By John Corrado French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a sweeping romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers reconnecting and being torn apart across moments in time. Bonello’s film is set in a future where AI controls the world, and strong feelings are discouraged. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is undergoing a process to… Read More Movie Review: The Beast
By John Corrado Irena’s Vow dramatizes the inspiring true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nélisse), a Polish nurse who helped shelter a group of Jewish workers during World War II. At a factory in occupied Poland, Irena is put in charge of supervising a group of Jewish workers in the laundry, who wash and… Read More Movie Review: Irena’s Vow
By John Corrado Directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), Sasquatch Sunset is a unique and ambitious indie dramedy that unfolds without dialogue and follows a family of sasquatches living off the land, played by actors in realistic fursuits. There’s the gruff, older patriarch (Nathan Zellner), the mama bear matriarch (Riley… Read More Movie Review: Sasquatch Sunset
By John Corrado In the opening moments of director Kim Albright’s film With Love and a Major Organ (which recently won the award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Fest), Anabel (Anna Maguire) watches as a man stands on a cliff, rips his own heart out of his chest, and throws the glowing… Read More Movie Review: With Love and a Major Organ
By John Corrado Alex Garland’s Civil War, the filmmaker’s visceral near-future portrait of an America on the brink, doesn’t divide things into Red States and Blue States. In fact, the story’s imagined alliance between California and Texas doesn’t even make much sense along current political lines. But this neutral stance is also what makes the… Read More Movie Review: Civil War
By John Corrado Hailey (Em Haine) returns home to the Nova Scotia coast years after walking out on her family in the Canadian dramedy Hailey Rose, which shines a light on a quirky but complicated family. Hailey drolly narrates this complicated family history over a series of flashbacks in the film’s opening sequence. She tells… Read More Movie Review: Hailey Rose
By John Corrado Based on the real life case of the Littlehampton Letters (with an opening title card assuring us that “this is more true than you’d think”), Wicked Little Letters is an amusing trifle set in a small English town in 1920. The story centres around the scandal involving a series of insulting letters… Read More Movie Review: Wicked Little Letters
By John Corrado Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the Italian filmmaker’s latest following The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, is itself a bit of a chimeric creature. The film unfolds with a loose, shifting narrative structure that morphs between magical realism, absurdist comedy and character drama, shone through with a wistful nostalgia for the past. The… Read More Movie Review: La Chimera
By John Corrado A young nun begins to discover ominous things are afoot after arriving in Italy. This is the basic plot of the indie horror film Immaculate released two weeks ago. But it’s also the setup for director Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen. Stevenson’s film serves as a surprisingly solid prequel to The Omen,… Read More Movie Review: The First Omen
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
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