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 Black Bag is the new sexy spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, with an ensemble cast of characters dealing with the prospect of a double agent in their midst while navigating their own personal relationships. Michael Fassbender stars as George Woodhouse, an English spy married to fellow agent Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In… Read More Movie Review: Black Bag
By John Corrado The latest Toronto-set psychodrama from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils reimagines the opera Salome through the lens of trauma and the #MeToo movement. It’s also perhaps The Sweet Hereafter filmmaker’s strongest late-career effort. Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is a young theatre director who is hired by the Canadian Opera Company to remount the… Read More Movie Review: Seven Veils
By John Corrado Director Alex Parkinson dramatizes his own 2019 documentary of the same name in Last Breath, a decent survival thriller following a group of deep sea divers rescuing a trapped crew mate. The first act is all about introducing the characters, a group of saturation divers repairing a stretch of pipeline deep below… Read More Movie Review: Last Breath
By John Corrado Fresh off the surprise success of serial killer thriller Longlegs, director Osgood Perkins now returns with a different kind of horror movie in The Monkey. This time it’s a horror comedy, adapted from a Stephen King short story of the same name. Re-teaming with Longlegs distributor NEON, Perkins’ latest finds him playing… Read More Movie Review: The Monkey
By John Corrado Captain America: Brave New World is the fourth Captain America film, serving as the big screen debut of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) donning the red, white and blue vibranium shield that got passed to him by Chris Evans’ now-retired version of the character. In that way, this 35th film in the Marvel… Read More Movie Review: Captain America: Brave New World
By John Corrado At 94 years old, and over five decades into a directing career that includes two Best Picture Oscar winners (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby), actor-turned-filmmaker Clint Eastwood has proven himself to be the steadiest of hands behind the camera. The courtroom drama Juror #2 is now Eastwood’s 40th film as director, and… Read More Blu-ray Review: Juror #2
By John Corrado The second feature from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, following his highly stylized Mackenzie King biopic The Twentieth Century, Universal Language is an absurdist dramedy set in an alternate version of Manitoba where everybody speaks Farsi instead of English. It’s a farcical, high-concept setup that the director not only fully commits himself to (even the signs… Read More Movie Review: Universal Language
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the 4K Ultra HD release of Wicked. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my full review right here. After becoming a box office hit over the holidays, director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked is now… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Wicked
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 Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the lead character in British writer-director Mike Leigh’s new movie Hard Truths, is a bitter woman with a chip perpetually on her shoulder. She is miserable every time she steps out into the world, but not much happier at home either, where she is constantly nagging after husband… Read More Movie Review: Hard Truths
By John Corrado Flight Risk is the new movie directed by Mel Gibson. It’s the actor-turned-filmmaker’s first since the World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge in 2016, which provided a stunning Hollywood comeback for him when he received a Best Director Oscar nomination. Gibson’s latest is also his most constrained and straight-forward directorial effort yet;… Read More Movie Review: Flight Risk
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 It’s rare to come across a film that feels like it is reinventing the form. Yet, in bringing Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys to the screen, director RaMell Ross takes a radically new approach to adapting a novel; he presents the entire film from the perspective of his characters, through unique,… Read More Movie Review: Nickel Boys
By John Corrado Please note that this is a review of the 4K Ultra HD release of The Wild Robot. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my TIFF review right here. Last month, DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot was released on 4K Ultra HD. Adapted from Peter Brown’s book, the… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: The Wild Robot (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado The British inventor and his pantomime dog return in Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the second feature-length outing for the characters following 2005’s Oscar-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Co-directed by series creator Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, this charming and funny new adventure for the stop-motion man and dog… Read More Movie Review: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Netflix)
By John Corrado Director Maura Delpero’s Vermgilio, Italy’s International Feature submission for the Oscars, is set at the end of World War II in 1944, but the war is happening entirely offscreen. Instead, this is a slow-burn slice-of-life portrait of a large family in the mountain village of Vermiglio. The patriarch of the family is Cesare… Read More Movie Review: Vermiglio
By John Corrado Director James Mangold arguably perfected the modern biopic structure with Walk the Line, his Oscar-winning 2005 portrait of country singer Johnny Cash. Mangold now returns to this genre and time period with his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (in fact, Cash is even featured here as well, as a contemporary of Dylan’s). Dylan, one… Read More Movie Review: A Complete Unknown
By John Corrado Wicked is the long-in-development film adaptation of the Broadway musical from over two decades ago, with director Jon M. Chu (In the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) finally bringing this Wizard of Oz prequel story to the screen. Well, Act One of it anyways; the film is a two-parter, with Act Two (officially… Read More Movie Review: Wicked
By John Corrado Nosferatu is the fourth film from director Robert Eggers, and it finds him reimagining F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionist film of the same name from 1922. This passion project from Eggers has shades of his 2015 debut The Witch, but on a much larger scale. Whether you view this as a remake of the Murnau… Read More Movie Review: Nosferatu
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