The Big Picture Magazine
Kieslowski’s Decalogue seems to resort, at times, to self-consciously symbolic imagery: a bee clinging to a straw as a neighbouring man in his bed clings to his life, a swinging rubber devil’s head on a doomed taxi driver’s car mirror, and wax tears running down the cheeks of a religious effigy. Yet rather than affirming […]
The words “oh God” have been uttered countless different times in cinema, but never with such uncomprehending horror as when Edward Woodward’s sacrifice-in-waiting howls them out in The Wicker Man. Religious intolerance and zealotry have been unfortunate bedfellows for thousands of years and are brought to the fore in Robin Hardy’s cult classic. Ostensibly about […]
There are numerous gods in Paul Thomas Anderson’s nihilistic nightmare rendering of the American Dream. Oil, Money and Power are the deities worshipped by both oil baron Daniel Plainview and his nemesis, the serpentine preacher Eli. Throughout the film, iconography and symbolism that can be attributed to the Almighty reveal the duplicity and manipulation at […]
Coming-of-age stories in which a young person comes to terms with their sexuality are very common in LGBT cinema and literature, yet Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour walks this well-trodden ground in a refreshingly intense manner. The strikingly blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux) helps unsure young Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) find her identity – but their relationship […]
Anyone who thought Billy Wilder’s savagely cynical noir about a disgraced journalist’s search for a career-rejuvenating scoop was too sensational need only recall 2010’s media circus surrounding the plight of the 33 trapped Chilean miners. The sight of hundreds of rubberneckers flanked by publicity-hungry officials and hordes of reporters dowsing the crisis at ‘Camp Hope’ […]
Whale’s Frankenstein wasn’t the first film to be based on Shelley’s cautionary gothic fable – J. Serle Dawley’s short film of the same name, one of three from the silent era, predated it by 20 years – but it and its sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) invented a powerful visual archetype to complement the robust […]
By far the most memorable moment to be found in Ernst Lubitsch’s great Ninotchka arrives mid-way through the film, where Greta Garbo’s eponymous tight-lipped Bolshevik is glumly partaking of some fish soup in a working class Parisian bistro. She is as one with the “common people”, or so she says, but couldn’t look more out of place: her starched clothes, […]
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. As for family, well… Towards the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s tenebrous portrait of a family eating itself from the inside, an aghast Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) asks his adopted brother Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) why he wants to wipe everyone out when he’s already won, to […]
This article contains film spoilers. Discouraged and temporarily defeated, detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) leans heavily, hands in pockets, against the doorway of his young daughter’s room. “That’s the most beautiful castle in the whole world”, he says, referring to the child’s impressive building block creation sprawled across the bedroom floor. She grins, immediately bounding up into her […]