The Big Picture Magazine
By the time Joe Carnahan’s The Grey was released theatrically in 2012, its star Liam Neeson had seemingly devolved from being an award-winning dramatic actor to a geri-action star in search of the next dunderheaded blockbuster. Indeed, Neeson had starred in Carnahan’s previous movie, an ill-advised big screen take on ‘80s TV show The A-Team […]
Hidden begins with an immobile long shot of a domestic Paris street. Only the occasional passers-by and cyclists remind us it is not a photograph. “Well?” we hear a voice say. “Nothing,” replies another. The sequence literally fast-forwards, pauses as Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) leaves his home, rewinds and pauses again. We realise that the […]
There’s something very 1960s and ‘70s about split screen. Brian De Palma loves it, but it’s been criminally underused of late. When it works well, the audience sees and knows much more. Ideas, by their very nature, are multi-faceted. Robert Aldrich’s American football drama The Longest Yard splits the screen, and splits opinion. Macho bullshit, […]
In Kwaidan, Masaki Kobayashi adapts four Japanese moralistic fairy tales retold by the Greek-American expatriate Lafcadio Hearn in the early twentieth century. Mirroring each other, the four episodes present a carefully structured series of repetitions and counterpoints. Their protagonists are haunted characters who face the unknown while struggling with a traumatic past or a present […]
The attention to detail attained by Christopher Guest in his finest works is absolute. One of the many high watermarks of his career, the 2000 dog show satire Best In Show, looks and feels authentic in every frame. But more than that, underneath the wonderful comedy, it also looks and feels authentic in each and […]
Sex, violence, betrayal, revenge – these are the ingredients of a film producer’s wet dream, and the legend of King Arthur has them in spades. It’s no surprise, then, that Arthur has continued to serve as an influence, direct or otherwise, for countless forms of art and entertainment. His latest cinematic incarnation is due to hit […]
The list of ‘great British erotic films’ is a very small list indeed. That’s not to say we don’t have any in our oeuvre. Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, Ken Russell’s Women in Love, and a handful by Nicholas Roeg all make the cut – although none but the first could be called erotic […]
The Bard and Keanu Reeves didn’t exactly hit it off when one half of Bill and Ted got himself Golden Raspberry-nominated for his grisly turn in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing (1993). Two years earlier, however, Reeves enjoyed far more success channelling the spirit of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal when he appeared opposite River Phoenix […]
Andrzej Wajda’s The Wedding (Wesele), based on Stanisław Wyspiański’s eponymous play (1901), retells the wedding of the poet Lucjan Rydel who married, as did Wyspiański himself, a peasant girl from the village of Bronowice near Krakow. The Polish artists and intellectuals of the late 19th century believed that these marriages would allow them to revive […]