The Big Picture MagazineGeorgina fell in love with film while studying literature in the remote Welsh valleys. With no money and no telly, she turned to her local film library for entertainment. She has a penchant for schlocky horror and can always be counted on for an opinion on cinema's more macabre offerings. She currently works as a writer in Bristol. Find her on Twitter @GuthrieGeorgina.
The list of ‘great British erotic films’ is a very small list indeed. That’s not to say we don’t have any in our oeuvre. Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, Ken Russell’s Women in Love, and a handful by Nicholas Roeg all make the cut – although none but the first could be called erotic […]
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” – Philip Marlowe, Farewell My Lovely Coat, hat, gun. The guts of […]
Joseph Pevney is a name you don’t hear often, although his output as a director was prolific. He made eighty or so productions, and gained success with a few commercial hits, including Female on the Beach, Tammy and the Bachelor, and (fun fact!) the first 14 episodes of Star Trek. His mostly forgotten The Midnight […]
Childhood sweets are happy memories. They’re treats from loving parents, for being good, for being loved. It’s wartime in Grave of the Fireflies, but a tin of sweets cherished by a little girl is an image that transcends culture and time. That the sweets are later replaced by her ashes remains one of cinema’s cruellest, […]
Cigarette, bottle of wine, coat: enter Withnail, Richard E. Grant’s raging antihero and elegantly wasted actor au-chômage. It’s winter in Camden Town, London, and he and Marwood (Paul McGann) are holed up in a squalid flat with no booze, heating or food. There’s the tweed coat. It’s always there: deep heat, rubber glove and coat. […]
The best parents loosen the ties to allow for a little self discovery, but where’s the line? Overly strict parenting makes a casualty of confidence, whereas complete freedom comes with a price of its own. This balance tips too much towards the latter for Minnie (Bel Powley), The Diary of a Teenage Girl‘s protagonist. Adapted […]
Martin von Krogh is an award winning photojournalist whose work for Newsweek took him to Kabul, the conflict-ridden capital of Afghanistan. Martin’s film Cinema Pameer is about the passion of those running and visiting the eponymous cinema, and their love of film in a difficult and frequently dangerous environment. With the help of Kickstarter funders, […]
Kieslowski’s Decalogue seems to resort, at times, to self-consciously symbolic imagery: a bee clinging to a straw as a neighbouring man in his bed clings to his life, a swinging rubber devil’s head on a doomed taxi driver’s car mirror, and wax tears running down the cheeks of a religious effigy. Yet rather than affirming […]
Taxi Driver’s portrait of ’70s downtown New York, complete with neon signs and porno theatres flashing through the night, is an image that sticks with you like no other. Never before has a film so full of sexuality, rage and loneliness been kept at boiling point for so long, and Travis’ final howl of violence […]