By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Kenny Loggins is the latest musical artist to get a career retrospective in the form of a documentary. Directed by Dori Berinstein, Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart is a portrait of the musician, who scored massive… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kenny Loggins: Conviction of the Heart
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto Quebec filmmaker Jean-François Caissy’s Kindergarten unfolds almost like a nature documentary, only we are following human children instead of animals. Caissy’s film is set in a daycare centre in Quebec, and his approach involves just putting a… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Kindergarten
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The latest film from Canadian documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich (The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, Born Hungry), This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino serves as a polished biographical portrait of a man who… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In the slice-of-life documentary On My Own Terms, director Tadeusz Chudy follows teenaged half-siblings Pawel and Julka, who are living together at an orphanage in Poland. Pawel is a promising young boxer, whose coach sees a lot… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: On My Own Terms
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto When Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police in Iran for violating the country’s mandatory hijab laws, and later died in custody, her death sparked the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement when activists would risk and in… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: A War on Women
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The world is facing a loneliness epidemic, with people starved for connection but struggling to meet each other in real life. Dating apps are filling that void, but come with their own set of challenges; these apps… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Love Apptually
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto In their documentary Gimme Truth, co-directors Simon Ennis and Brad Abrahams explore modern conspiracy theories, by introducing us to a variety of subjects who believe in them. Their views range from vaccine skeptics to 9/11 truthers. These… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Gimme Truth
By John Corrado The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto The documentary Nekai Walks opens with a beat-by-beat account of the night that Nekai Foster got shot in the head in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood. It was summer, and he was walking home from playing basketball,… Read More #HotDocs26 Review: Nekai Walks
By John Corrado Titled after the Polish word for “eruption,” as in “volcanic,” Erupcja is an indie movie travelogue set in Poland, that provides a scrappy portrait of modern friendship and relationships, starring none other than pop star Charli XCX. The story follows Charli XCX’s Bethany, a British woman who is on vacation in Warsaw… Read More Movie Review: Erupcja
By John Corrado The tagline for Mother Mary, the latest film from writer-director David Lowery, is “this is not a ghost story.” It’s a bit of a misnomer, because Mother Mary arguably is one. But it does cleverly differentiate this bold effort from Lowery’s low-key, experimental 2017 film A Ghost Story, an understated gem which… Read More Movie Review: Mother Mary
By John Corrado Orangutan is the latest Earth Day release from Disneynature, a tradition that now stretches back over fifteen years. This one follows Indah, a 9-year-old orangutan (we are told that makes her a teenager in human years) in the jungles of Southeast Asia, living with her mother Diann and new baby brother Bimo.… Read More Movie Review: Disneynature’s Orangutan (Disney+)
By John Corrado Amidst the modern biopic boom, the Michael Jackson biopic has finally arrived. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer trilogy, Training Day), and starring the late King of Pop’s real life nephew Jaafar Jackson, who is uncanny as his uncle, Michael is about the rise of Michael Jackson, and really only the rise.… Read More Movie Review: Michael
By John Corrado Director Gore Verbinski’s sci-fi time travel action comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is one of the better movies of the year so far, and it’s now being given a physical media release this week. Sam Rockwell stars in the film as a man claiming to be from the future, who… Read More Blu-ray Review: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
By John Corrado In Mile End Kicks, the very enjoyable sophomore feature from former Toronto film critic Chandler Levack following her excellent directorial debut I Like Movies, we follow a young music critic trying to figure things out in her early twenties. In many ways, Mike End Kicks plays like a companion piece to I… Read More Movie Review: Mile End Kicks
By John Corrado Universal Pictures has just put out the first trailer for Focker-in-Law, which was first unveiled tonight at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. This is the sequel to popular comedies Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, and it’s written and directed by John Hamburg, who co-wrote the previous three. This fourth… Read More First Trailer for Focker-in-Law
By John Corrado As a documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville has focused on a variety of celebrity subjects, from Mister Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? to Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner. And, in his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom, he brought backup singers into the spotlight. The subject of Neville’s latest film is another behind the… Read More Movie Review: Lorne
By John Corrado Ryan Gosling received his first Oscar nomination two decades ago for playing a school teacher in the indie drama Half Nelson. Now, Gosling is playing a teacher once again in the sci-fi blockbuster Project Hail Mary, which finds the Canadian actor delivering one of his very best performances. Adapted from the novel… Read More Movie Review: Project Hail Mary
By John Corrado The indie dramedy Fantasy Life serves as the impressive feature directorial debut of actor Matthew Shear, doing quadruple duty as writer, director, executive producer, and star. Shear stars in the film as Sam, an anxious young Jewish man in New York City who, in no short order, gets laid off from his… Read More Movie Review: Fantasy Life
By John Corrado The Drama, the latest film from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, starts off feeling like a typical indie rom-com, complete with a coffee shop “meet-cute” between our protagonists Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) and Emma Harwood (Zendaya). But there’s something off about it. And if you’ve seen Borgli’s previous films Dream Scenario and Sick… Read More Movie Review: The Drama
By John Corrado In his previous documentary, the Oscar-winning 2022 film Navalny, Toronto filmmaker Daniel Roher presented a thrilling portrait of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Now Roher turns his attention to the equally timely topic of artificial intelligence in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Roher’s latest, which he… Read More Movie Review: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
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