The Big Picture MagazineJez has contributed to numerous film-related books, magazines and websites. He has co-edited three books in Intellect's World Film Locations series, covering Dublin, Reykjavik and Liverpool and has contributed pieces to many more volumes in the series. His monograph on John Carpenter's The Thing in Auteur's Devil's Advocates series of books was published in 2013. He is currently working on another book in the same series, concerning Ealing Studios' Dead of Night.
For all Disney’s early innovations in the field of animated movement of characters and environments, from the use of rotoscoping to the multiplane camera technique, it is this moment of relative stillness from Bambi that is perhaps his most affecting piece of work. It’s easy to be cynical about Disney, but this truly breaks the […]
Kiss Me Deadly—a brutal, brilliant film noir that set the high-water mark for Cold War paranoia—is finally getting the deluxe DVD reissue it deserves on June 21st courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Criterion Collection. Below is a pivotal scene from the film as featured in the World Film Locations: Los Angeles book available […]
Picking up on the theme of transition in issue 14 of The Big Picture magazine, Jez Conolly looks back at three films concerned with the pre- and post-millennial influx of refugees into the UK. In each case the director elected to employ the liminal non-spaces of British seaside resorts as the setting for their stories […]
Few films fail quite so brilliantly as Altered States. Part chin-stroking talk-fest on trippy existentialism among the corduroy-jacketed academia of Harvard, part body-horror tripe of the silliest order, it’s a hallucinogenic broth combining Jung, Darwin and Timothy Leary which manages to be both deep and daft in equal measure. For all its shortcomings it remains […]
The idea of a director ‘painting with light’ in the making of a film has become something of a lazy cliché. In the case of Archipelago, the new British film scrutinising every painful and discomforting nuance of a dysfunctional family holiday on the Scillonian island of Tresco, it is possibly the most apposite description of […]
As a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor let us linger for a while over what is surely one of the greatest ever onscreen kisses. If proof were needed that, in her heyday, Taylor photographed better in close-up than pretty much any other actress, this George Stevens romance surely provides it. To begin with, it’s worth noting […]
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In Jack Smight’s criminally underappreciated No Way to Treat a Lady it proves to be the most effective and blackly amusing form of murder. Rod Steiger hams it up as murderous mother-fixated thespian Christopher Gill, donning various disguises and dispatching his victims with a quick strangle, […]
It started with a green sock with ping pong balls for eyes. Years later some of the creatures to feature in Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s dark and scary children’s fantasy epic The Dark Crystal were about as cuddly as a monster cactus wrapped in razor wire. Hide your eyes children: here come the Garthim! […]
Mike Leigh’s cinematographer Dick Pope deserves a special mention amid all the praise currently being heaped on the director’s latest picture Another Year. The colours deployed to denote the passing of the seasons, appropriately reflecting the turn of the months and the downturn in the fortunes of Mary (Lesley Manville) are a fine example of […]