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 John H. Foote No fancy intro, just into it. 2019 will forever be remembered and celebrated as the year Netflix revolutionized the industry. I begin with fifteen runners up to the top ten in what was an exciting, strong year at the movies. I get so tired of hearing movies are worse than ever,…
By John H. Foote Why do an intro? These are the ten worst films I screened this year, I am sure there are others, I am sure I could do a list of runners up numbering very high. But I won’t because, at the end of the day, 2019 was a good year at the…
By John H. Foote Though he has not worked often when he does make a film, he makes it count and when working with actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese, it is legendary. Despite his small stature, Pesci can dominate a scene with the same ferocity as John Wayne, his explosive, uncontainable fury…
By John H. Foote With the glut of film awards being handed out this past month, the big ones still to come, I have decided to give annual awards too. These are the winners of the first annual Foote Film Awards. Best Picture – THE IRISHMAN Best Director – Martin Scorsese for THE IRISHMAN Best…
By John H. Foote Every so often a film comes about that is wildly acclaimed, and I am on the outside looking in, not comprehending the acclaim. It happened with The Artist (2011), fun film, built on a gimmick, but Best Picture? Please! I felt the same gnawing annoyance about Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which I…
By John H. Foote (****) Is it generational that Little Women seems to pop up as a new film version with such frequency? Whatever the reason, the topical issues explored in the fine book by Louisa May Alcott remain as timely today as they were back in the 1860s and in this film are given…
By John H. Foote (****) Bob Clark’s warm, wonderfully nostalgic film A Christmas Story, has long been a classic, a staple of holiday film watching. The Canadian production, yes, it is a Canadian film, is among the finest films made in this country, an event when all the pieces fell perfectly together to give us…
By John H. Foote (****) Academy Award winner Sam Mendes returns to greatness with his stunning World War One epic, 1917, a breathtaking work that ironically comes to us the same year as the superb Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Never Grow Old. More on that later. Mendes film, deceptively simplistic, yet undeniably compelling, is…
By John H. Foote (****) As a man, I will never know what it is to be sexually harassed. I suppose there is a slim chance of being so harassed by a woman or a man, but so far it has not happened and I doubt it will. My wife knew what it was to…