(***) By John H. Foote This massive, flawed epic was delayed a full year after 9/11, Miramax believing it was immoral to release the film at Christmas, just four months after terrorists brought down the World Trade Centre. Those towers figure prominently in the films’ closing moments, so the delay made sense. However who knew anything about the…
By John H. Foote After winning the coveted New York Film Critics Circle for Best Actor, Ethan Hawke, for his haunted, powerful performance in First Reformed became a contender for the Academy Award as Best Actor. Until that win, Hawke had been on the fringe, but the moment the NY scribes named him their Best Actor he leaped…
By John H. Foote (****) When Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie, he drew heavily on his own life, his past and the result was the birth of the neo realistc American theatre. A Streetcar Named Desire would blow the lid off that movement and, together with Arthur Miller’s Death Of a Salesman, make the late forties the…
By Nick Maylor Vox Lux is an exploration of tragedy, both societal and personal. Raffey Cassidy stars as Celeste, a teen who witnesses (and is a surviving victim of) a school mass shooting. Using her time in rehabilitation to learn her way around a keyboard with the help of her sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin), she writes…
By John H. Foote When Warner Brothers announced Clint Eastwood’s new film The Mule was getting a year-end release, obviously, the rumour mill began talking Oscar. And why not? In 2004 the frontrunner for Best Picture and Best Director was Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), a dizzying entertainment about the Hollywood years of Howard Hughes. In late…
By John H. Foote Walking out of the screening for First Man at TIFF, I was not alone in my effusive praise for this extraordinary film. More than one critic was heard stating they had just seen this year’s Best Picture winner and, quite frankly, I agreed with them. Yet after several major awards being announced First…
By John H. Foote This story is by now, very familiar having been told in the film Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) with no less than Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, in Elizabeth I (2005) with Helen Mirren and Elizabeth, The Golden Age (2007) with Cate Blanchett. What I am saying, I suppose, is enough…
By John H. Foote From the moment I saw her in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989) there was no doubt Julia Roberts was going to be a major star. Not actor, not yet as she had not learned enough at the early juncture of her career, but one could not deny the camera…
By Alan Hurst With the release this year of Mary Poppins Returns (2018) there has been a resurgence of interest around the original Mary Poppins (1964) and Julie Andrews’ performance in that classic film. It’s the film that launched Andrews’ movie career and within a year she had overtaken both Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor…
By Alan Hurst The Editorial Team at Foote and Friends on Film have been asked to come up with their top five holiday-themed films before Christmas. As I started to pull my list together (hoping that it wouldn’t overlap too much with some of the other lists), I was challenged in getting my choices down…