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
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a movie based on the classic fantasy roleplaying game, and it offers a surprisingly enjoyable mix of comedy and adventure that has a fun, playing with a group of friends feel to it that I imagine will be quite appealing to… Read More Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) Keanu Reeves returns to the titular role of John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4, which doubles as the best entry yet in this already very good action movie franchise. This fourth instalment puts Reeves’ former assassin Wick, who is now a marked man, at the centre of… Read More Review: John Wick: Chapter 4
John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Brother, the Scarborough-set drama from writer-director Clement Virgo that is up for fourteen Canadian Screen Awards, follows two brothers, Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), over the course of more than a decade. Much of the film takes place in the 1990s, with the Jamaican-Canadian brothers living in… Read More Review: Brother
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Set in Toronto’s Tibetan community, Tenzin is a Canadian social issue drama that takes a moody, minimalistic approach to telling a story and exploring its themes. Directed by Michael LeBlanc and Josh Reichmann, the film centres around Tenzin (Tenzin Kelsang), a young Tibetan man dealing with the grief… Read More Review: Tenzin
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) After older brother Peter Farrelly, one half of the 1990s and 2000s comedy titans the Farrelly Brothers, went solo to direct the Oscar-winning Green Book, younger brother Bobby Farrelly now branches out on his own with the feel-good sports movie Champions. A remake of the 2018 Spanish film… Read More Review: Champions
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Scream VI is a direct sequel to last year’s quasi-reboot Scream, which served as a belated continuation of Wes Craven’s original slasher series and passed the torch to a new cast of characters. Like last year’s “requel” (or whatever you want to call it), Scream VI is co-directed… Read More Review: Scream VI
By John Corrado ★★★½ (out of 4) The first film in the Irish language to be nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars, The Quiet Girl is a tender and poignant coming of age film that shows a painfully shy young girl finally blossoming in the right care, and it’s a thing of quiet… Read More Review: The Quiet Girl
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Shot on a tight budget in Alberta, Guitar Lessons is a small Canadian drama from writer-director Aaron James (Hank Williams First Nation). The film stars Canadian country singer Corb Lund in his first leading role as Ray Mitchell, a former musician turned ornery oilfield worker who is befriended… Read More Review: Guitar Lessons
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The latest film from M. Night Shyamalan, Knock at the Cabin is an adaptation of Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World. Shyamalan has crafted the material into a solid chamber piece thriller that is infused with Biblical allegories, and builds tension… Read More Review: Knock at the Cabin
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Set in Australia at the turn of the new millennium, writer-director Goran Stolevski’s sophomore feature Of An Age is an engaging and poignant portrait of two young men, Kol (Elias Anton) and Adam (Thom Green), who connect over a whirlwind 24 hours in the last few weeks of… Read More Review: Of An Age
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the 31st film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the first in Phase Five), and I’d have to give a few others a rewatch to say for sure, but it might just be the weakest and most disappointing entry yet in the long-running… Read More Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
By John Corrado ★½ (out of 4) In Marlowe, Liam Neeson stars as a private detective sniffing about the sleazy side of the movie industry in late-1930s Los Angeles, taking on a role inspired by author Raymond Chandler’s detective character Philip Marlowe, who first appeared onscreen played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. The… Read More Review: Marlowe
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Being made to feel self-conscious about who are as a child is a hell of a thing. Belgian director Lukas Dhont powerfully explores this feeling in his Oscar-nominated coming of age drama Close, which tells the story of Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele), two 13-year-old… Read More Review: Close
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) As far as self-produced vanity projects go, the inspired-by-a-true-story comedy 80 for Brady, which follows four old ladies who go to the Super Bowl to see their hero Tom Brady play, is a pretty enjoyable one. Produced by Brady, who also gives himself a small role playing himself,… Read More Review: 80 for Brady
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) The Canadian co-production Alice, Darling is a drama starring Anna Kendrick in the titular role of Alice, a career-oriented young woman in Toronto living with her emotionally abusive partner, a visual artist named Simon (Charlie Carrick). On the surface, Alice seems to have an enviable relationship, as she… Read More Review: Alice, Darling
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Made on a budget of $15,000 dollars, Canadian director Kyle Edward Ball’s lo-fi horror film Skinamarink has become something of a sensation, having now grossed $1.9 million in theatres. This success is all the more impressive considering the heavily experimental nature of the film itself, which eschews conventional… Read More Review: Skinamarink
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) The directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg, When You Finish Saving the World (which had its premiere at Sundance in 2022) is a quirky comedic story about a self-absorbed mother and son who are struggling to reconnect. The son, Ziggy Katz (Finn Wolfhard), is a budding teenage singer-songwriter… Read More Review: When You Finish Saving the World
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) The narrative feature debut of documentary filmmaker Alice Diop, Saint Omer (France’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature) is an extremely understated and slow-moving legal drama that unfolds almost entirely within a French courtroom. The film centres around Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor and novelist who travels… Read More Review: Saint Omer
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