By John H. Foote (****) Remember Beanie Feldstein from Lady Bird (2017)? She played the best friend alienated by Lady Bird herself, though they manage to reconcile before a valued friendship is lost forever. She is also the sister of Oscar nominee Jonah Hill and if her brilliant performance in this film is any indication,…
By John H. Foote (***) What if Superman had been a bad guy? What if used those powers for selfish reasons, to conquer, to kill, to destroy? We saw in Superman II (1981) the awesome power of General Zod, hellbent on destruction, bringing down armies on his way to encounter the Man of Steel. Brightburn…
By John H. Foote (**) Like so many of the recent releases from Disney, this film is critic proof. There is a built-in audience of those curious to see what Guy Ritchie has done with the hugely successful animated film of 1992, made flesh and blood for 2019. Add to the mix the die-hard Disney…
By John H. Foote (***) Horror remains subjective, like comedy the most personal of the film genres. What scares you might not scare me and so on and so on. When I was a boy the supernatural horror films from Universal frightened me, but not really because I knew under the make-up were actors. But…
By John H. Foote (**) Much was made of Sir Richard Attenborough and his twenty-year battle to bring the turbulent life of Gandhi to the screen. The three-hour film finally flickered onto screens in late 1982 and film critics wrote extensively about both the film and the account of bringing the work to the screen.…
By John H. Foote (****) At the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, David Cronenberg brought to us his new film, A History of Violence, based on a popular graphic novel about secrets in a small town. Darkly brilliant, unsettling and frightening, it is a modern-day real-life horror film, among the finest of the decade. Tom…
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…
By John H. Foote (***) In 1978 the Festival of Festivals in downtown Toronto, struggling to find its identity as a festival, landed the film that would put the upstart fest on the map, Midnight Express. Directed by Alan Parker, adapted to the screen from the book by Oliver Stone, the film, a prison drama, stormed…
By John H. Foote (Worthless, Repellent, Horrific) What began as what could have been a notable film, a biography of the quite insane and depraved Roman Emperor Caligula, instead was transformed during its making into a major pornographic film produced by Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine. Though esteemed writer Gore Vidal had written by all…
By John H. Foote The movie season is divided into three specific categories. From January through April we have the dumping ground, the months the studios release their films that they are unsure of. From time to time we get a Captain Marvel to shake things up, but usually audiences are still going to see…