By John H. Foote I love acting – not doing it – but appreciating it. So much more goes into a performance than the untrained eye might realize. The lines are agonized over, not just learning them but how they are delivered. A line delivered too strong can be silly, whereas not enough underplays the…
Sarah Polley has long been a favourite of mine, both as an actress and a writer/director. Her performances in films such as The Sweet Hereafter (1997), My Life Without Me (2003) and the exquisite The Secret Life of Words (2005) earned her acclaim around the globe, but frankly she deserved more, like attention from the…
By John H. Foote No one wants to say it, no one wants to suggest it. Watch the highlight of the entire scene beginning with Chris Rock’s entrance. He is known to be a hellion when unleashed on an audience, so someone is going to take his fire, and everyone knows it. The Academy knows…
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 John H. Foote Dustin Hoffman has always been at his finest when the character he is portraying has an edge to him, a meanness that sets him apart from the rest of humanity. He twice has won Academy Awards for Best Actor, but never has he won for his finest work, which was Tootsie…
By John H. Foote Watching this film for the first time, I remember thinking as Lange moved into the frame, “I am watching pure carnality”, so great was her sexual power. As Cora, the very dangerous young woman stuck in a dead-end marriage to a loud, brash immigrant who owns a diner in the Depression…
By Geoff Wertheim (***) Ghostbusters did it. Star Wars did it. Now Scream does it. Embracing the “requel”, 5cream – as this should’ve been called – follows many of the beats of the original while adding just enough to keep it fresh beyond the teenage cast. The returning actors have all aged with their roles…
By John H. Foote One of the dumbest rules ever created for the Academy Awards is that an actor is eligible for nomination only once in the same category each year. So, if someone has three brilliant performances in three different films, they must decide which one they are going to campaign for the nomination.…
By Alan Hurst (***) Streaming on Prime I guess it is possible to know too much about someone. Particularly when that person and her husband are the subject of a film biography where dramatic license is liberally employed to tell their story. That’s what Aaron Sorkin has done here in telling the story of Lucille…
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…