The Big Picture Magazine
You’ve got to have friends. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” We all need to know who our real friends are. “I trust Mr. Brown, I do not trust Mr. Grey.” Friends in high places. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse …” Crime film aficionados will recognise the lingo, and feel they […]
Susanne Bier’s Bird Box (2018) starts, like many horror-thriller movies, with a terrifying premise — a monster that gives the insane power and the innocent death. However, as the movie progresses, I have to wonder if the monster has a deeper meaning regarding the human psyche. Malorie (Sandra Bullock) refuses outside contact as she focuses on her artworks. […]
Shakespeare told us love is blind, although there are those who insist he stole it from Chaucer. It is Preston Sturges who reminds us of the truism in The Lady Eve (1941), a screwball constructed like a clever card trick that always comes up aces. That’s “screwball” as in “farcical romantic comedy” – Shakespeare also has […]
In the first sequence of Kutlug Ataman’s Lola and Bilidikid (Lola und Bilidikid, Germany, 1999), a young man is walking in a park at night. Murat (Baki Davrak) – an expression of anxiety on his face, his body tense – has ventured into the darkness. The park is the huge Tiergarten in the middle of […]
Ánimas Trujano (Mexico, 1962) starts as a documentary film with images of a festival which the villagers in the Mexican State of Oaxaca are celebrating in honour of their patron saint. A voice-over narrator explains the role of the mayordomo, a respected member of the community who is elected to organize the various religious and […]
MATTHEW 25, 6: And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), his final – we think? – go round the mobster realm and that detailed world and times he knows so well is peopled by … well, let’s just say “colourful” characters. […]
Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai, Japan, 1959) starts with shots of a man on horseback in a landscape reminiscent of a Western. This hero is Japanese, and the action is set in the wide-open spaces of the Manchurian steppe in the summer of 1945 near the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Okamoto’s approach to the war […]
Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude. – 1 Corinthians 13 In Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), the course of true love never did run smooth. In Francis Lee’s multi-award-winning God’s Own Country (2017), a film predictably if unhelpfully tagged the “Brexit Brokeback,” things […]
The Host (Gwoemul, South Korea, 2006) starts with gloomy images in a morgue at an American military base in South Korea. Evil is predicted when a pathologist orders his assistant to dump a large amount of formaldehyde in a drain at the base. A few years later, a monstrous creature emerges from the River Han […]