The Big Picture MagazineCallum Reid is an experienced film and music writer, and an award-winning production journalist. Cult, Horror, Classic Hollywood. Rush, Tool, Converge. And the occasional power ballad. Read him at bigpicturemagazine.com, ghostcultmag.com, originalrock.net, metal-temple.com and in Beneficial Shock!
MATTHEW 25, 6: And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), his final – we think? – go round the mobster realm and that detailed world and times he knows so well is peopled by … well, let’s just say “colourful” characters. […]
I AM NOT anti-Netflix. Of course not. Let’s face it – without Netflix, we wouldn’t have Roma. What’s that? Have I actually watched Alfonso Cuarón’s three-time Oscar-winning masterpiece? Er, no. I’m waiting for the right moment. Or the right big screen. Or the right home sound system. Really, really? I’d really rather watch it in […]
Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude. – 1 Corinthians 13 In Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), the course of true love never did run smooth. In Francis Lee’s multi-award-winning God’s Own Country (2017), a film predictably if unhelpfully tagged the “Brexit Brokeback,” things […]
Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) pitches us into an unforgiving wintry environment and declares once and for all, as if we didn’t know already, that this writer-director will be a survivor. And yes, his movie grips and informs and entertains along the way. A female, big-city-loneliness FBI agent finds herself tracking a rapist and murderer, his […]
(Warning: This article contains plot spoilers) M. Night Shyamalan has undergone an identity crisis. The writer, director, and bit-part ‘actor’ of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village came something of a mid-career cropper. With his subsequent movies failing to impress, Shyamalan went from being the new master of suspense and king of the […]
Mark Cousins, Northern Ireland’s acclaimed documentary filmmaker, said one of the things that first helped him realise there was more to the movies was “when my father cried at a John Wayne picture”. Yeah, Mark – we’ve all been there. The British critic David Thomson was an excoriator of Wayne – the man and his […]
Nothing can distract from the audience’s cinema experience more than a mobile phone. But in his exquisitely enigmatic, always intelligent and creepy-as-hell Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas uses this most modern of blank tablets, this smallest of small screens, to ramp up the tension within the big screen – bit by bit, message by message. Kristen […]
Music, like dreams, can linger in your head in bits and pieces. A snatch of a driving riff from here, a half-remembered lyric from there, a fast, crazy guitar solo from who knows what. Then, in a spark of revelation, it becomes apparent all the elements come from the same song (when this happened to […]
Proverbs 3:31: “Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.” To die for a righteous cause is one thing, but to die just for the hell of it is another. To somehow do both at the same time is pure Sam Peckinpah. The life and film-making of Bloody Sam are full of […]