By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In her latest documentary, Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard explores the efforts to reintroduce herds of wild buffalo to Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Hubbard, who also narrates the film, explores the work of Blackfoot Elder… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: Singing Back the Buffalo
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto In The Here Now Project, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel offer a portrait of increasingly severe weather conditions attributed to climate change, culled together from thousands of hours of videos shot by regular people over the… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: The Here Now Project
By John Corrado The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto When Afghanistan fell back to the Taliban after the United States withdrawal in 2021, women almost immediately lost all of the progress that they had slowly made in the country. Girls weren’t allowed to continue school, and… Read More #HotDocs24 Review: An Unfinished Journey
By John Corrado The stop-motion animated movie The Inventor is best described as an elaborate, lovingly crafted tribute to old school Rankin/Bass specials, inspired by the final years of Leonardo da Vinci’s life. The film begins in Rome circa 1515, where da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry) is a kooky inventor with a long white… Read More Movie Review: The Inventor
By John Corrado The latest Earth Day release from Disneynature, Tiger takes us deep into the mythical forests of India to follow Ambar, a mama tiger trying to protect her four cubs. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jones, the film follows Ambar and her litter of adorable cubs from birth, as their mother takes them to… Read More Movie Review: Disneynature’s Tiger (Disney+)
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 Irena’s Vow dramatizes the inspiring true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nélisse), a Polish nurse who helped shelter a group of Jewish workers during World War II. At a factory in occupied Poland, Irena is put in charge of supervising a group of Jewish workers in the laundry, who wash and… Read More Movie Review: Irena’s Vow
By John Corrado Directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), Sasquatch Sunset is a unique and ambitious indie dramedy that unfolds without dialogue and follows a family of sasquatches living off the land, played by actors in realistic fursuits. There’s the gruff, older patriarch (Nathan Zellner), the mama bear matriarch (Riley… Read More Movie Review: Sasquatch Sunset
By John Corrado We’ve all heard of haunted houses, but how about a haunted swimming pool? That’s the premise behind the Blumhouse horror movie Night Swim, which introduces us to the unique concept of a family being terrorized by a cursed pool in their new backyard. The film centres around the Waller family. Ray Waller… Read More Blu-ray Review: Night Swim (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing… Read More Movie Review: With Love and a Major Organ
By John Corrado Alex Garland’s Civil War, the filmmaker’s visceral near-future portrait of an America on the brink, doesn’t divide things into Red States and Blue States. In fact, the story’s imagined alliance between California and Texas doesn’t even make much sense along current political lines. But this neutral stance is also what makes the… Read More Movie Review: Civil War
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
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
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 young nun begins to discover ominous things are afoot after arriving in Italy. This is the basic plot of the indie horror film Immaculate released two weeks ago. But it’s also the setup for director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen. Stevenson’s film serves as a surprisingly solid prequel to The Omen,… Read More Movie Review: The First Omen
By John Corrado The latest and possibly final film from British director Ken Loach, The Old Oak is another poignant social realist drama exploring themes of unrest in modern England, this time centred around the migrant crisis. Done in his usual neorealist style, the film focuses on the clash between a group of Syrian immigrants… Read More Movie Review: The Old Oak
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 A follow up to the 2021 legacy sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife (which was itself a course correction from the misguided 2016 reboot), Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the latest film in the franchise that began forty years ago. It’s safe to say that all of these films have been chasing the high of the… Read More Movie Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
By John Corrado This sequel to the 1997 Nickelodeon kids comedy Good Burger finds Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell reprising their roles as Dex and Ed, the two dudes who work at the eponymous burger joint. In Good Burger 2 (a Paramount+ Original Movie), Dex is now an aspiring entrepreneur whose business ideas all have… Read More DVD Review: Good Burger 2
By John Corrado The 2024 Canadian Film Fest runs from March 18th to 23rd, with films screening in-person at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. The latest collaboration between director Sean Garrity and star Jonas Chernick, The Burning Season is a simmering romantic drama with a dark secret at its centre that starts at the end and… Read More Canadian Film Fest Review: The Burning Season (Closing Night Film)
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