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
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Taken from Sanskrit, these were the famous words spoken by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer following the test of his atomic bomb in the Los Alamos desert, an invention that would be used to take countless lives when it was… Read More Review: Oppenheimer
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) With her blonde hair and iconic figure, Barbie is one of the most recognizable toys of all time. Whether you view Mattel’s flagship doll as a beloved plaything or an impossible standard by which to judge female beauty standards, there’s little denying the impact that she has had… Read More Review: Barbie
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) A group of women from Ireland take a pilgrimage to Lourdes in The Miracle Club, an Irish film that takes a talented cast fronted by two Oscar winners (Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith) and two Oscar nominees (Laura Linney and Stephen Rea), but struggles to live up to… Read More Review: The Miracle Club
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Following the release of Ghost Protocol in 2011, the Mission: Impossible series has turned into one of our best and most reliable action movie franchises, building on the promise of sequels that either match or exceed their predecessors. That trend continues with the seventh film in the series,… Read More Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The directorial debut of Tamil Canadian filmmaker V.T. Nayani, This Place (which premiered at last year’s TIFF) is a queer love story between two young women from different backgrounds that finds its strengths in being so culturally specific to Toronto. Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs, who also co-wrote the screenplay… Read More Review: This Place
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Joy Ride, the directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim, is the story of a Chinese adoptee getting reacquainted with her birth country. It’s also a raunchy, proudly R-rated road trip comedy about four friends having their bonds tested through a series of escapades involving drugs… Read More Review: Joy Ride
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Directed by Julie Cohen (Julia, RBG), the fascinating and highly engaging documentary Every Body explores the people who make up the I in LGBTQIA, which stands for intersex. The term intersex is used to describe those born with elements of both male and female sex characteristics, with over… Read More Review: Every Body
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Harrison Ford is back cracking the whip as the titular archeologist in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a film that earns the designation of legacy sequel as it finds Ford returning to the role fifteen years after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. At 80 years old,… Read More Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Wes Anderson has developed one of the most unique styles of any modern American filmmaker across his rich body of work, and his 11th feature, Asteroid City, offers perhaps his most metatextual narrative yet. And it’s his best since The Grand Budapest Hotel. Through Anderson’s playfully subversive storytelling… Read More Review: Asteroid City
The Joy of Movies 