The Big Picture Magazine
Before using colours “like a singing Matisse” in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy made the most lyrical use of black and white in his first two films, Lola and Bay of Angels. Before singing heroines bursting on screen on a background of glorious colours and stylised sets (the citizens of Cherbourg allowed Demy to […]
One of the most acclaimed films in Cannes this year, Trang Anh Hung’s La passion de Dodin Bouffant, which also won the award for best director, is not just a story about “The Napoleon of the culinary arts”, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his beloved cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), but one that distinguishes itself visually […]
Holly is a 15-year-old girl living in a South Dakota town with her father. “Little did I realise,” she narrates in voice-over, twirling her baton on the street, “that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” What begins in the alleys and back […]
René Clément was the first to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s book The Talented Mr. Ripley for the big screen. And he made it his own. Titled Plein soleil (1960), his gripping thriller – which focuses on the cruel, but cool Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), who ingeniously and skillfully finds ways to further his finances and lifestyle […]
Catherine Deneuve graces this year’s poster for the Cannes Film Festival and in its honour, we are revisiting François Truffaut’s La Sirène du Mississippi (1969). It was the first time when François Truffaut depicted a genuine couple. “In Jules and Jim and in The Soft Skin, scenes involving two people are always presented with reference […]
Until the End of the World (1991) begins with a grim end-time scenario. A nuclear satellite threatens to crash through the ozone layer and wipe out the world’s communications system. It is said to be circling above like a bird of prey. Watching the film now, in 2023, it’s daunting to realise that the unrestrained […]
An adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), is a tour de force of the noir genre, one that covers a wide range of noir themes and noir locations, a story with a cruel and twisted plot, in which a young but broken-down prize-fighter takes a perilous path to […]
East Germany, 1980. Barbara is a doctor who works in a hospital in a small provincial town. This is her punishment for attempting to emigrate to the West. She used to work in the biggest hospital in Berlin. Now she is kept under constant surveillance, secluded in the country, with nobody to trust. She does […]
There are few things I appreciate about a film more than its sense of place. That’s what Peter Weir achieved in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). The mood and the recreation of the Indonesian locale are so extraordinary (he used Manila and the Philippines as a stand-in for Djakarta and Indonesia) that they give […]