By John H. Foote A STAR IS BORN (****) Wow! Talk about knocking it out of the park! In his directorial debut Bradley Cooper creates the finest of A Star is Born films, far surpassing the 1976 version and eking by the Judy Garland version. Further, he gives the finest performance of his career as…
By Nick Maylor (***1/2) Official Film Synopsis: ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch is the third collaboration between award-winning photographer Edward Burtynsky and acclaimed filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier following Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark. In breathtaking tableaus, their latest documentary continues their exploration of industrialization and extraction in astonishing scale and perspective. I walked into the upper…
By Nick Maylor (***1/2) Paul Dano shows the patience, confidence and wisdom of an older, more experienced filmmaker for his directorial debut. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Richard Ford first published in 1990 and the script was adapted by Dano himself and Zoe Kazan. When explaining why he chose the book, Dano…
By John H. Foote OUTLAW KING (***) Though made for the streaming company Netflix, Outlaw King, which opened TIFF last night at Roy Thompson Hall deserves to be, no, demands to be seen on a vast movie screen. The better to take in the glorious helicopter shots, the lush greenery of old Scotland, and the…
By John H. Foote Always a slow one as some of the major studios are still arriving. THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE (****) French Canadian director Denys Arcand has been a staple with TIFF for as long as I can remember. His films The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1990),…
By John H. Foote Watching Papillon at TIFF last September I kept asking why? Why remake the film? The original, while not a masterpiece, was a solid film, well acted by Steve McQueen, movie star, never much of an actor and Dustin Hoffman, wonderful in the film, and well directed by Oscar winner Franklin J.…
By John H. Foote (***) This romantic fantasy is being celebrated as the first major film to deal with Asians to be released into the mainstream. OK, fair enough, but lets be clear about something, there is nothing remotely realistic about the film, it is a fairy tale committed to its audience having a good…
By John H. Foote Is it not extraordinary that Spike Lee, one of the definitive directors of his time has not ever been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director? He has been nominated for his screenplay, his documentaries, and was awarded an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, but not for his direction of a…
By John H. Foote In about ten years when asked what my guilty pleasure are I suspect The Meg to be among them. Extraordinarily stupid, yet wildly entertaining and quite well crafted the film is a typical summer entertainment. Place your brain in the fridge, go see the film, never once think about it and…
By Nick Maylor (****) Becoming the highest-grossing film franchise of all time (in less than a decade), The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an epic crossover that plays out in a continuous anthology of interconnected stories just like the Marvel Comics Universe that the film’s are based on. With Avengers: Infinity War (2018), ten years and…