The Big Picture MagazineThomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago and is a regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal and Film International. He is also an editor for The Big Picture. His book Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema is available from Wallflower Press.
The psychosexual thriller has survived many iterations, from the highbrow (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), to the gloriously over-the-top (Dressed to Kill, 1980), to the painfully dated (Jade, 1995). Scott J. Ramsey’s X (2019) is something of a Frankenstein’s monster, borrowing a bit from Kubrick’s final masterpiece (masked orgies, recurring mirror imagery) and a lot from […]
Fans will find much to relish in Alexandre O. Philippe’s obsessive documentary, Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019). As its title suggests, the film explores how Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece draws from the past (especially Egyptian and Greek mythology) and speculates about the future, yet continues to feel entirely of the moment. A number […]
After languishing in obscurity for decades, Tony Williams’ cult horror oddity, Next of Kin (1982), has finally been released on Blu-ray, thanks to Second Sight Films. While the disc comes loaded with excellent special features, including multiple audio commentaries and two of Williams’ shorts, the biggest draw, naturally, is the pristine quality of the film […]
Before I saw any of George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, it already terrified me. This preemptive fear was caused by a VHS cover that has remained burned in my memory ever since I first laid eyes upon it as a child. One of my favorite childhood activities was perusing the Styrofoam-filled […]
Of the three films comprising Gus Van Sant’s so-called “Death Trilogy” (the others being 2002’s Gerry and 2005’s Last Days), Elephant (2003) remains the most affecting and prescient. Although a major success at Cannes, earning both the Palme d’Or and Best Director awards of that year, it is largely overlooked in comparison with the rest […]
In its opening scenes, Julia Ducournau’s Raw establishes Justine (Garance Marillier) as a strict vegetarian; when she finds a piece of meat in her mashed potatoes at a buffet, she spits it out with repulsion. However, through a series of increasingly squirm-inducing moments, Ducournau traces her protagonist’s journey to the polar opposite of the gastronomic spectrum: […]
Éric Rohmer was fascinated by philosopher Blaise Pascal’s ‘wager’ of faith, a literal gamble one takes in either believing or not believing in God. Believing is the best ‘bet’ one can make, since there is no way of losing: “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager that he exists […]
The central location in Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditative Stalker sounds like something out of a fairy tale: deep within “The Zone” – a mysterious and ever-shifting landscape left on Earth by some unknown entity – is a room that realises its inhabitants’ deepest desires. In theory, this location should be a gift, and perhaps it was […]
Now that M. Night Shyamalan is again enjoying critical and public success thanks to The Visit and Split, it’s high time we revisit what is perhaps his most misunderstood offering: the wildly uneven but oddly fascinating The Happening. Although derided as “that movie where Mark Wahlberg talks to a plant,” it remains the writer-director’s bleakest film to […]