By John H. Foote By the time he portrayed the disturbed haunted army assassin Willard in Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen should have been a nominee for Badlands (1974) and had a few Emmys on his mantle for his superb work on television. When actor Harvey Keitel worked five days for Coppola before being fired off…
By John H. Foote The finest film I saw in 2002 was Todd Haynes miraculous homage to Douglas Sirk Far from Heaven, a beautiful film filled with heartache and pain, but superbly acted by Julianne Moore as the fifties suburban housewife trapped between two men. One doesn’t want her after years of marriage as his…
By John H. Foote For one of the most beautiful love stories to come to the screen, Julie Christie was nominated as Best Actress, and Sarah Polley received a nominated for her Screenplay Adaptation. When Daniel Day-Lewis accepted the New York Film Critics Award for best Actor for his riveting performance in There Will Be…
By John H. Foote Is it a great performance, a wildly over the top performance or an example of dreadful over the top acting? How about about all three, though her complete immersion into the character of Joan Crawford prevents it from being dreadful in any way. Critics were mostly supportive of Dunaway, though some…
By John H. Foote Not only should Tilda Swinton have been nominated for Best Actress for her stunning, heartbreaking performance in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the actress should have WON Best Actress. There was no greater a performance by an actress in 2011 than Swinton as a broken mother and wife, Eva, dealing…
By John H. Foote Never was I believer that Jim Carrey deserved an Academy Award nomination for The Truman Show (1998) but admittedly, it was a very fine performance. A year later he absolutely deserved to be nominated for his extraordinary, uncanny performance as comic Andy Kaufmann in Milos Forman’s brilliant Man on the Moon.…
By John H. Foote Debra Winger’s performance in Urban Cowboy was once described as “sex incarnate” and it is both correct and unfair. Winger was so much more than just a beautiful sexy woman, she was an actress of formidable power, and had the ability to reach into a character and find the character. The…
By John H. Foote After winning two Academy Awards and being most deserving of a third in Cast Away (2000), still his finest performance, Tom Hanks was ready for a monumental challenge. It came when Oscar winner Sam Mendes approached the actor to play a thirties mob hitman in Road to Perdition (2002) opposite no…
By Alan Hurst Both Myrna Loy in The Thin Man and Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage should have been Best Actress Oscar nominees in 1934. Let me explain. In 1934 – the first time the Academy honoured films released within the 12-month calendar year – there were three nominees for Best Actress (five nominees…
By John H. Foote And to be clear, it is not always because I did not care for the performance, but more often than not that there were better performances that lost! So often the industry decides that an actor is “due”, it is “their time for an Oscar” and come hell or high water…