The Big Picture Magazine
Stoker is a film replete with significance and meaning imposed on the positioning of its characters within the frame. A scene on a winding staircase at around 12 minutes neatly captures the moment when a crucial shift in power between India (Mia Wasikowska) and Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) occurs. Louis Giannetti, in his hardy perennial film […]
The pivotal narrative moment in Jacques Audiard’s Rust And Bone (2012) is an accident involving a killer whale that sees one of the film’s protagonists, Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer Stéphanie, lose her legs. The sequence clearly poses a test for the filmmaker. Should one render the act using CGI, or retain rawness and attempt to convey […]
Every scene in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), seems laden with significance because the enigmatic protagonist’s past is almost completely withheld from the audience until the film’s denouement. As with many of Wender’s alienated heroes, Travis is lost, both physically and spiritually, and must piece together the fragments of his life in order to create […]
It is perhaps fitting that in the year that saw the world descend into civil unrest, a micro-budget splatter movie in which the dead rise from the grave and usher in the apocalypse would redefine both the horror genre and contemporary cinema. There is horror before 1968’s epochal Night of the Living Dead, and there […]
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has become one of the most iconic bad guys in cinema history. With his penchant for quiet weaponry and disquieting conversation, the character takes on a mythic quality that reads to both the audience and the inhabitants of the film as an unstoppable force of evil, an angel of death, or, perhaps, […]
Upon its release, Proof of Life (2000) was marketed and received as a vague update of the untouchable and inimitable classic Casablanca (1942). Tony Gilroy’s script pairs a realistic hostage-negotiation scenario with an unconsummated romance between its central characters: Meg Ryan’s Alice Bowman, whose husband Peter (David Morse) has been taken hostage by rebels in […]
For most of La vie de Jésus Bruno Dumont has his audience riding pinion with a gang of bored young motorcyclists. They roam aimlessly around a widescreen rendered, rural northeastern France, waiting for their lives to happen, or for someone to merely notice they are there. However, a potentially racist act of violence towards the […]
It’s no real surprise to learn that David Fincher’s least favourite of his films are Panic Room and Alien 3. Both are films with powerful female leads where for once his masculinity is undermined by complex femininity. Pretty much the first words uttered here are by an arrogant male real estate agent, standing on the […]
A cautionary metaphor for the dangers of unchecked power, or just a slice of Japanimation at its most ass-kickingly spectacular? Whichever way you look at it, the influence of Akira, the 1988 anime cult favourite, endures persistently. A nightmarish sci-fi yarn of motorcycle gangs and child psychics, of terrorists and telekinesis, amidst an imposing post-apocalyptic […]