The Big Picture MagazineAda writes the blog Classiq, where she funnels her lifelong passion for cinema and her interest in fashion in film, of which she is a fervent proponent as one of cinema's most far-reaching influences. She is an optimistic by nature, but she hates forced happy endings. Maybe that’s why film noir is her favourite genre. She regards it as a prime contributor to restoring the balance disrupted by the traditional notion of a Hollywoodian happy ending.
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 […]
Before using colours “like a singing Matisse” in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy made the most lyrical use of black and white in his first two films, Lola and Bay of Angels. Before singing heroines bursting on screen on a background of glorious colours and stylised sets (the citizens of Cherbourg allowed Demy to […]
One of the most acclaimed films in Cannes this year, Trang Anh Hung’s La passion de Dodin Bouffant, which also won the award for best director, is not just a story about “The Napoleon of the culinary arts”, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his beloved cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), but one that distinguishes itself visually […]
Holly is a 15-year-old girl living in a South Dakota town with her father. “Little did I realise,” she narrates in voice-over, twirling her baton on the street, “that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” What begins in the alleys and back […]
René Clément was the first to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s book The Talented Mr. Ripley for the big screen. And he made it his own. Titled Plein soleil (1960), his gripping thriller – which focuses on the cruel, but cool Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), who ingeniously and skillfully finds ways to further his finances and lifestyle […]
Catherine Deneuve graces this year’s poster for the Cannes Film Festival and in its honour, we are revisiting François Truffaut’s La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). It was the first time when François Truffaut depicted a genuine couple. “In Jules and Jim and in The Soft Skin, scenes involving two people are always presented with reference […]
Until the End of the World (1991) begins with a grim end-time scenario. A nuclear satellite threatens to crash through the ozone layer and wipe out the world’s communications system. It is said to be circling above like a bird of prey. Watching the film now, in 2023, it’s daunting to realise that the unrestrained […]
The sprightliness of the reimagined story of Little Red Riding Hood. A dark, atmospheric cautionary tale set in the slumps of Louisiana on the jazzy score of Adrien Chevalier. A little mouse who lives among books and their extraordinary adventures and who, when the candle burns out and he runs out of matches, must take […]
An adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), is a tour de force of the noir genre, one that covers a wide range of noir themes and noir locations, a story with a cruel and twisted plot, in which a young but broken-down prize-fighter takes a perilous path to […]