The Big Picture Magazine
I recently returned from a short holiday to Spain, where – apart from reminding myself that the sun did in fact exist – I was introduced to the amazing murals of Estapona; a small resort town two hours west of Malaga on the south coast. The huge arts initiative, which invited painters from all over […]
Is Katharine Hepburn playing herself in Bringing Up Baby (1938)? And if so, why not? Katharine Hepburn turned Hollywood on its head. She fearlessly and uncompromisingly set out to become a star in an industry that wanted greatness on its own terms, an industry that often tried to destroy the original few. She wanted greatness […]
In this special 3 part episode, Gabriel and Tom select and discuss great director debuts from the year 2000 and up. Right out of the gate, these film-makers showed a clarity of vision and creative maturity that ensured theirs would be names (and films) we’d remember. In part 1, our spotlight focusses on Kenneth Lonergan’s […]
Shot a few months after the triple disaster that hit Japan’s Eastern Pacific Coast in March 2011 – an earthquake followed by a tsunami and core meltdowns in three reactors at the nuclear power plant in the Fukushima Prefecture – Sion Sono’s The Land of Hope (Kibo no kuni, Japan, 2012) addresses a great variety […]
Jay and Mark Duplass’s film starts with Jason Segel’s 30 year-old slacker Jeff musing about the significance of fate into a dictaphone while sitting on the crapper. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs, with its thread of meaningful coincidences, points to a loose philosophy for Jeff to cling to as he idles away endless hours […]
There’s something uncomfortable in the way that gangster films often ask us to empathise with central characters who are, in effect, psychopaths. ‘Anti’ and ‘heroic’ are separated by a very thin line as the movie gangster is made of sterner stuff than us mere mortals, seemingly existing in a place once removed from normality; a […]
The Batman (2022) has received something of a mixed reception from critics and film fans, but I’d like to go on record to say it deserves at least Se7en out of zen. It’s reminiscent of the look and feel and general modus operandi of David Fincher’s 1995 serial killer opus – if not quite Zodiac […]
On September 26, 1993, a crew of eight people emerged from a huge ecological desert facility after two years of isolation. The facility, named Biosphere 2 and located in Oracle, Arizona, was constructed to replicate the earth’s various habitats in a closed environment as a forerunner for speculative ‘off world’ colonization. While the whole thing […]
Aliza Richardson fixes her gaze on memorable houses in film, exploring their uniqueness as architectural marvels and evocative cinematic locations.
