The Big Picture Magazine
Vicente Aranda (who died last year) was part of the avant-garde Barcelona School of filmmakers in the 1960s and became best known for entwining explicit sexuality with explorations of murky pasts. Although Freedom Fighters’ Spanish Civil War setting satisfies the latter of those directorial motifs, Aranda’s habitually fleshy depictions of carnal desire and twisted sexual jealousy […]
Stuart Cooper’s dream-like interweaving of stunning archival footage with the fictional narrative of the training of a new recruit, Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner), won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1975, but Overlord (the codename for the D-Day landings) seemingly received little attention until Criterion recently issued it on Blu-ray. The film […]
Dark Habits falls through the cracks between Pedro Almodóvar’s crude and anarchic first two films and the creative stride that he hit in the mid-1980s, which is a shame because it is the first of his films that is recognizably ‘Almodóvarian’. The film opens with a time-lapse shot of dusk falling on Madrid and this […]