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
By John Corrado ★★★ (out of 4) Brian and Charles is the story of Brian (David Earl), a lonely, eccentric Welsh inventor who makes himself a sentient robot friend named Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward), whose “tummy is a washing machine.” Directed by Jim Archer, and co-written by Earl and Hayward, who are collectively adapting their… Read More Review: Brian and Charles
By John Corrado ★★½ (out of 4) Pixar’s Lightyear, a spinoff from the Toy Story film series that purports to show the origin story of the famous space ranger, opens with subtitles explaining that, in 1995, a boy named Andy saw a movie that made him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure, and “this is… Read More Review: Lightyear
By John Corrado ★★ (out of 4) Jurassic World Dominion is the sixth film in the Jurassic Park series, and it’s a pretty clear case of diminishing returns. This is not to say that the franchise has ever fully lived up to the greatness of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original (even Spielberg’s own 1997 followup The… Read More Review: Jurassic World Dominion
The Joy of Movies 