By John H. Foote (****) When Richard Nixon was re-elected President in 1972, he rode into office on the wave of the greatest landslide in American political history. Did he know just 18 months later, disgraced, he would resign the Presidency under the cloud of the Watergate affair? I think Nixon thought his substantial achievements in the Oval…
By John H. Foote After winning the coveted New York Film Critics Circle for Best Actor, Ethan Hawke, for his haunted, powerful performance in First Reformed became a contender for the Academy Award as Best Actor. Until that win, Hawke had been on the fringe, but the moment the NY scribes named him their Best Actor he leaped…
By John H. Foote (****) When Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie, he drew heavily on his own life, his past and the result was the birth of the neo realistc American theatre. A Streetcar Named Desire would blow the lid off that movement and, together with Arthur Miller’s Death Of a Salesman, make the late forties the…
By John H. Foote (****) In 1982 I was an acting student more interested in directing than acting, and more interested in film criticism than anything else. On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, I went to see the film alone, as I often did, and sat in the theatre quietly transfixed by the beauty and absolute purity of the…
By John H. Foote This is the worst kind of Hollywood biography. To be merciful, I will be quick. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of the most extraordinary women on the last one hundred years and certainly deserved so much more than this. Earlier in the year, the superb documentary RBG (2018) beautifully documented the life of this…
By John H. Foote Nicole Kidman gives a towering performance of barely concealed fury in this film, a performance that elevates the film, a performance that is the finest of her career. With little to no make up, her hair a mess, her eyes red with lack of sleep, her movements simply forward, unyielding, she is a frightening…
By John H. Foote It was, at the movies, a very good year. Not like 1939, 1956, 1974 or 2007 but damn, it was a great year at the movies. With streaming services online and television better than ever, film has been challenged in a way they have not since the fifties. I CHOSE NOT TO INCLUDE STREAMING…
By John H. Foote Great acting performances leave me in awe. They stroke my soul, they feed me. Great acting has often brought me to tears just because of the purity of the accomplishment, it can be utterly breathtaking to see. From Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Jane Fonda in Klute (1971),…
By John H. Foote Despite appearances in Batman v. Superman (2016) and Justice League (2017), Aquaman is an original movie, telling the story of how the super hero from beneath the sea came to be. A big, overblown, overlong epic film you can see where the two hundred million budget was spent, and we understand why they have…
By John H. Foote I was a child through the sixties, when boys asked for Tinker Toys, Fort Apache, the Big Jim Sports Camper or the old reliable hockey gear and sticks. The greatest gift I ever received as a child was a brand new set of goalie gloves, my God I can still smell…