By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Director Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia offers a compelling glimpse inside North Korea, through the eyes of those who risk their lives trying to escape the country. The real pull of Gavin’s film is the secret, handheld footage shot by defectors themselves, showing us the perilous journey that… Read More Review: Beyond Utopia
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the writer-director’s best film since Lost in Translation, is a biopic of Priscilla Presley that focuses on her relationship to Elvis, offering an unglamorous but authentic look at their troubled romance. In its own way, Priscilla also serves as the subdued, melancholic counterpart to the… Read More Review: Priscilla
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Following his Old Hollywood passion project Mank, director David Fincher returns to the thriller genre with The Killer, a slickly crafted adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s French graphic novel exploring the daily grind of a professional assassin. Fincher’s film opens with its unnamed titular assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) staying… Read More Review: The Killer
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) After completing his Halloween trilogy last year with the divisive Halloween Ends, director David Gordon Green now sets his sights on rebooting another classic horror property with The Exorcist: Believer, though the results are largely disappointing this time around. Like Green’s 2018 legacy sequel Halloween, The Exorcist: Believer positions… Read More Review: The Exorcist: Believer
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Persian Version, which premiered at Sundance in January, finds writer-director Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance) dipping into her own background as an Iranian-American woman to craft an enjoyable, ambitious mother-daughter dramedy. The film centres around Leila (Layla Mohammadi), an Iranian-American aspiring filmmaker living in New York City. She has… Read More Review: The Persian Version
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is already one of the biggest selling concert tours of all time, a massive juggernaut that has generated billions of dollars in profits, providing a boost to local economies wherever she goes. The success of this tour one hundred percent speaks to the cultural… Read More Review: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The new English-language short film from writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, Strange Way of Life is an enjoyable queer Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal that serves as the Spanish filmmaker’s “answer” to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which he was offered to direct but declined. The short, which premiered… Read More Review: Strange Way of Life
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The latest film from New York writer-director Rebecca Miller (her first since Maggie’s Plan in 2015), She Came to Me is an absurd, operatic melodrama that takes the bones of a romantic comedy and remixes it into a sort of soap opera. The result is somewhat of an… Read More Review: She Came to Me
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) In the Canadian time travel comedy Relax, I’m From the Future, New Zealand comedian Rhys Darby is delightfully able to take centre stage as Casper, a time traveller from an unspecified point in the future, who lands back in the 2020s. The title comes from Casper’s reassurance to… Read More Review: Relax, I’m From the Future
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Solo, which recently won the Best Canadian Film prize at TIFF, is a character drama set in Montreal’s drag scene. In her third feature, Quebec writer-director Sophie Dupuis (Family First, Underground) captivatingly explores the dynamics between the performers at a Montreal gay bar. The film centres around the… Read More Review: Solo
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The rescue pups are back for another big screen adventure in PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, a worthy sequel to 2021’s surprisingly good PAW Patrol: The Movie. This new spinoff film from the popular Canadian children’s TV series and toys, which serves as another co-production between Nickelodeon, Paramount… Read More Review: PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Nearly twenty years after the original Saw in 2004, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) returns in Saw X, the tenth film in the franchise that somewhat cleverly serves as a sort of “midquel” by positioning itself between the events of Saw and Saw II. There is only so much… Read More Review: Saw X
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here. An older man wakes up in the morning and gets ready for work. He tenderly mists his houseplants before leaving his modest home, and listens… Read More #TIFF23 Review: Perfect Days (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The title of Dreamin’ Wild, the new music drama from writer-director Bill Pohlad, comes from the name of an album first recorded by teenage brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson on their rural Washington farm in the late 1970s. The album flew under the radar, before finding unexpected success… Read More Review: Dreamin’ Wild
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Ben Kingsley stars in the film Jules as Milton Robinson, an aging eccentric who befriends an alien that crash lands in his backyard, and invites the humanoid creature into his home out of loneliness and isolation. This results in an odd but mostly weirdly endearing little film that… Read More Review: Jules
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Spanish-French thriller The Beasts (As Bestas), which premiered at Cannes last year, follows a French couple living in the Galician countryside who end up clashing up against the locals. Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and his wife Olga (Marina Foïs) are older expatriates from France who have set up… Read More Review: The Beasts
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest from American indie film director Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, Little Men), which premiered at Sundance and was the opening night film at the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival in Toronto, Passages charts the sexually charged and emotionally messy dynamics between three people in modern Paris. The… Read More Review: Passages
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest big screen outing for the adolescent mutant turtles trained in ninjutsu who eat pizza and live in the sewers of New York City, and it serves as a rock solid reboot of sorts for the franchise. Directed by Jeff Rowe… Read More Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The Canadian drama North of Normal is an adaptation of Cea Sunrise Person’s 2014 memoir of the same name, following her coming of age in the city after an unconventional upbringing in the Yukon wilderness with her free-loving teen mother (played in the film by Sarah Gadon). The… Read More Review: North of Normal
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Disney’s Haunted Mansion is the latest movie based on one of their theme park rides, while also serving as a reboot of their maligned 2003 film The Haunted Mansion. Directed by Justin Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair), this is a slightly more “serious” take on the material… Read More Review: Haunted Mansion
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