By John Corrado Named for the Jonathan Edwards country song, which gives you some idea of the tone the film is going for, Carolina Caroline is the story of Caroline (Samara Weaving), a Texas girl looking for a way out of her dead end town. She finds it in a drifter con man (Kyle Gallner)… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Carolina Caroline (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In her sophomore feature Blood Lines, Métis writer, director, and actress Gail Maurice (Rosie) crafts a family melodrama steeped in Métis culture. This cultural specificity is the main point of intrigue for Maurice’s film, which is also presented largely in the traditional Michif language. The main character is Beatrice (Dana Solomon), a… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Blood Lines (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado The latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook, following up the gauzy, neo-noir, romantic mystery of 2022’s stunning Decision to Leave, No Other Choice is a wildly entertaining film that moves so seamlessly between dark comedy, drama, and murderous thriller, that it seems to defy genre itself. The story centres around Man-soo… Read More #TIFF50 Review: No Other Choice (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado There is something objectively funny about Canadian filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson using the money and industry cred that he received from his 2023 movie BlackBerry to make Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, an idiosyncratic and gloriously entertaining big screen resurrection of his cult web series from 2008. In doing… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The Canadian genre film Honey Bunch serves as both the latest collaboration between actors and real life partners Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, and the sophomore feature from co-directors Madeline Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli. In their debut film, the ultra-gritty revenge thriller Violation, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli showed an appetite for extreme violence.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Honey Bunch (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, formerly imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi crafts another complex and involving portrait of modern day Iran. The film follows a group of people who find themselves at the centre of a moral dilemma, when a worker named Vahid (Vahid… Read More #TIFF50 Review: It Was Just an Accident (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado In his mixing of paranoid espionage thriller and absurdist dark comedy, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a culturally specific portrait of his country in the late 1970s in The Secret Agent, seen through the eyes of a man on the run during the waning days of the military dictatorship. The man… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Secret Agent (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado A man gets off the subway and tries to exit the station. But every time he turns a corner, he ends up back in the same place, stuck in a seemingly endless loop. This is the premise behind the Japanese film Exit 8, a fun and suspenseful little puzzle box thriller from… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Exit 8 (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado Director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât opens on a memorably cinematic scene as a group of outcasts hold a rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert. We see evocative images of massive speakers being set up in the desert, as bodies bop and gyrate in time to the blaring techno music, the beat… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sirât (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Sentimental Value is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s followup to his 2021 modern classic The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. If Worst Person was about a quarter-life crisis and searching for meaning in your twenties, Sentimental Value aims for something even more ambitious in scope.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sentimental Value (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado The Long Walk is the long-awaited film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novella of the same name, an early work by the author that became part of a 1985 short story collection published under the pen name Richard Bachman. That that collection also included The Running Man and Rage, a school shooting story… Read More Movie Review: The Long Walk
By John Corrado Splitsville is the new relationship comedy from director Michael Angelo Covino and his real life friend Kyle Marvin. The two previously teamed up to make the 2020 film The Climb, a portrait of male friendship told with impressive technical precision through a series of long takes and fluid camerawork. Covino and Marvin… Read More Movie Review: Splitsville
By John Corrado Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, is now available on physical media, following its run in theatres earlier this summer. Benicio Del Toro stars in Anderson’s latest as Zsa-zsa Korda, a corrupt businessman who decides to appoint his only daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) – a young nun – as the sole… Read More Blu-ray Review: The Phoenician Scheme
By John Corrado Ne Zha II is the Chinese blockbuster that became the highest grossing animated film of all time, beating the record previously set by Inside Out 2 just last year, almost entirely from what it grossed in China alone. The film had previously been released in North American theatres earlier this year, and now we… Read More Movie Review: Ne Zha II
By John Corrado Honey Don’t! is the second solo film from director Ethan Coen, who first split from his brother Joel to make last year’s crime comedy Drive-Away Dolls, a collaboration with his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke. This latest, which was also co-written by Coen and Cooke and is the second in their planned… Read More Movie Review: Honey Don’t!
By John Corrado The live-action remake of DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon was a slam-dunk hit at the box office earlier this summer, and now it’s available on physical media, including 4K Ultra HD. I reviewed this one in theatres (you can read my full thoughts on the film here), and was somewhat pleasantly… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: How to Train Your Dragon (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado Bob Odenkirk returns as contract killer and family man Hutch Mansell in Nobody 2, the pretty good sequel to the 2021 pandemic-era action flick that did modestly well in theatres and found even more of an audience on VOD. And this slightly higher-budgeted followup kinda feels like an old school action movie… Read More Movie Review: Nobody 2
By John Corrado Weapons, the ambitious new horror movie from director Zach Cregger who burst onto the scene with Barbarian in 2022, opens with a killer hook. One night, at 2:17am, seventeen kids all woke up, got out of bed, walked out their front doors, and disappeared. At the start of the film, we see… Read More Movie Review: Weapons
By John Corrado My Mother’s Wedding, which actually premiered at TIFF two years ago under the original title North Star, is the directorial debut of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who also appears in the film as the titular mother getting married. But this uneven comedy-drama mainly focuses on her character Diana Frost’s three adult daughters;… Read More Movie Review: My Mother’s Wedding
By John Corrado A belated sequel to Disney’s 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter who switch places with each other, could have easily gone off the rails. Especially since that film was already a remake of an earlier movie from 1976 (starring Jodie Foster),… Read More Movie Review: Freakier Friday
The Joy of Movies 