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 Late Night with the Devil is an indie horror film from directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes that is built around the inventive concept of being assembled from the lost tapes from a live TV broadcast of an old 1970s late night talk show. David Dastmalchian stars as Jack Delroy, the old school… Read More Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil
By John Corrado Director Michael Mohan’s new “nunsploitation” flick Immaculate, a passion project for star Sydney Sweeney, seems mainly intended as a throwback to the Italian Giallo genre. But beyond this aesthetic inspiration (Dario Argento is chief among its influences), the film is a mixed bag that lacks some of its own ideas or identity,… Read More Movie Review: Immaculate
By John Corrado Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s previous subjects have included Star Wars fans (The People vs. George Lucas), the shower scene in Psycho (78/52), the movie Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien), and the late director William Friedkin (Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist). Through these works, he has shown a… Read More Movie Review: William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
By John Corrado The latest animated work from co-directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, the filmmakers behind the Oscar-nominated Chico and Rita, They Shot the Piano Player is an ambitious if uneven mix of animation and docudrama. The film opens at the Strand Book Store in New York City, where fictitious music journalist Jeff Harris… Read More Movie Review: They Shot the Piano Player
By John Corrado Director Chris Eyre’s 1998 coming-of-age film Smoke Signals was a landmark for both American indie cinema and Indigenous self-representation, with its Native American cast and crew telling a story featuring authentic characters. Among the film’s cast was Cody Lightning, the child actor who played the younger version of Adam Beach’s lead character… Read More Movie Review: Hey, Viktor!
By John Corrado Jack Black returns as the voice of Po in this fourth instalment of DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda series, which began sixteen years ago now in 2008. It’s easy to say that, by this belated fourth go around, the series is starting to show some wear, and Kung Fu Panda 4 does… Read More Movie Review: Kung Fu Panda 4
By John Corrado Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, the follow-up to 2021’s Dune, is massive filmmaking in every sense. Villeneuve builds upon the first film, completing his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel. The film picks up directly after the events of the first. Following the death of his family on Arrakis at the… Read More Movie Review: Dune: Part Two
By John Corrado The latest work from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, About Dry Grasses is an involving character drama that uses its lengthy running time to absorb us in the lives its of its subjects. The film follows Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a middle-aged… Read More Movie Review: About Dry Grasses
By John Corrado The latest film directed by Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah), the Oscar-nominated International Feature Io Capitano largely serves as a dramatization of the challenges faced by African refugees who make the long, perilous trek to reach the shores of Europe. The film tells the fictional story of Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa… Read More Movie Review: Io Capitano
By John Corrado The feature directorial debut of Canadian filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown, Seagrass is a patient character drama that captures the slow deterioration of a biracial family unit. Judith (Ally Maki) is a Japanese-Canadian woman who is experiencing difficulties in her marriage to non-Asian husband Steve (Luke Roberts). These challenges are amplified by Judith’s mother… Read More Movie Review: Seagrass
By John Corrado The Taste of Things, the latest work from French-Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng who was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes for his work, is a piece of high-class “food porn” mixed with a swooning, bittersweet culinary romance. In the grand tradition of other “foodie” films, The Taste of Things offers many beautifully… Read More Review: The Taste of Things
By John Corrado The Promised Land is a historical drama set in Denmark in the mid-1700s, with director Nikolaj Arcel spinning a near-epic tale out of a humble man trying to carve out his own piece of the land while going up against an arrogant nobleman. The protagonist is Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), who… Read More Review: The Promised Land
By John Corrado British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut How to Have Sex, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at last year’s Cannes, is an often vibrant mix of party movie and subtle social commentary on the post-#MeToo generation. Walker’s film centres around Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), three… Read More Review: How to Have Sex
By John Corrado Fran (Daisy Ridley) is an office worker in Oregon who thinks a lot about dying. She sits in a daze at her cubicle, imagining her dead body decaying in the woods or being hung from the crane outside her window. Fran’s morbid daydreams provide the basis for the title of director Rachel… Read More Review: Sometimes I Think About Dying
By John Corrado The Teachers’ Lounge is Nominated for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards Stolen cash leads to accusations of racial profiling and a growing culture of distrust between faculty and students in director Ilker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated film The Teachers’ Lounge, a tautly executed middle school drama that often moves like a… Read More Review: The Teachers’ Lounge
By John Corrado The latest work from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (the Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin), the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters is a chilling and fascinating study of how radicalization takes hold. The film is formally audacious in its mix of documentary and dramatic reenactments, blending subjects and actors to tell… Read More Review: Four Daughters
By John Corrado Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ artful, unconventional documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood follows a group of women in Southern Estonia, who are gathered together in a traditional smoke sauna hidden deep in the woods. Shot over several years, Hints follows a variety of subjects over the backdrop of changing seasons. As they sit naked… Read More Review: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
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