By John H. Foote How did it lose Best Picture, Best Director? In 1989, at the end of the decade, Premiere Magazine, that wonderful now defunct movie magazine polled the nations top film critics to ask them what was the best film of the eighties? To no ones surprise, they voted Martin Scorsese’s searing boxing…
Rumble Fish (1983) Criterion Special Edition Blu Ray (****) By John H. Foote Smarting from the critical bashing he took on One from the Heart (1982), Francis Ford Coppola took the advice of a teenaged fan and read The Outsiders, then immediately bought the rights to it for a film. On the heels of The…
By John H. Foote COMING HOME (1978) (****) Hal Ashby was a bonafide free spirit, a hippy who hated the system that held the power of making movies. He loved making movies, loved it with an unbridled passion, but he hated the suits that held the power to making those movies. During his most fruitful…
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (****) By John H. Foote My wife was very close with her mother. Best friends. They could spend an entire day together, then call each other at night to chat some more. Ellie often went with us to various events, movies, plays, fairs, to hear the folk group Tanglefoot, and of course…
By John H. Foote This might be the biggest surprise of the summer, that this sequel to the superb Sicario (2015) is as good as it is. The previous film, directed by Denis Villeneuve was a superb study of drug trafficking across the Mexican border, where US agents routinely encounter major Mexican cartels and their…
By John H. Foote SNUBBED ENTIRELY, BUT MASTERFUL NONETHELESS… Kevin Costner won an Academy Award for Best Director for his western epic Dances with Wolves (1990), which won six other Oscars including Best Picture, and saw the likable star nominated for Best Actor. This was very near the beginning of his career, when his baseball…
By John H. Foote When The Silence of the Lambs (1991) swept the major Oscars, Best Film, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, there was some griping about Jodie Foster winning again, just three years after winning for a The Accused (1988). Let me state here and now, her Clarice Starling is the heart and soul…
By Alan Hurst From a first viewing in the late 70s and then multiple viewings since, no other film of the horror/suspense genre has ever had the impact on me that Rosemary’s Baby (1968) has. It was a big hit when it came out in 1968 and it sill holds up today. It’s the perfect…
By John H. Foote The Incredibles (2004) now fourteen years old, remains among the greatest films of the decade, easily among the top three Pixar films ever made. In addition, it stands among the finest of the super hero genre, which in 2004 had yet to explode to the extent it has in 2018. Neither…
By John H. Foote A couple of years ago Alex Garland gave us his excellent science fiction thriller Ex Machina (2014), a thriller that was far better than perhaps it had any right to be. Confident, even brash behind the camera Garland has done it again, even more so, with his new film Annihilation, which…