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 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 Alan Hurst The team challenge to write about the most worthless film each of us had ever seen was a head scratcher. Worthless to me meant that it had to have zero redeeming qualities: a waste of talent, time and money that should have been stopped at some point during production. But coming up…
By Craig Leask For Mother’s Day I have chosen Mrs. Miniver, as the film that not only acknowledges the strength, endurance and fierce protectiveness found in most mothers, but the film also masterfully celebrates them. Mrs. Miniver was the right film at the right time. Based upon the 1940 Jan Struther novel of the same…
By Alan Hurst Movie moms tend to fall into three categories. You have the self-sacrificing, almost saintly mothers as epitomized by Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver (1942), Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama (1948), and step mom Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965). Then there are the dark, edgy creations like Margaret Wycherly…
By Melissa Houghton Would we exist without mothers? That’s rhetorical. Real and fictional mothers- love, support, protect, nurture, provide for, shape and inspire us. But let’s not take mothers for granted; they also have needs and want some of the same things they selflessly give to their families and others. To all the moms, mom-dads,…
By John H. Foote (****) American outlaw Jesse James has been portrayed many times on the big screen by such actors as Tyrone Power, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, and Colin Farrell, but no one touches Brad Pitt’s performance as the gunman in this 2007 film. Pitt captures the unpredictability James was said to have possessed,…
By John H. Foote “They train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write fuck on their airplanes, because it is obscene.” – Kurtz (Marlon Brando) The University Theatre sat on Bloor Street in Toronto, standing like a massive cathedral for cinema, a church to film buffs and…