By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Documentary filmmaker Elegance Bratton makes his narrative directorial debut with The Inspection, a good autobiographical drama that he wrote based on his own experiences as a young gay black man joining the Marine Corps to try… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Inspection (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title of Sisu, the latest from Finnish genre filmmaker Jalmari Helander (whose previous films Rare Exports and Big Game have become cult classics), comes from a hard to translate word that essentially means a form… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Sisu (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. “Weird Al” Yankovic is the undisputed king of parody songs, and now he gets the biopic treatment in director Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. But, in true Yankovic fashion, this is less a biopic… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The second feature from Canadian filmmaker Lindsay MacKay, following her very good (and equally memorably titled) debut Wet Bum, The Swearing Jar is an ambitiously structured romantic drama that grabs us right from the opening scene;… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The Swearing Jar (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Josh (Jonas Chernick) and Emma (Emily Hampshire) are a married couple with two kids who realize they have lost the sexual spark in their marriage. So when their daughters are away for a week at winter… Read More #TIFF22 Review: The End of Sex (Contemporary World Cinema)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Something You Said Last Night, the evocative debut film from writer-director Luis De Filippis, follows an Italian-Canadian family on vacation in a beach town. Ren (Carmen Madonia) and her younger sister Siena (Paige Evans) are spending… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Something You Said Last Night (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The debut film from writer-director Sophie Jarvis, Until Branches Bend is an engaging character study of Robin (Grace Glowicki), a cannery worker in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Robin’s job is to grade peaches, but her life… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Until Branches Bend (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The title character in Rosie, the feature debut of Métis filmmaker Gail Maurice, is an Indigenous girl (Keris Hope Hill) living in Montreal in the 1980s, who gets taken in by her Francophone aunt Frédèrique (Mélanie… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Rosie (Discovery)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Broker, the latest family drama from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda working in Korea for the first time, opens in the dead of night with new mother So-young (Lee Ji-eun) leaving her baby in a box for… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Broker (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. Ruben Östlund is a filmmaker known for satirically taking aim at any number of targets, ranging from traditional gender roles to class divides and elite society folks, skewering them all through his darkly comic films. And… Read More #TIFF22 Review: Triangle of Sadness (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th. The feature directorial debut of Chandler Levack, a film critic for the Globe and Mail, I Like Movies is the story of Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), a 17-year-old cinephile in Burlington, ON circa 2002, who dreams… Read More #TIFF22 Review: I Like Movies (Discovery)
The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8th to 18th, and you can keep it right here for all of your TIFF coverage, including reviews of some of the hottest titles at this year’s festival! This post will serve as the main directory of all my #TIFF22 coverage, and will be updated as more… Read More Welcome to #TIFF22! (Review Directory)
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Disney’s new version of Pinocchio, which is being released direct to streaming as part of this year’s Disney+ Day programming, is the studio’s latest live action remake of a beloved animated classic, and it’s maybe the weakest one they have put out yet. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, who… Read More Disney+ Review: Pinocchio
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Minions: The Rise of Gru is a sequel to the 2015 film Minions, which was itself a prequel to the three Despicable Me films, showing the origins of those little yellow guys who speak gibberish and have taken the world by storm. And, five films deep into this… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Minions: The Rise of Gru (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a follow up to the hit 2020 film that brought the iconic SEGA video game character to the big screen, and it does what a sequel should do. It’s a bit bigger in scope, introduces a few new characters, and even leaves things… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Sonic the Hedgehog 2
By John Corrado In 1987, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello reunited for Back to the Beach, a lighthearted and surprisingly enjoyable tribute to the “beach movies” that made them teen idols over two decades earlier in the 1960s. The film, which Paramount recently released for the first time on Blu-ray, finds Avalon and Funicello playing… Read More Blu-ray Review: Back to the Beach (1987)
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Carmen, the third feature from writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, is a Canadian-Maltese co-production (it closed the Canadian Film Fest earlier this year) that is set in a small village in Malta. The title character, Carmen (Natasha McElhone), is the sister of the local priest (Henry Zammit Cordina), whose life… Read More Review: Carmen
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Please note that there are spoilers for the 2009 film Orphan in this review. The idea of making a prequel to the 2009 film Orphan thirteen years after the fact with lead actress Isabelle Fuhrman, who was a child at the time and is now in her mid-20s, reprising… Read More Review: Orphan: First Kill
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Emily (Aubrey Plaza), the central character in the aptly titled Sundance crime drama Emily the Criminal, is a young woman in Los Angeles whose designation as a law-breaker is one that she seemingly can’t escape from. The opening scene finds her being blindsided by a job interviewer who tries… Read More Review: Emily the Criminal
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)
The Joy of Movies 