By John H. Foote (***) Count me a Bob Fosse fan. Watching his electrifying Cabaret (1972) for the first time you could feel something new being born on the screen, a revisionist musical that would shake the genre to its very core. Released the same year as The Godfather (1972), it is often forgotten Cabaret…
By Nick Maylor (***1/2) Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of high school teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White/Heisenberg on the series Breaking Bad has been heralded as one of the finest pieces of acting this century, if not of all time. For those of you who haven’t watch Breaking Bad, a SPOILER ALERT is now in effect.…
By Craig Leask (**) They’re creepy and their kooky …. And they’re back! The latest incarnation of the everyone’s favorite ghoulish family – The Addams Family – has arrived in theatres as a highly detailed animated movie, reconnecting the well-established family members and locating them in New Jersey. And while it’s a visual treat, there…
By John H. Foote (***) It was a tale often seen in movies, a love story set against the backdrop of a tragic historical event. Two studios would produce the film, as the budget soared to two hundred and sixty million dollars. To break even, Titanic would have to become the highest grossing film of…
By John H. Foote (**) Ang Lee is a great filmmaker No one will argue that point. With two Academy Awards for Best Director, Lee has been The toast of Hollywood more than once, with his films Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), the underrated Ride with the…
By Nick Maylor It’s good for an actor’s image if they’re seen as willing to poke fun at themselves. Robert De Niro helped define a character archetype by appearing in some of the most important crime films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Winning an Oscar for his role as Don Vito Corleone in The…
By Alan Hurst When it was announced a while back that the play End of the Rainbow – which detailed a few months towards the end of Judy Garland’s life – was going to be adapted for the big screen and that Renee Zellweger would be playing Garland, I was among the many skeptics who…
By John H. Foote (****) A quarter century – 25 years – have passed since Oliver Stone’s electrifying Natural Born Killers thundered onto movie screens for the first time, alighting a hurricane of controversy. By the nineties, television had become littered with Court TV programs and crime shows. Here was a film, written by Quentin…
By Nick Maylor Many Americans were not living the dream during the 1930’s, aside from the massive economic hardships suffered due to the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl forced countless American families living in the Plain states to relocate, many of them to California. It was a mass exodus that saw nearly 3.5 million people…
By John H. Foote (***) Shame on the Academy for their shabby treatment of Eddie Murphy through the years. Shame on Eddie Murphy for behaving like a pompous ass. That said you can pinpoint the moment the “freezing out” of Murphy took place, I watched it happen, commenting to my girl that Murphy had just…