By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Bardo (full title Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) finds the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker in introspective mode and working in the Spanish language for the first time since Biutiful in 2010, to craft a semi-autobiographical tale of identity and belonging,… Read More Review: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) How do you go about making a sequel to a blockbuster film when the star of said film has tragically and unexpectedly passed away? That’s the moral conundrum faced by director Ryan Coogler with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a follow up to his 2018 Marvel film that arrives… Read More Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) James Gray’s Armageddon Time finds the writer-director digging into his own childhood experiences to craft a mostly engaging coming of age story set during the Reagan-era. The year is 1980, and Paul Graff (Banks Repeta, playing the film’s stand-in for a young Gray) is an 11-year-old Jewish boy… Read More Review: Armageddon Time
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Halloween Ends is the third film in director David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy that began with Halloween in 2018, a legacy sequel that saw Jamie Lee Curtis return to the role of Laurie Strode, the babysitter who first evaded masked killer Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s 1978 original.… Read More Review: Halloween Ends
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Drinkwater is a 1980s-inspired Canadian coming of age film set in Penticton, B.C. that centres around Mike Drinkwater (Daniel Doheny), an awkward teen boy who wants to get the girl and hopefully get into college to get out of his small town. The Bruce Lee-obsessed Mike is stuck… Read More Review: Drinkwater
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The documentary And Still I Sing follows three female singers in Afghanistan; the controversial pop star Aryana Sayeed who has courted a backlash in her country for speaking out in support of women’s rights, and Zahra Elham and Sadiqa Madagar, who are both contestants on the American Idol-esque… Read More Review: And Still I Sing
By John Corrado ★★★★ (out of 4) Todd Field’s triumphant return to directing after a sixteen year hiatus following his 2006 film Little Children, TÁR is one of those films that quietly holds us in its grip for the entire 158 minute running time. This is a brilliantly made slow-burn film from writer-director Field, that has… Read More Review: TÁR
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Billed as being “directed, produced, adapted by & starring Katie Boland,” We’re All in This Together is a somewhat ambitious Canadian dramedy that follows a young woman who has her life thrown into turmoil after her mother Kate (Martha Burns) goes viral on social media by attempting to… Read More Review: We’re All in This Together
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The documentary Blind Ambition follows Joseph Dhafana, Marlvin Gwese, Tinashe Nyamudoka and Pardon Taguzu, four men from Zimbabwe living in South Africa, who form the first Zimbabwean team to compete in the annual World Blind Wine Tasting Championships in France. The men had gone most of their lives… Read More Review: Blind Ambition
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Amsterdam is the latest star-studded film from director David O. Russell, his first since Joy in 2015, which capped off an incredibly impressive run that included The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. The odds have been stacked against this film from the outset, both due to… Read More Review: Amsterdam
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Neither good nor bad enough to fully justify its widely publicized behind the scenes drama, Olivia Wilde’s overly ambitious second feature Don’t Worry Darling is instead a thoroughly mediocre and undercooked effort that tries to be a lot of things, but doesn’t really do any of them particularly… Read More Review: Don’t Worry Darling
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Carmen, the third feature from writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, is a Canadian-Maltese co-production (it closed the Canadian Film Fest earlier this year) that is set in a small village in Malta. The title character, Carmen (Natasha McElhone), is the sister of the local priest (Henry Zammit Cordina), whose life… Read More Review: Carmen
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Emily (Aubrey Plaza), the central character in the aptly titled Sundance crime drama Emily the Criminal, is a young woman in Los Angeles whose designation as a law-breaker is one that she seemingly can’t escape from. The opening scene finds her being blindsided by a job interviewer who tries… Read More Review: Emily the Criminal
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Ali & Ava, the latest film from British writer-director Clio Barnard, is a low-key love story between Ali (Adeel Akhtar) and Ava (Claire Rushbrook), two lonely working class folks in the United Kingdom who come from different backgrounds (him British-Pakistani and her Irish-born), but form a close bond… Read More Review: Ali & Ava
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Nope, the third film written and directed by Jordan Peele, completes the trifecta of modern genre movies that he started with Get Out and Us, and continues his winning streak as a filmmaker. While it’s worth addressing up front that Nope doesn’t have the same type of social… Read More Review: Nope
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) How does Netflix take a $200 million budget, a couple of movie stars, and the directors behind some of the biggest movies of all time, and make something as bland as The Gray Man? That’s the question audiences will be left with after watching this latest film from… Read More Review: The Gray Man
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Marcel the Shell with Shoes On opens with a tennis ball rolling around and bouncing down the stairs. We soon learn that our pint-sized protagonist Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a one-inch tall shell wearing pink sneakers who will steal our hearts over the next ninety minutes, is… Read More Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latest puzzle piece in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the fourth solo film for Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and it very much plays in the same vein as its direct predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok. Waititi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, builds… Read More Review: Thor: Love and Thunder
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The latest film from director John Michael McDonagh (older brother of Martin McDonagh), The Forgiven is a talky moral drama that offers a bleak as hell look at rich, bourgeois society folks colliding with the locals in North Africa. Adapting the 2012 novel of the same name by… Read More Review: The Forgiven
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker who turned the words of William Shakespeare into the most ’90s movie imaginable in his 1996 film Romeo & Juliet and last delivered a glitzy 3D take on The Great Gatsby in 2013, is a director who is known as much for his… Read More Review: Elvis
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