learn a lot about concrete by watching the film. Playing in a similar vein to his HBO series How To with John Wilson, Wilson’s film is a… Read More Movie Review: The History of Concrete
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 Sometimes all you need for a movie to work is an old school movie star and a canine companion. Such is the case with Heart of the Beast, the latest film from director David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch), which stars Brad Pitt as a Special Forces officer and his combat dog.… Read More Movie Review: Heart of the Beast
By John Corrado It’s the mid-2000s, right in the middle of the reality TV boom, and Chris Hansen is using his NBC show To Catch a Predator to turn sting operations capturing pedophiles into entertainment. This is the premise behind Primetime, director Lance Oppenheim’s quasi-biopic of Hansen turned stylish, disturbing Nightcrawler-esque thriller. Robert Pattinson stars… Read More Movie Review: Primetime