By John H. Foote 2020 has been a rough year at the movies, but film books have shone very bright. Well, most – my Spielberg book has been bumped to 2021, another near year before this hits the shelves. When I was young, film books were plentiful, and I paid many visits to Cinebooks on…
By John H. Foote Glenn Kenny’s sublimely research and written “Made Men – The Story of GoodFellas” – is easily among the finest books on cinema written this year, standing alongside Jay Glennie’s outstanding “The Making of The Deer Hunter”, and Oliver Stone’s memoir of his early success in film, “Chasing the Light.” Writing about Martin…
By John H. Foote The moment I opened the package containing my copy of Oliver Stone’s new book “Chasing the Light”, a memoir, I devoured it. Putting it down was just never an option, and one day after opening the book, sadly, I was finished. So I promptly read it again. “Chasing the Light” is…
By John H. Foote Let me be clear, these books are not written by the editor, they act as gatherers of information, they are detectives seeking out old interviews, nothing more. So Lane, a self-described acclaimed film and television director, producer and writer, lent not a creative bone to this book, by far the weakest in…
By John H. Foote Val Kilmer has given one, perhaps two extraordinary performances in a career spanning nearly 40 years. In the first he was astonishing as Jim Morrison for Oliver Stone in the film The Doors (1991) which was more a biography of Morrison than it was about the band though, in reflection, what…
By John H. Foote Having always believed Woody Allen is innocent of the accusations of child abuse leveled at him by his former partner Mia Farrow, reading his account of the events dealing with her vicious attacks, I am now even more confident of Allen’s innocence. Though her adopted son Moses spoke out against his…
By John H. Foote Is there a more polarizing figure in American cinema than director Michael Cimino? An Academy Award winner for his study of friendship in small town America, before and after service in Vietnam. He sat atop the heap in Hollywood only to fall from grace very quickly, forever ruined after Heaven’s Gate…
By John H. Foote Of the great film directors in movie history, Sidney Lumet was among the elite. Highly regarded as an actor’s director, he possessed the uncanny ability to draw Oscar nominated and winning performances from his actors in bold and magnificent films. Yet Lumet himself was a Best Director nominee just four times, and…
By Nick Maylor The best film of the year (perhaps the decade), Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) was adapted from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa. The book has been analyzed and criticized for those who claim that Frank Sheeran’s first-hand accounts…
By John H. Foote Every major actor working today – film, stage or television, professional or otherwise – owes a debt to Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest actor in the history of the art form. Do I believe he has been surpassed as our greatest actor? I do, but his impact and staggering domination of…