By John Corrado Do you know how hard it is to be yourself? That’s the quippy answer that George Clooney’s movie star character Jay Kelly, the titular protagonist of director Noah Baumbach’s latest film, gives when someone asks him what it feels like to be accused by critics of always playing himself. Of course, Clooney… Read More Movie Review: Jay Kelly
By John Corrado As an actor, Harris Dickinson has already impressed us with his performances in Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness. So it’s fitting that, in his confident feature directorial debut Urchin, a stripped down drama about poverty and addiction, he gives another young performer the chance to take centre stage. That actor is Frank… Read More Movie Review: Urchin
By John Corrado A struggling improv comic in Baltimore needs an emergency dentist appointment on Christmas Eve. It sounds like the setup for a joke (and maybe it is), but it’s also the inciting incident of The Baltimorons, a tender and funny chance encounter romance from director Jay Duplass. Duplass crafts the film as a… Read More Movie Review: The Baltimorons
By John Corrado If, on the surface, Oh, Hi! might seem likely your typical indie romantic dramedy, it’s one with a blackly comic twist. Writer-director Sophie Brooks sets the stage for this in the opening scene, with female lead Iris (Molly Gordon) frantically telling her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) that she “did something bad.”… Read More Movie Review: Oh, Hi!
By John Corrado In their debut feature Sorry, Baby, writer-director-star Eva Victor blends elements of comedy and drama to craft a unique, emotionally resonant portrait of a traumatic incident and its aftermath. Victor stars in the film as Agnes, a college literary professor living alone in small town Massachusetts. When the film opens, Agnes’ friend… Read More Movie Review: Sorry, Baby
By John Corrado Two Women, the latest film from Quebec director Chloé Robichaud (Sarah Prefers to Run), is a raunchy, female-centric comedy that serves as a modern remake of Claude Fournier’s 1970 film Two Women in Gold. Fournier’s original remains an influential piece of Quebec cinema, and Robichaud’s version, which has been adapted and updated… Read More Movie Review: Two Women
By John Corrado The 35th edition of the Inside Out Toronto 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival launches today, with both in-person screenings at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, and Ontario-wide virtual screenings as well. Tonight’s Opening Night Gala is the Canadian premiere of writer-director Elena Oxman’s drama Outerlands (May 23rd, 7:00pm), starring Asia Kate Dillon. The festival’s Closing… Read More The 2025 Inside Out Toronto 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival Runs from May 23rd to June 1st
By John Corrado Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) is an aspiring romance novelist who works as a shopkeeper at Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company. She fantasizes about Jane Austen, and longs for her own love story, but is perpetually single, and struggling with writer’s block. Agathe is the protagonist of writer-director Laura Piani’s delightful new romantic… Read More Movie Review: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
By John Corrado Actor Michael Angarano directs and stars in Sacramento, a dramedy about masculinity and fatherhood that hits a lot of the expected beats, but still has enough of a scrappy charm to it. Angarano stars as Rickey, an immature man-child in LA who has recently lost his father, when he comes crashing back… Read More Movie Review: Sacramento
By John Corrado The Luckiest Man in America is the based-on-a-true-story tale of Michael Larson (played by Paul Walter Hauser), an ice cream truck driver from Ohio who had an incredible winning streak on the game show Press Your Luck in the 1980s. Like other contemporary films about live TV from a similar era such… Read More Movie Review: The Luckiest Man in America
By John Corrado Director James Griffiths’ entirely enjoyable dramedy The Ballad of Wallis Island opens with musician Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) arriving on the remote Wallis Island to play what he believes is an intimate solo gig. Herb is formerly one half of the fictional folk music duo McGwyer & Mortimer, and has been brought… Read More Movie Review: The Ballad of Wallis Island
By John Corrado The latest Toronto-set psychodrama from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils reimagines the opera Salome through the lens of trauma and the #MeToo movement. It’s also perhaps The Sweet Hereafter filmmaker’s strongest late-career effort. Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is a young theatre director who is hired by the Canadian Opera Company to remount the… Read More Movie Review: Seven Veils
By John Corrado It’s rare to come across a film that feels like it is reinventing the form. Yet, in bringing Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys to the screen, director RaMell Ross takes a radically new approach to adapting a novel; he presents the entire film from the perspective of his characters, through unique,… Read More Movie Review: Nickel Boys
By John Corrado Director Maura Delpero’s Vermgilio, Italy’s International Feature submission for the Oscars, is set at the end of World War II in 1944, but the war is happening entirely offscreen. Instead, this is a slow-burn slice-of-life portrait of a large family in the mountain village of Vermiglio. The patriarch of the family is Cesare… Read More Movie Review: Vermiglio
By John Corrado A24 has released the new full-length trailer for The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet’s 3-and-a-half-hour Vistavision epic, starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones in three of the best performances of the year. The full trailer is embedded below. I saw The Brutalist at TIFF (in 70mm with the intermission), and it’s… Read More New Trailer for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist
By John Corrado Swedish director Magnus von Horn’s highly disturbing but artfully crafted new film The Girl with the Needle is a period piece set in Copenhagen in the direct aftermath of World War I. The timeline is set early on when a town crier shouts out news of the armistice, right after we see… Read More Movie Review: The Girl with the Needle
By John Corrado Payal Kapadia, the filmmaker behind the 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, makes her narrative feature debut with All We Imagine as Light. Kapadia’s film, which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year, is a touching and very heartfelt slice-of-life portrait of women in modern India. The film mainly focuses… Read More Movie Review: All We Imagine as Light
By John Corrado The feature debut of music video director Luke Gilford, National Anthem is an engaging portrait of outcasts who desperately want their part of the American Dream, but have to carve out their own piece of it. Entrenched in the world of cowboys and rodeos, Gilford’s film is steeped in Americana, but explored… Read More Movie Review: National Anthem
By John Corrado Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the Italian filmmaker’s latest following The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, is itself a bit of a chimeric creature. The film unfolds with a loose, shifting narrative structure that morphs between magical realism, absurdist comedy and character drama, shone through with a wistful nostalgia for the past. The… Read More Movie Review: La Chimera
By John Corrado Director Chris Eyre’s 1998 coming-of-age film Smoke Signals was a landmark for both American indie cinema and Indigenous self-representation, with its Native American cast and crew telling a story featuring authentic characters. Among the film’s cast was Cody Lightning, the child actor who played the younger version of Adam Beach’s lead character… Read More Movie Review: Hey, Viktor!
The Joy of Movies 