Rainbow imagery plays a central role in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the enigmatic Eyes Wide Shut.
Author: Thomas M. Puhr
Thomas 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.
Murmur of the Heart consists of two halves: the first a celebration of youth, and the second an awakening to adulthood’s messy realities.
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New Release: Mother!
Gratuitous splatter-fest or underrated masterpiece? Big Picture critic Thomas Puhr reviews Darren Aronofsky’s latest, Mother!
As dense and uncategorisable as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) is, the filmmaker’s career-spanning fascination with the human face remains abundantly clear. In one of his most startling images, he combines his female lead’s facial features to demonstrate how one’s identity cannot exist in total isolation but is always influenced and moulded by others. Elisabet Vogler […]
Some of the best horror films, from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980), are fueled by subverting qualities often associated with family, such as safety, loyalty, and trust. While the thought of being murdered is terrifying in and of itself, it is even more disturbing when the perpetrator is a family member. Severin Fiala […]
At the root of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) is a telling paradox: though the film chronicles a nightmarish, serpentine journey through New York’s Soho neighbourhood, it is ultimately a story of entrapment. The protagonist’s sense of being stuck in a life of routine is symbolised through a recurring, startling prop: plaster sculptures of humans […]
On paper, writer-director Lars von Trier and cowriter Niels Vørsel’s The Element of Crime (1984) is straight out of a 1940s-era noir. In the film’s opening, a mentally unstable detective named Fisher (Michael Elphick) is summoned to Europe to track down a notorious child-killer (echoes of Lang’s M here) known as Harry Grey. According to […]
Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s humanism is most profoundly and movingly on display in his 2011 feature Oslo, August 31st. The film chronicles a day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lee), a recovering drug addict who is permitted a short leave from rehab for a job interview. Trier follows his protagonist as he reconnects […]
In his best films, John Carpenter straddles the fuzzy line between auteur and genre craftsman. This tendency is on full display in Prince of Darkness (1987), perhaps his most deceptively heady film of all. Beneath its jump scares and gore coils a sombre commentary on the relationship between science and faith. Does religion exist, the […]