By John H. Foote 5. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) It has been more than 75 years since Allied forces stormed that beach, dubbed Omaha, leaving it blood soaked, littered with bodies torn to pieces by heavy machine gun fire from the many nests above the beach. There are fewer and fewer veterans each year to…
By John H. Foote 6. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) From the time I first screened The Silence of the Lambs I have maintained the great strength of the story, the secret weapon if you will, is the superbly empathetic performance of Jodie foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling. I am aware that Anthony…
By John H. Foote Personally I enjoy remakes. People say they are unnecessary, but I pose the question, how many productions of Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet have there been around the world? How many productions of The Crucible or The Glass Menagerie have been staged? What about the great comedies of Neil Simon: The…
By John H. Foote 7. L.A. Confidential And back to the counting down of the greatest films of the nineties, we are almost there. The Oscars interrupted us! At the end of 1997, while audiences were lining around city blocks to see Titanic, James Cameron’s massive love story set aboard the doomed ship making its…
By Craig Leask By the 1970’s, the American public had survived the shocking 1963 assassination of JFK with the implausible Warren Committee conclusion of a lone gunman having committed the deed – a simpleton by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. Add to this: the murder of Oswald (televised live) by Jack Ruby (who perished…
By John H. Foote I freely concede it took a long time for me to recognize that the films made in this country are powerful worthy works, something the rest of the planet had discovered before most Canadians. The struggle to get Canadians to watch Canadian cinema is still an ongoing battle, but things are…
By John H. Foote 8. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) Watching The Shawshank Redemption for the first time at TIFF, my breath was literally taken away three times in the film. The first time was with the two lead performances, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, as two men serving long sentences in Shawshank Prison, the second…
By John H. Foote 9. MAGNOLIA (1999) How often does a director really dare in his filmmaking? How often have you sat in a theatre and thought: this is astonishing, I have never before experienced something like this. Those were my thoughts as I watched Magnolia for the first time at a press screening. The…
By John H. Foote 10. JFK (1991) Walking into Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1991, I always thought I knew a little bit about the Kennedy assassination, but emerging three hours later, I realized I had known nothing and now I was convinced I knew who shot the President. The film is that convincing and that…
By John H. Foote 11. FIGHT CLUB (1999) “There is one rule about fight club. You do not talk about the fight club. The second rule is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.” – Tyler Durdan (Brad Pitt) in Fight Club (1999) So says Tyler Durden in laying out the rules for the strange…