By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto The provocative title of My Boyfriend the Fascist refers to the relationship between self-identified left-wing Italian filmmaker Matthias Lintner and his Cuban boyfriend Sadiel Gonzalez, a right-wing activist fighting communist influences. Lintner’s film takes a verite approach,… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: My Boyfriend the Fascist
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In her documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, director Shoshannah Stern crafts an engaging, intimate portrait of actress Marlee Matlin, who become the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar for her lead performance in the 1986… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto The title of #skoden refers to an Indigenous phrase that is the shorthand of “let’s go, then” said with an Indigenous accent. The saying became immortalized as a meme through a viral image of a Blackfoot man… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: #skoden
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto In their documentary Marriage Cops, co-directors Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess take us inside a police station in northern India, where a team of female officers provide marriage counselling to couples experiencing marital problems. It’s a way… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Marriage Cops
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Shot on luminous 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is a portrait of Agatha Bock, a subject who, in her mid-eighties, is proudly carrying on the traditions of rural farm living in southern Manitoba. The film is directed by… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Agatha’s Almanac
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Ai Weiwei’s Turandot looks at the Chinese artist and activist’s modern re-staging of Puccini’s opera at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. The film opens with the quote “everything is art, everything is politics,” before dramatic footage from… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Ai Weiwei’s Turandot
By John Corrado The 2025 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24th to May 4th in Toronto Director Noam Gonick’s documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, which opens this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, looks at the history of gay rights in Canada, and the origins of our country’s first Pride Parades as… Read More #HotDocs25 Review: Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance
By John Corrado Disneynature’s Earth Day releases have been an annual tradition since 2009, when the studio released Earth. The films have since shifted away from being theatrical releases and migrated to being released direct to streaming on Disney Plus, but the tradition remains largely the same. In Sea Lions of the Galapagos, the latest… Read More Movie Review: Sea Lions of the Galapagos (Disney+)
By John Corrado A contemporary remake of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name, The Wedding Banquet is a queer crowdpleaser that could best be described as a modern screwball comedy. This updated version focuses on two same-sex couples, instead of just one, and moves the setting to Seattle. But the basic setup… Read More Movie Review: The Wedding Banquet
By John Corrado Actor Michael Angarano directs and stars in Sacramento, a dramedy about masculinity and fatherhood that hits a lot of the expected beats, but still has enough of a scrappy charm to it. Angarano stars as Rickey, an immature man-child in LA who has recently lost his father, when he comes crashing back… Read More Movie Review: Sacramento
By John Corrado Disney has just released the first trailer for Tron: Ares, the long-awaited follow up to the 2010 legacy sequel Tron: Legacy. This one concerns a computer program, Ares, getting loose in the real world. A sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 film Tron, Tron: Legacy was a visually dazzling experience with an awesome… Read More First Trailer for Disney’s Tron: Ares
By John Corrado The Luckiest Man in America is the based-on-a-true-story tale of Michael Larson (played by Paul Walter Hauser), an ice cream truck driver from Ohio who had an incredible winning streak on the game show Press Your Luck in the 1980s. Like other contemporary films about live TV from a similar era such… Read More Movie Review: The Luckiest Man in America
By John Corrado Director James Griffiths’ entirely enjoyable dramedy The Ballad of Wallis Island opens with musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) arriving on the remote Wallis Island to play what he believes is an intimate solo gig. Herb is formerly one half of the fictional folk music duo McGwyer & Mortimer, and has been brought… Read More Movie Review: The Ballad of Wallis Island
By John Corrado DreamWorks Animation has always had two modes, which is what allows the studio to balance prestige animated films with more cartoony efforts. So for every How to Train Your Dragon, there’s a Boss Baby. This is why the studio is able to so effortlessly follow up a great film like last year’s… Read More Blu-ray Review: Dog Man (Collector’s Edition 2000)
By John Corrado Love Hurts is a new romantic action comedy that is mainly set up as a star vehicle for recent supporting actor Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. Quan, of course, is the former child star of The Goonies and Temple of Doom who won Best Supporting Actor for his big… Read More Blu-ray Review: Love Hurts (Collector’s Edition)
By John Corrado In her feature debut, the crowd-pleasing dramedy Bob Trevino Likes It, writer-director Tracie Laymon crafts a surprisingly tender portrait of an unlikely friendship, drawn from her own life. Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is a bubbly but insecure young woman who has a strained relationship with her self-absorbed father Robert (French Stewart). When… Read More Movie Review: Bob Trevino Likes It
By John Corrado Warner Bros. has just released the first trailer for One Battle After Another, the highly anticipated new film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. Leonardo DiCaprio leads the stacked cast, which also includes Regina Hall, Benicio Del Toro and Teyana Taylor, with Sean Penn as the neo-Nazi antagonist in what is reported to… Read More First Trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another
By John Corrado When Magazine Dreams premiered at Sundance in 2023, it was touted as a defining role for Jonathan Majors, who was instantly in the Oscar conversation when Searchlight Pictures picked up the film and positioned it for an awards run. And then everything fell apart. Majors was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend (and… Read More Movie Review: Magazine Dreams
By John Corrado Disney has built a reliable business model over the past decade around creating live-action remakes of their various animated classics. The latest such film is Snow White, their beleaguered reimagining of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which holds an extra special place in the studio’s history as their first ever… Read More Movie Review: Disney’s Snow White
By John Corrado Director Leigh Whannell is no stranger to taking horror properties and turning them into domestic dramas, having already followed this model in his 2020 film The Invisible Man. Now Whannell and producer Jason Blum shift their attention to another one of the Universal Classic Monsters in Wolf Man, turning the lycanthropic tale… Read More 4K Ultra HD Review: Wolf Man (Collector’s Edition)
The Joy of Movies 