The Big Picture Magazine
Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Distance (Disutansu, Japan, 2001) is a film about memories and farewells: the farewells of people spending their last moments together and about the ultimate farewell – to the dead. The film’s story is closely related to an event that still continues to haunt Japanese society – the gas attack on Tokyo’s subway in […]
For an industry so reliant on the whims of the marketplace, cinema’s relationship with capitalism has never been a straightforward one. Even as vast amounts of money were channelled into the filmmaking machinery and yet greater profits were realized at the other end, movies have never been completely comfortable with the economic system on which […]
In 1970, Pierre Goldman, a left-wing intellectual and militant, was arrested and charged with committing four armed robberies, including one of a pharmacy on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir in Paris during which two pharmacists – both women – were killed. In 1974 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the robberies and life […]
It’s rare in the modern Hollywood landscape to see movies that deal with faith in a very direct way. Religious epics were once a staple genre with the American world of movies, but perhaps more than any other genre, they’ve disappeared from popular American filmmaking since their heyday in the 1950s. What remains is a […]
The Big Picture is committed to giving young, emerging writers a voice in the world of film criticism. In this feature, student writers from around the world share their insights on contemporary film and new releases.
The Holdovers (2023), the latest film by Alexander Payne, after a screenplay by David Hemingson, is set in a New England prep school during a snowy winter break, on the backdrop of the 1970s. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the professor who has to supervise a handful of boys who have nowhere to go for […]
When the sun is high, it casts the most unyielding shadows. And in Jodorowsky’s unflinchingly off-kilter masterpiece The Holy Mountain (1973), the sun is always out, illuminating the improbable tangents of the human condition and stirring the dark impulses that lurk in our culture’s crevices. As a piece of high-camp, low-inhibition social commentary, The Holy […]
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tetsuo, 1989) presents a filmic universe haunted by visions of flesh and metal in which the protagonist is transformed into a hybrid of man and machine. Along with Shozin Fukui and Sogo Ishii, Tsukamoto is considered one of the main representatives of Japanese cyberpunk, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man […]
“We all have a past, but it doesn’t define us” one character says in Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father the Devil (2021). The film holds this assertion under close scrutiny. The story focuses on Marie, played by Babetida Sadjo, a Guinean immigrant living and working in rural France at a sleepy retirement home. She maintains a […]