By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out in 2018, it really felt like the film was pushing the boundaries for big screen animation, mimicking the look of a comic book with its inventive and highly stylized mix of 2D and 3D animation. Now we have Spider-Man: Across the… Read More Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Elemental is the latest film from Pixar (their 27th feature), and it could also be described as the studio’s first romantic comedy. Set against the imaginative backdrop of a place called Element City, where air, fire, water and earth residents live, the film works as a charming mix… Read More Review: Elemental
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the seventh film in the big screen Transformers franchise, serving as both a prequel and soft reboot of sorts to the five Michael Bay movies, and it’s one of the more watchable entries in the series, at least. While it doesn’t exactly… Read More Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Past Lives, the gorgeous directorial debut of playwright Celine Song, opens with its trio of main characters Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) sitting together at a bar, as an off-screen voice wonders what their connections are to each other. From here, Song’s… Read More Review: Past Lives
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Written and directed by Marie Clements, Bones of Crows is an ambitious Canadian drama that follows the life of a residential school survivor over many years, and the scars that remain from the trauma that she has experienced. The film spans multiple decades in the life of Aline… Read More Review: Bones of Crows
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) What do you do when you accidentally overhear a loved one giving their honest opinion about something you’ve done? This is the basic setup for You Hurt My Feelings, the latest film from writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said). The main character is Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a writer in… Read More Review: You Hurt My Feelings
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) In Mission Kandahar (which is being released as Kandahar south of the border), Gerard Butler stars as Tom Harris, a covert CIA operative who must travel through Afghanistan with his translator Mo (Navid Negahban), towards an escape point in Kandahar. The film opens with Butler’s Harris on an undercover… Read More Review: Mission Kandahar
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Disney’s 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid is credited with kicking off the studio’s fabled Renaissance period, paving the way for a number of animated classics released throughout the 1990s. This makes it an obvious choice for a live action remake in the current IP-driven climate, considering that… Read More Review: The Little Mermaid
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director Laurel Parmet explores the push and pull between religion and sexuality in her confident debut film The Starling Girl, which centres around an inappropriate relationship between a teen girl and her youth pastor, and the circumstances that allow it to develop. Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) is a… Read More Review: The Starling Girl
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The opening scene of Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener will be very familiar to those who watched the writer-director’s previous two movies The Card Counter and First Reformed. A man sits hunched over at a desk in a dimly lit room writing in a journal, as voiceover narration reveals… Read More Review: Master Gardener
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) With a manned mission to Mars now basically a matter of when and not if, one of the biggest questions that remains is how human astronauts will deal with the isolation on the three year mission that it takes to get to the Red Planet. This question is… Read More Review: The Longest Goodbye
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Aaju Peter, the subject of filmmaker Lin Allluna’s documentary Twice Colonized (which recently had its world premiere as the opening night film of Hot Docs), is an Inuit lawyer who was born in Greenland, but moved to the Canadian Arctic. Living in Iqaluit, Aaju is perhaps most notable… Read More Review: Twice Colonized
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The rise and fall of Waterloo, Ontario tech company Research in Motion, and their once-mighty BlackBerry, is charted in Canadian director Matt Johnson’s energetic and fast-paced film BlackBerry. This latest feature from Johnson, who previously showed what he is capable of with his DIY indies Operation Avalanche and… Read More Review: BlackBerry
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Writer-director James Gunn completes his gonzo space adventure trilogy with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, a fitting end to the saga that plays with the same colourful mix of action, humour, and heart that made the first two movies such standouts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And… Read More Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. This is the deceptively simple question being asked by the 11-year-old protagonist of Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel of the same name, a book for middle school readers that was groundbreaking for its frank discussions of taboo topics ranging from religion… Read More Review: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Beau Is Afraid, the wildly ambitious, three-hour-long third film from writer-director Ari Aster, has been described as a “nightmare comedy,” and that’s a pretty apt description for what the filmmaker has cooked up this time around. I also saw the film last week and am still not entirely… Read More Review: Beau Is Afraid
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Director Daniel Goldhaber’s provocatively titled second feature How to Blow Up a Pipeline – which has garnered a lot of buzz since it premiered at TIFF last year, and also (unsurprisingly) stirred up controversy – is a tautly paced thriller following a group of eco-terrorists plotting to blow up… Read More Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The eighth feature from American indie auteur Kelly Reichardt, Showing Up is recognizably a part of her impressive oeuvre of slice-of-life films about ordinary people going about their lives in Oregon, while also adding some levity to it. The film stars Michelle Williams as Lizzy, a struggling sculptor… Read More Review: Showing Up
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The feature directorial debut of Toronto filmmaker Joseph Amenta, Soft is a gritty and atmospheric coming-of-age film. It follows Julien (Matteus Lunot), Otis (Harlow Joy) and Tony (Zion Matheson), three adolescent kids in the city who are hanging out together over summer break. The kids, who are all… Read More Review: Soft
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature A Thousand and One, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January, is a mother-son drama defined by its complex lead character, with the filmmaker eschewing easy emotion for something far thornier. The film, which begins in the 1990s, centres around… Read More Review: A Thousand and One
The Joy of Movies 