By John H. Foote (***) It was New Year’s Eve 1978, and my lady and I were not hard drinking party goers. No, our night out would be a hearty Chinese dinner and a movie. We popped in to wish a beloved school teacher a Happy New Year and then headed to the movies. All…
By John H. Foote Time is a very strange thing in our minds is it not? I often wonder if it is entirely possible to even comprehend. I look at my daughters now 28 and 20 and wonder how the years slipped by so fast, where did they go? There are things from my past…
By John H. Foote (****) Opening night of The Shining, 40 years ago this weekend in 1980. My brother and I had been fans of the book and both appreciated Stanley Kubrick, though the big draw here for both of us was Jack Nicholson. My girlfriend of the time, Steve and I headed out to…
By John H. Foote (****) Once upon a time, 40 years ago in a theatre in Oshawa, in a galaxy far, far away, sat 500 people. They were there to see the single most anticipated film of the year, the first sequel to Star Wars (1977) entitled The Empire Strikes Back. I was among that…
By John H. Foote (****) For this film, Marlon Brando won Best Actor awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle for his punishing, gut wrenching performance as Paul, an American adrift in Paris after the suicide of his Parisian wife. There is little doubt Brando deserved the…
By Craig Leask In this fifth and final section in my series on Corruption in the Movies I am focusing on movies about reporters – reporters at a time when the news had integrity – not the biased one sided opinion circus that journalism has now become. Reporters were trained that the truth in their…
By John H. Foote (****) There were three films released in 1989 that dealt openly with the racial tensions between blacks and whites. Spike Lee’s explosive Do the Right Thing, the epic Civil War drama Glory, and the most conservative and gentle of the three, Driving Miss Daisy. Lee’s film was incendiary, a scalding study…
By John H. Foote (**) Al Capone has been portrayed often onscreen, most recently by the great Stephen Graham in Boardwalk Empire where the actor captured the ambition and fury of a young Capone. Robert De Niro is perhaps the most famous Capone on film in The Untouchables (1987), wielding a baseball bat with deadly…
By Craig Leask In this fourth installment in my series on Corruption in the Movies I’m focusing on movies about real life whistle blowers. A whistle blower is a person who discovers a wrongdoing within an organization and anonymously or secretly reports it to the authorities or to the media. In so doing, a whistle…
By John H. Foote (****) After each decade ends, film critics usually debate which film was the finest of the previous 10 years, which we did with the first 10 years of the 2000’s. Nearly every critic I encounter places this film in the top three of the decade, most placing it number one, which…