The Big Picture Magazine
It’s a pity it took the global financial crisis for politicians to wake up to the lessons espoused in Trading Places. The legacy of John Landis’ 1983 classic screwball comedy is such that it inspired the so-called ‘Eddie Murphy rule’ contained within Obama’s 2010 Wall Street reform to stamp out the sort of shady insider […]
The Innocents – Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – was once described by the famous New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael as “the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen”. Miss Giddens, a brittle and idealistic young governess, is newly employed as custodian of two orphaned children, Miles and […]
Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that ‘cinema is truth 24 times a second… and every cut is a lie.’ The silent, grainy footage shot by Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963 as US President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas lasts less than 30 seconds, features no cuts, and provides the ‘truth’ […]
Jules Dassin had already made a number of important political thrillers and film noirs, notably The Naked City (1948) and Thieves’ Highway (1949), before falling victim to the House of Un-American Activities in 1952. His subsequent exile, first in London – where he directed the magnificent noir Night and The City (1950) – and later in Paris, culminated in his […]
A Big Wheel tricycle. The epitome of American 1970s childhood; a bastion of good, clean fun and innocence, and staple toy of choice for the all-American kid. To see it is to imagine wide, tree-lined streets, fresh air and mom’s laundry drying out in the sun. Yet here, in Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, the tricycle is […]
There Was a Father (1942) is one of two films Yasujirô Ozu made during Japan’s efforts in World War II and, as such, is a film that was influenced by the Japanese government’s increased control over all aspects of the country’s film industry. Under the watch of the ruling powers, films were encouraged to promote […]
The death of Babs Milligan (Anna Massey) at the hands of Neck Tie Murderer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) in Hitchcock’s Frenzy is arguably the Master of Suspense’s last great sequence. And it’s all the more effectively chilling for its relative restraint. About half an hour earlier in the film we had been witness to the […]
A black figure looming out of the desert haze stops both Lawrence and his guide in their path. Hardly a word is shared as they stare out into the distant white sands. David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) follows an awkward Oxford intellectual and his transformation into an audacious military hero, who leads the […]
Shot on location in the gritty and windswept landscapes of North Wales and Northumbria, Macbeth contains a masterly but understated demonstration of the film-maker’s art. At this transformative moment, ambition takes root in the heart of the eponymous antihero as Polanski transmutes an already famous Shakespearian scene into a piece of compelling visual drama. It […]