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 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)
By John Corrado Poetic License is the delightful directorial debut of Maude Apatow, best known as an actress on Euphoria and in her father Judd Apatow’s films. Working from a perceptive screenplay by Raffi Donatich, the younger Apatow’s behind-the-camera debut is confident and funny, while also exploring the complexities of friendship. The film feels like… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Poetic License (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the director’s long-awaited adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel, begins in the icy Arctic. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is being hunted by the monster of his own creation (played by Jacob Elordi), taking refuge on a Viking ship. In telling the combined stories of the mad scientist, and… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Frankenstein (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Despite being the latest case for Daniel Craig’s Southern detective Benoit Blanc, director Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out whodunnit Wake Up Dead Man actually shifts the focus to a young priest played by Josh O’Connor. It’s a bit of a reset that works for the Netflix franchise. In fact, Blanc is mostly… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Chloé Zhao’s emotional period piece Hamnet, based on the personal life of William Shakespeare, explores the art that comes through grief. The film, which is adapted from a book by Maggie O’Farrell (who co-wrote the script with Zhao), also finds the filmmaker back in the intimate, character-driven space of her Oscar-winning Nomadland,… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Hamnet (Gala Presentations)
By John Corrado The feature directorial debut of French animators Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is a gorgeous animated film that lets us view the world through a child’s eyes. The film is based on The Character of Rain, a short novel by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, which… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Centrepiece)
By John Corrado In his documentary You Had to Be There – full subtitle How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way) – filmmaker Nick Davis explores a legendary 1972 Toronto production of the Stephen Schwartz musical… Read More #TIFF50 Review: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution… (Special Presentations)
By John Corrado Ballad of a Small Player is the latest film from German director Edward Berger, who broke out in a big way and became an Oscar heavyweight with his past two films Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front. Berger’s latest, a Macau-set gambling film, can’t live up to his previous two.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Ballad of a Small Player (Special Presentations)
The Joy of Movies 