By John Corrado Director, writer, and star Cody Lightning (Hey, Viktor!) draws from the well of the underdog sports movie for his second feature Smudge the Blades, an enjoyable homegrown hockey movie centred around the Treaty 6 Blades, an Indigenous U-18 hockey team in Northern Alberta. The film opens with a fight breaking out on… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Smudge the Blades (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In her debut feature Still Night, Burning House, Vietnamese-Canadian filmmaker Carol Nguyen looks inward, focusing on her own family’s history with grief and mental health. The film seeks to tell the story of her Uncle Thach, who was schizophrenic and died from suicide a decade ago, after jumping out a second story… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Still Night, Burning House (TIFF Docs)
By John Corrado Fear of “the other” seems to be one of the prevailing themes throughout Quebec filmmaker Alexandre Franchi’s mix of dark comedy and psychological thriller L’Autre, a title that literally translates to “the other.” The film opens with our protagonist Stan (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) undergoing surgery to remove cancer from the bone in his… Read More #TIFF26 Review: L’Autre (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado Canadian author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis returns to the screen with The Betrayers, a well-acted and intriguing adaptation of his own award-winning 2014 novel of the same name. The film centres around Baruch (Michael Aronov), a Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician, who is being pushed to enter into a coalition agreement, while… Read More #TIFF26 Review: The Betrayers (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In Being Heumann, the follow up to her Oscar-winning CODA, director Siân Heder dramatizes the true story of Judith Heumann, the prominent disability rights activist who helped break down barriers for accessibility. The result is a film that works as a rousing, inspiring crowdpleaser about the disability rights movement in the 1970s,… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Being Heumann (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado The latest movie from Cartoon Saloon, the Irish animation studio behind beloved modern films like Wolfwalkers, The Breadwinner, Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells, Julián is very sweet and charming story about a little boy who dreams of being a mermaid. The film centres around the titular Julián (voiced… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Julián (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In his feature debut River, partially inspired by his 2018 short film In Sound, We Live Forever, director Joshua Giuliano crafts a fun slasher movie built around the deceptively simple yet effective premise of three siblings trapped on a river. The siblings are Lucy (Jane Levy), Carla (Jessica Rothe) and Drew (Max… Read More #TIFF26 Review: River (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado A century after it was first published, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway gets a contemporary adaptation from filmmaker brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, who find a fresh angle by setting their version in modern day Lagos, Nigeria. Sophie Okonedo stars in the film as the titular Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Clarissa (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Director, writer and star Jordan Firstman delivers an accomplished debut feature with Club Kid, a major crowdpleaser which plays like the gay, indie, A24-backed answer to Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. And it’s something special. Firstman stars in the film as Peter, a club promoter in New York City who is living a… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Club Kid (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado In Fjord, his second Palme d’Or-winner following 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu crafts a complex film that masterfully balances being a family drama, coming-of-age story, and courtroom procedural. This is a film that exists purely in shades of grey, even literally with the washed out… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Fjord (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Toy Gun Bandit, the new film from Quebec writer-director Rémi St-Michel, is a work that feels inspired by the scrappy, propulsive filmmaking of the Safdie brothers. That’s a lofty comparison, to be sure, but their influence is felt throughout this frenetic Québécois crime movie, which serves as both an entertaining and suspenseful… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Toy Gun Bandit (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In Coward, his third and most ambitious feature yet, Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont (Girl, Close) takes us back to World War I. Dhont’s works all explore gender identity and burgeoning sexuality, and those themes get fine-tuned here as he explores the homoerotic tensions between young Belgian soldiers who arrive on the front… Read More #TIFF26 Review: Coward (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado The latest from Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, All of a Sudden is primarily a film about the different ways we care for each other, weaving themes about the bureaucratic power structure of a nursing home into a character drama. It’s an ambitious undertaking, even more so when you account for the fact… Read More #TIFF26 Review: All of a Sudden (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado In his coming-of-age film Olmo, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke finds the right balance between enjoyable portrait of bratty adolescence, and heavier, more dramatic scenes, telling a small but nuanced father-son story. There’s also some star power behind the film, having been produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. The titular Olmo (Aivan… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Olmo (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In their latest film collaboration Dead Lover, real life couple Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie craft a German Expressionist parody with a real handmade quality to it. Glowicki, who directs the film from a screenplay that she co-wrote with Petrie, stars as a lonely gravedigger. We are told that she smells really,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Dead Lover (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The entire setup for director Nick Corirossi’s The Napa Boys is itself an elaborate joke; it’s fashioned as the fourth film in a franchise, that has already received a series of spinoffs. Only none of these other entries exist, and the film that is supposed to have spawned this franchise is Alexander… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Napa Boys (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado A prequel to his 2017 stop-motion film Junk Head, which was in turn based on a 2014 short, Junk World finds Japanese filmmaker Takahide Hori playing around on an even larger canvass. Hori’s film is set in a world of people and clones (called “Mulligans”), who rise up against the humans, leading… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Junk World (Midnight Madness)
By John Corrado The latest film from director Gus Van Sant, Dead Man’s Wire dramatizes a 1977 kidnapping that saw a disgruntled Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) take mortgage banker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage in his apartment. Hall is the son of the man (played by Al Pacino) who owns the mortgage firm that Kiritsis… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Dead Man’s Wire (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Director Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less biography of George Orwell, and more heavily slanted video essay that struggles to thread the needle between the British author’s work and selected modern events. It’s a major disappointment. The film’s title, of course, is a reference to Orwell’s most famous book 1984,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Orwell: 2+2=5 (TIFF Docs)
By John Corrado The latest film from Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines, Blue Valentine), Roofman is based on the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, a convicted criminal who became known in the media as “Roofman” for robbing a series of McDonalds by cutting a hole through the roof. Manchester was doing this to… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Roofman (Gala Presentations)
The Joy of Movies 