By John H. Foote (****) More than forty years after its release, where it was greeted with great reviews but no audience, Black Sunday (1977) is arguably the finest film about international terrorism. Based on the bestseller by Thomas Harris, years before he wrote The Silence of the Lambs, Paramount positioned the film as a major summer…
By John H. Foote (****) Two nominations? Sure, one of them was for Best Picture, but just two? The Post (2017) was acclaimed by most film critics and thought to be a major contender for Best Picture and Director, but when the nominations were announced the film, easily one of last year’s finest and most…
HEAVEN’S GATE – A LOOK BACK; A LOOK TODAY By John H. Foote It was never as bad as the critics made it out to be. They were out for blood, after being lied too and betrayed by director-writer Michael Cimino and blood they got. Cimino made it easy for them given his irresponsible behaviour…
By John H. Foote How did it lose Best Picture, Best Director? In 1989, at the end of the decade, Premiere Magazine, that wonderful now defunct movie magazine polled the nations top film critics to ask them what was the best film of the eighties? To no ones surprise, they voted Martin Scorsese’s searing boxing…
By John H. Foote COMING HOME (1978) (****) Hal Ashby was a bonafide free spirit, a hippy who hated the system that held the power of making movies. He loved making movies, loved it with an unbridled passion, but he hated the suits that held the power to making those movies. During his most fruitful…
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (****) By John H. Foote My wife was very close with her mother. Best friends. They could spend an entire day together, then call each other at night to chat some more. Ellie often went with us to various events, movies, plays, fairs, to hear the folk group Tanglefoot, and of course…
By John H. Foote It happens, though truly one has to wonder why? How can an Academy made up of film people, experts, one would hope in their field, miss the best films of the year? How do inferior films get a Best Picture nomination over clearly greater films? Yet it happens, year after year.…
By John H. Foote So often through the history of the cinema, and the connection to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, wildly over appreciated films are nominated for and often win the Best Picture award in addition to many other prizes. If you study closely the nominees and winners of each year right back…
By John H. Foote SNUBBED ENTIRELY, BUT MASTERFUL NONETHELESS… Kevin Costner won an Academy Award for Best Director for his western epic Dances with Wolves (1990), which won six other Oscars including Best Picture, and saw the likable star nominated for Best Actor. This was very near the beginning of his career, when his baseball…
By John H. Foote When The Silence of the Lambs (1991) swept the major Oscars, Best Film, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, there was some griping about Jodie Foster winning again, just three years after winning for a The Accused (1988). Let me state here and now, her Clarice Starling is the heart and soul…