The Big Picture Magazine
Criticisms of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking often centre on a lack of warmth and humanity, as if his style is a façade and that emotional content is something that is neglected or ignored, willfully or otherwise. But this doesn’t ring true; in this, his third film, the story reaches an emotional crescendo that the design, cinematography […]
Perhaps most notable for its existence as the first (and finest?) adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and an early example of survival horror, The Last Man on Earth begins under more innocuous circumstances. Sunrise over a cluster of pretty tenement buildings; the calm, empty streets of some wistful European city that suggest in their absence of people […]
Kieron Moore looks on in horror as a romantic caravanning holiday in the north of England descends into violent mayhem in Ben Wheatley’s idiosyncratic black comedy. What would Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973) be like were it set around the tourist spots of Northern England? It’s an unusual pitch, but the answer is Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, […]
It’s become somewhat of a British horror tradition to have a plot based around local country bumpkin-satanist types. Elliot Golder’s found-footage debut The Borderlands, with its unfriendly villagers and sheep-burning teenagers, certainly looks as if it’s going that way. It’s quick to pay homage to Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) but swiftly skirts the local […]
The simplicity of Dario Argento’s Eurohorror classic Suspiria’s story is equalled only by the complexity of its intoxicating aesthetics. Portrayed through Argento’s celebrated visceral set-pieces, a string of strange and violent events lead American dance student Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) to discover that the renowned Freiburg Tanz Akademie where she is studying is run by […]
The zombie film was, to excuse the pun, a sub-genre that had flatlined at the turn of the century. Movies thrown together by hacks with low budgets and even lower ambitions had consigned the undead to the DVD shelves. What this sub-section of horror needed was an injection of life, and British genre-spanning director Danny […]
Of all the films made about the sport of baseball, plenty have struck out, while only a handful have truly knocked it out of the park. None, however, can compare to The Natural (1984). It’s unsurprising that a sport so revered by its innumerate followers should provide the backdrop to a picture whose central character […]
Throughout the 1970s, the BBC television series A Ghost Story for Christmas provided a chilling counter to the gaudy frivolity of the season, brilliantly dramatising some of the great tales in the English ghost story tradition. Director Lawrence Gordon Clark initially concentrated on filming stories written by the great master of this tradition, MR James, […]
Until the late nineteen-seventies, Woody Allen had only produced farces and slapstick comedies. It was with the release of Annie Hall (1977), a significant turning point in his career, that Allen demonstrated his intent to produce films that were thematically mature, dramatic, and emotionally engaging. What followed broke the mould for the filmmaker. Beautifully photographed by Gordon Willis in […]