By John H. Foote (**) It was a tough, sometimes brutal film, making headlines before anyone had seen a single frame of the film. Directed by an Oscar-winning director, William Friedkin, and featuring a major actor in Al Pacino, it had the ingredients to be a great, but yes, controversial film. Friedkin talked often about…
By Alan Hurst Tennessee Williams had a spectacular run on Broadway from the mid-forties to the late fifties and the inevitable film versions of his plays also enjoyed varying degrees of critical and box office success. Key film successes from Williams’ work included A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), Cat on a…
By John H. Foote (****) Watching the opening of La La Land (2016) at TIFF in 2016, the sensational Oscar-winning musical from Damien Chazelle, I was stunned by the wild originality of the film, and over the course of the picture, its wide-eyed innocence and sweet-natured energy drew me in and swept me away with…
By John H. Foote (****) Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Best Actress (Jane Fonda), and Best Director (Sydney Pollack) among them, it was snubbed for Best Picture despite the second most nods of the year, just one behind Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). Easily among the best five films of the year, its reasons…
By John H. Foote (****) Great films that have failed to find an audience have been around since the silent era, so it is no surprise, that in the fifties, the same event took place many times, including this powerful however cynical noir which failed at the box office despite powerhouse performances and a dark…
By Nick Maylor (****) I have been a fan of Kevin Smith for the better part of two decades. His irreverent and sharp writing style has always spoken to me and I first fell in love with his work when I saw Dogma (1999) for the first time. An intensely smart and funny film about…
By Alan Hurst For many around my age, Walt Disney’s production of Mary Poppins (1964) represented their first movie-going experience. It was magical in 1964, and again on future viewings during subsequent re-releases in 1973 and 1980. And with the advent of home video, it’s been a staple in many libraries as well (and for…
By John H. Foote (****) In 1976 I was aware of Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker having seen Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and certainly a fan of the actor on the rise, Robert De Niro who had just won an Oscar in The Godfather Part II (1974). Their new…
By John H. Foote After seeing the new film A Private War at TIFF this year, the story of war correspondent Marie Colvin I came home to find a similar film I have long admired from the eighties. Simply said, Under Fire (1983) is among the greatest films ever made about American involvement in a…
By John H. Foote BULWORTH (1998) (****) Intelligence was the first thing I noticed about Warren Beatty when I interviewed him a few years ago, it radiates out of his eyes. Fabulously good looking, fit, well dressed and well groomed, he was everything I had heard he would be when I walked in a suite…