By John H. Foote After two years of a virtual film festival, meaning most of we critics saw the films via the internet in the comforts of our offices or homes, TIFF is gearing up for the festival to be as it always has been. The Scotiabank Theatre will again be humming with screenings and…
By John H. Foote Ray Liotta, 67, died in his sleep on Wednesday. The actor was not known to have been ill, and the passing has come as a terrible shock to his family and friends. Liotta shot to stardom in the eighties with a superb performance as the ex-convict Charlie in Jonathan Demme’s Something…
By John H. Foote ‘For the period of 1981-1991, William Hurt was among the actors to dominate the art and craft of American acting with an array of brilliant performances. Hurt died Sunday of natural causes at 71. He broke into film, after graduating from Juilliard and working onstage, in Ken Russell’s strange film Altered…
By Alan Hurst Peter Bogdanovich – one of the hottest and most successful directors of the early seventies – passed away yesterday at the age of 82. His career serves as a cautionary tale of the kinetic combination of talent, early success, unbridled ego, and bad decisions. A scholar of film, before directing he had…
By Alan Hurst Our own John H. Foote has written the cover story for the latest edition of “Cinema of the ‘70s”, a terrific magazine out of Britain that focuses on one of the greatest decades for movies since their inception. “Cinema of the 70’s” is fast becoming one of the hottest selling magazines in…
By John H. Foote He made us believe a man could fly in his 1978 epic Superman, giving the film the perfect sense that Superman was a God sent from another planet. The entire year had seen previews with a booming voice announcing, “You’ll believe a man can fly” and then finally the film opened.…
By John H. Foote The casting of Nicole Kidman in a new film as television icon, the beloved Lucille Ball, known simply as Lucy, is drawing the wrath of Ball’s fans online. People are wondering why Kidman, best known for her work in intense drama, was cast as the hilarious comic, who proved to be…
By Alan Hurst George Segal had a pretty terrific run in films in the late sixties through the seventies, acclaimed initially for his dramatic work and then finding a nice groove as a solid comic performer. He passed away yesterday at the age of 87, still working as part of the long running ensemble on…
By Alan Hurst Christopher Plummer was perhaps the pre-eminent Canadian actor of his generation, one of the great Shakespearean actors in North America and England and a bona fide movie star for more than 55 years, thanks to a little film called The Sound of Music (1965). He passed away on Friday, ending one of…
By Alan Hurst Cloris Leachman passed away on January 27 after 94 well-lived years and a career that was in its eighth decade. Despite her age, the news came as a bit of a shock because she was still acting in major projects with surprising frequency – if you look at the credits on her…