The Big Picture Magazine
The ending of John Mackenzie’s seminal British gangster film is regarded by many, this author included, to be a work of art, befitting the superb fall-from-grace story of London crimelord Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins). Having just abruptly ended a business deal with the New York mafia, “The mafia? I’ve shit ’em!” Harold storms into his […]
Back in the days before The Exorcist‘s long-delayed UK commercial home video release – February 1999 if you’re wondering – we had to rely on poor-quality VHS copies purchased at record fairs, car boot sales and the like from gentlemen wearing AC/DC T-shirts who answered to the name of ‘Dog’. “Yeah, it’s a copy taken […]
Walter Matthau was once described as resembling a bloodhound with a head cold, which is a rather unfair description when applied to his role as Lt. Zachary Garber of the New York City Transit Police in Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). As hangdog and curmudgeonly as he may be, he’s […]
It probably wasn’t planned this way but it’s really quite remarkable how often the film characters played by actress Shelley Winters met a watery grave. One of her most hauntingly bizarre demises features in Charles Laughton’s lone directorial outing The Night of the Hunter. To silence his new wife Willa (Winters) evil Reverend Harry Powell […]
For all Disney’s early innovations in the field of animated movement of characters and environments, from the use of rotoscoping to the multiplane camera technique, it is this moment of relative stillness from Bambi that is perhaps his most affecting piece of work. It’s easy to be cynical about Disney, but this truly breaks the […]
The idea of a director ‘painting with light’ in the making of a film has become something of a lazy cliché. In the case of Archipelago, the new British film scrutinising every painful and discomforting nuance of a dysfunctional family holiday on the Scillonian island of Tresco, it is possibly the most apposite description of […]
As a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor let us linger for a while over what is surely one of the greatest ever onscreen kisses. If proof were needed that, in her heyday, Taylor photographed better in close-up than pretty much any other actress, this George Stevens romance surely provides it. To begin with, it’s worth noting […]
Mike Leigh’s cinematographer Dick Pope deserves a special mention amid all the praise currently being heaped on the director’s latest picture Another Year. The colours deployed to denote the passing of the seasons, appropriately reflecting the turn of the months and the downturn in the fortunes of Mary (Lesley Manville) are a fine example of […]
It’s the perfect setting for a Hitchcock finale; Robert Cummings and Norman Lloyd pitted against each at the top of Bartholdi’s green lady, all 151 feet and 1 inch of her. Inside and outside of her torch they tussle, until Lloyd’s fifth columnist falls dramatically to his death. Russell Lawson’s matte paintings of the statue […]