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…
By John H. Foote “They train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write fuck on their airplanes, because it is obscene.” – Kurtz (Marlon Brando) The University Theatre sat on Bloor Street in Toronto, standing like a massive cathedral for cinema, a church to…
By John H. Foote (****) Recently my colleague Craig Leask named the original King Kong (1933) as his greatest film of all time. Like Craig, I love that creaky old black and white movie with its primitive special effects that remain effective to this day. There is something wonderfully nostalgic about the film, the creation…
By John H. Foote THE APOSTLE (1997) (****) Imagine being Robert Duvall in 1984. He had by then won an Oscar and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics as Best Actor and was hailed as one of the greatest actors in American film history. He had appeared…