The Big Picture Magazine
Red Lion (Akage), co-produced by Toho and Mifune Productions, is one of eight films Kihashi Okamoto made with Toshirō Mifune. The action takes place in the 1860s when the feudal system of the Tokugawa Shogunate was on the brink of collapse, and follows Gonzo, a peasant sent back to his native village with the mission […]
There’s a killer on the loose, and your vehicle won’t start up. Your phone has been drained of battery, but you probably wouldn’t have been able to get a signal anyway. The track keeps skipping on the record player and the lights have just gone out; all you have left is a sticky box of […]
You may have seen it in films a hundred times already: with the scene set, the tension slowly building, the audience anticipates an unseen yet looming threat to a character – an axe murderer hiding in the cupboard, or a monster ready to pounce from behind a bush – but the director is only hinting […]
To watch The Immigrant in the light of the contemporary refugee crisis is to see the film’s historical context brought shamefully into the present amidst the understanding that mistreating those who seek a better life away from their homeland, often in places that frequently exploit other countries and peoples around the world in the name […]
Few directors are as interested in the interiority of their characters as Robert Bresson. His ascetic style strips films of their furnishings, leaving behind a bareness of images and sounds, to be seen and heard with intensified awareness, as if we stand in the protagonist’s shoes during his most private moments. Pickpocket is one of Bresson’s […]
Lili cycles alone down a barren freeway in an image straight out of an apocalypse film. It is not a horde of stumbling zombies that chases after her, but a swarm of dogs. As the music builds to a crescendo, the animals pass her by. From these opening shots, it’s clear that White God is […]
After Charlie Chaplin, who wrote, directed, edited, composed for and starred in his own pictures, Stan Brakhage was the only true auteur of the American cinema; a painter with light whose most innovative works were produced without the need of a camera. Brakhage’s oeuvre is best viewed chronologically, not only for the interest of seeing […]
The Union Broadcasting System took a risk when they let a visibly unwell Howard Beale on air. With his frantic demeanour and dishevelled appearance, the anchorman was in no state to present the news. What Beale does instead is denounce the social ills of 1970s America in a monologue that keeps escalating in its hysteria. […]
Akira Kurosawa’s penultimate film, Rhapsody In August (1991), was the director’s first Japanese production since 1965’s Red Beard, an occasion he marked by reflecting upon the tragedy which had closed the first chapter of his career – the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. Framed around a frail matriarch (Kane, embodied by Sachiko Murase) and […]