By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) Firestarter is the second adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 novel of the same name, following the 1984 film that starred a young Drew Barrymore. This Blumhouse-produced remake is intended as a modern upgrade, but it’s actually one of the blandest King adaptations, struggling to, well, get any sort… Read More Blu-ray Review: Firestarter (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), Prey is the fifth instalment in the Predator franchise (seventh if you count the spinoffs Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem). The twist is that it’s actually a prequel to the 1987 original, that is set in the Comanche… Read More Disney+ Review: Prey
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Mr. Malcolm’s List is a romantic dramedy set in the 1800s that mainly serves as a sincere tribute to Jane Austen (I would say “fan fiction,” but that perhaps has a more negative connotation than what I wish to convey here), offering a fairly enjoyable entry into the… Read More VOD Review: Mr. Malcolm’s List
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Ali & Ava, the latest film from British writer-director Clio Barnard, is a low-key love story between Ali (Adeel Akhtar) and Ava (Claire Rushbrook), two lonely working class folks in the United Kingdom who come from different backgrounds (him British-Pakistani and her Irish-born), but form a close bond… Read More Review: Ali & Ava
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum team up in the romantic adventure comedy The Lost City, and it’s an example of a film that is actually surprisingly kinda good, simply because it delivers exactly what we want. Bullock’s Loretta Sage is a romance novelist, who has channelled her genuine… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: The Lost City
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nope, the third film written and directed by Jordan Peele, completes the trifecta of modern genre movies that he started with Get Out and Us, and continues his winning streak as a filmmaker. While it’s worth addressing up front that Nope doesn’t have the same type of social… Read More Review: Nope
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Michael Bay’s Ambulance is a refreshingly back-to-basics film from the director, that sees him stepping away from the increasing tedium of the Transformers franchise to offer a fairly straight forward but entertaining chase movie set on the streets of Los Angeles. The film still features the over the… Read More Blu-ray Review: Ambulance (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado Please note that this is primarily a review of the Blu-ray release. For my full thoughts on the film itself, you can read my original theatrical review of The Northman right here. Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, one of the best movies of the year so far, is being released on… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Northman (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) DreamWorks Animation’s The Bad Guys, adapted from the book series by Aaron Blabey, is an animated heist movie that riffs on everything from Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction and the Ocean’s Eleven movies. And it’s a lot of fun. Filled with car chases, twists, and double crossings galore,… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: The Bad Guys (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado This week, Paramount is releasing a new 25th anniversary SteelBook edition of the 1997 kids comedy Good Burger, the second movie produced by Nickelodeon. A feature length spinoff from the Nickelodeon sketch comedy series All That, the film became a modest hit at the box office when it was first released in… Read More Blu-ray Review: Good Burger: 25th Anniversary (SteelBook Edition)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) How does Netflix take a $200 million budget, a couple of movie stars, and the directors behind some of the biggest movies of all time, and make something as bland as The Gray Man? That’s the question audiences will be left with after watching this latest film from… Read More Review: The Gray Man
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third film in the Harry Potter prequel series that began with the entertaining Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2016, and already saw diminished returns with the 2018 sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. The third time’s… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens with a tennis ball rolling around and bouncing down the stairs. We soon learn that our pint-sized protagonist Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a one-inch tall shell wearing pink sneakers who will steal our hearts over the next ninety minutes, is… Read More Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latest puzzle piece in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the fourth solo film for Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and it very much plays in the same vein as its direct predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok. Waititi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, builds… Read More Review: Thor: Love and Thunder
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film from director John Michael McDonagh (older brother of Martin McDonagh), The Forgiven is a talky moral drama that offers a bleak as hell look at rich, bourgeois society folks colliding with the locals in North Africa. Adapting the 2012 novel of the same name by… Read More Review: The Forgiven
By John Corrado Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing The First Wives Club for the first time on Blu-ray this week, a 1996 comedy that has gained a following over the years. The film follows Annie (Diane Keaton), Elise (Goldie Hawn) and Brenda (Bette Midler), three former college friends who decide to get back at their… Read More Blu-ray Review: The First Wives Club (1996)
By John Corrado In honour of the film’s 30th anniversary this year, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing the hit 1992 Eddie Murphy romantic comedy Boomerang for the first time on Blu-ray this week. Murphy stars in the film as Marcus Graham, a successful advertising executive and notorious womanizer in New York City with obscenely high… Read More Blu-ray Review: Boomerang (1992)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker who turned the words of William Shakespeare into the most ’90s movie imaginable in his 1996 film Romeo & Juliet and last delivered a glitzy 3D take on The Great Gatsby in 2013, is a director who is known as much for his… Read More Review: Elvis
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) is a retired religious ethics teacher in her fifties who hires a male escort named Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) for a series of sexual encounters in a hotel room, in the Sundance drama Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Nancy’s husband, the only man… Read More Review: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Directors Jono Bergmann and Benji Bergmann deliver a glossy portrait of Canadian designer Bruce Mau in their aptly titled Mau, a stylish, slickly assembled documentary that is befitting of the man himself. The film takes us through the highlights of Mau’s career, including first getting noticed with the… Read More VOD Review: Mau
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