By Alan Hurst Remember the Night starts off as a snappy and fast paced comedy, very typical of the genre in the late thirties and early forties. But then it takes you places you aren’t expecting – first a little risqué (but not really) and then it becomes quite dark, almost threatening. But minutes later…
By Marie-Renee Goulet The season is upon us, and my team suggested we pick our favourite Christmas movie and go through why it was so meaningful to us. Like every other time this situation comes up, I smiled and nodded and stayed silent. How do I tell them? Should I tell them? I don’t have…
By John H. Foote (****) Streaming on Apple Tom Hanks has twice won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his superb work in Philadelphia (1993) and a year later in Forrest Gump (1994), an unforgettable performance. He has been nominated for the Oscar another four times. He should have won a third for his…
By John H. Foote The Directors Guild of America has nominated him 11 times, more than any other filmmaker in the history of the movies, and three times honoured him as the year’s Best Director. Seven times he has been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director, winning twice, however it is clear there…
By Alan Hurst A cinephile’s dream: programming your own film festival. We’ve given ourselves a bit of a challenge here at Foote and Friends on Film to start a series of articles where we each get to program our own film festival, maybe even a few. The theme of the festival, the number of films,…
By John H. Foote The producers touted this drama with Al Pacino and Donald Sutherland as an important historical film. Directed by the talented Hugh Hudson, who also directed Chariots of Fire (1981) and the magnificent Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), Revolution still tanked in spite of the talent behind…
By John H. Foote What scares you might not scare me at all. In the last 15 years, I have come face to face with what definitely scares me in life. Number one was becoming a dad. But in films, though some can work dark magic on me, rarely do I emerge from a movie…
By John H. Foote When my wife was pregnant and again when having chemotherapy for the brain cancer that took her from us, it was my job to clean the litter boxes for the cats. Cat urine has an ammonia smell if left too long, and the poop stinks dreadfully. I cleaned them every day…
By Alan Hurst Sleep Hollow and Dragonwyck are set about 50 years apart but they’re eerily effective in provoking the puritanical, malevolent mood of life along New York’s Hudson River in era’s long gone by. They both tell stories that are influenced by the supernatural and occult. They achieve their visual effects through atmospheric cinematography…
By Marie-Renee Goulet I never much cared for chick flicks. Romantic movies are pernicious. Almost all present an utterly unrealistic set of circumstances that create unattainable expectations by the consumers. The large majority of these movies unfold in a way that would never in a million years happen in real life. However, I sometimes indulge…