By John H. Foote Let me start with my single complaint. You cannot make a warthog look like a friendly, jolly animal unless you are using animation. Unless it is a cartoon. The animals in this film are hyper-realistic, there is nothing cartoonish about them. But eyes in animated films are truly windows to the…
By Nick Maylor I am a big fan of the musician biopic when it’s done right. When I’m not writing about film, I pretend to be a musician sometimes. I’d like to offer some perspective, the best that I can, on the big wave of music biopics that is here and doesn’t show signs of…
By Nick Maylor After seeing Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), I decided it was time to take a look back at all of the films starring our favourite wall-crawler and list them from weakest to strongest. While Holland’s version of Peter Parker/Spider-Man has appeared in other MCU films that are not “Spider-Man” centric, I will…
By John H. Foote Through the years film critics and historians have written about individual years being the greatest in movie history. Those years celebrated yielded the greatest number of bonafide masterpieces, and one cannot deny it makes for an interesting debate. The greatest enemy to film is time, and as time flashes furiously past…
By Nick Maylor (***) As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of The Beatles. My parents were born and raised in Liverpool, UK and growing up in my house was like listening to the Gospels according to John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Danny Boyle’s latest film explores the life of a struggling musician (Himesh…
By Craig Leask As mentioned in my article on Famous Television Cars a vehicle in movies, when properly used and presented, can be iconic and an integral component of the main character’s persona. Often great lengths are taken by a production team to research and identify the perfect car for their film, and when done…
By Craig Leask In movies and in television, few techniques have been used to easily define the character of an individual better than the car the lead actor drives. Beginning predominantly in the 1960’s, cars were incorporated into various television series as an identifier of the character(s) uniqueness, social class or conventionality, rather than as…
By John H. Foote After the glowing review my buddy Nick Maylor gave Avengers: Endgame, I went back a month later for a second look. It was never that I disagreed or disagreed with Nick, on the contrary, it is a terrific film. I think I returned to it to decide if it was as…
By Nick Maylor Movies have the power to make us dream the Impossible. They make us think. They make us laugh. Sometimes they have the power to bring us to tears. Today, I am focusing on that latter element of cinema; the ability to create a lump in our throats and manifest serious optical waterworks.…
By John H. Foote In a move I applaud and have challenged for years the Academy has renamed their Best Foreign Language Film, altered the criteria slightly to include English language films from English speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland and wherever English might be spoken. The Foreign Language Oscar has been…