By John H. Foote (****) When I saw this masterful film for the first time at TIFF, I believed with every fibre of my being it would dominate the Academy Award nominations, 10, 11, 12 nominations felt right. Rave reviews greeted the film, it seemed to have everything a film needed to be a major…
By John H. Foote (***) In writing about this exceptional Canadian film, I imagined that there are very few readers who have seen it, even more who have never heard of it. I am not in any way trying to be condescending, just honest and realistic, very few Canadian films are known throughout the rest…
By Craig Leask Throughout history corruption has been a major motivating factor in governments, corporations and pretty much any organization that involves money and or power. Historically these acts of corruption have been geographically contained and only negatively affecting the local town, city or region. With globalization, that’s no longer the case. These acts of…
By John H. Foote (**) With the publication of the excellent new book “One Shot – The Making of The Deer Hunter”, I thought I would do two things, the first to go back and re-watch The Deer Hunter (1978), which I did, and the second to revisit Heaven’s Gate, the film which ruined United…
By John H. Foote (****) Arguably the greatest of Canadian novels, Mordecai Richler’s superb study of a young Jewish hustler in Montreal after the Second World War, is a magnificent story about an ambitious, fiercely driven young man to whom the law means nothing, to whom moral decency means even less. Duddy (Richard Dreyfuss) is…
By Alan Hurst I remember reluctantly sitting in a movie theatre in the spring of 1980 to watch Michael Apted’s film version of Loretta Lynn’s autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter”. At that point I didn’t know a lot about the singer except that we shared a birthday (April 14), she sometimes showed up on the TV…
By John H. Foote (****) When one thinks of films that explore time travel, most would think of special effects extravaganzas or tightly written stories such as Back to the Future (1985), most with a tinge of science fiction in them. There is nothing of the kind in Woody Allen’s superb Midnight in Paris, as…
By John H. Foote (*) In the spirit of Battlefield Earth (2000), Cats (2019, and Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977), this was a truly dreadful film, created by great artists, with seemingly everything going wrong. From the creation of what was obviously an ugly place to exist within, the bizarre bad performances of gifted…
By John H. Foote (****) There are seven great plays of the 20th century that remain as fresh, as powerful and as urgent as the first day they opened on Broadway. They are Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, The Crucible, A Streetcar Named Desire, Equus, Angels in America and this masterful study of…
By John H. Foote There is, in Warren Beatty’s remarkable film Reds, a moment that defines journalist John Reed. While covering Pancho Villa in Mexico, he rises during a battle and chases a horse-drawn wagon, reaching out to touch it, but does not quite do so. That was John Reed, forever chasing history, forever wanting…