The Big Picture Magazine
The Holdovers (2023), the latest film by Alexander Payne, after a screenplay by David Hemingson, is set in a New England prep school during a snowy winter break, on the backdrop of the 1970s. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the professor who has to supervise a handful of boys who have nowhere to go for […]
The sprightliness of the reimagined story of Little Red Riding Hood. A dark, atmospheric cautionary tale set in the slumps of Louisiana on the jazzy score of Adrien Chevalier. A little mouse who lives among books and their extraordinary adventures and who, when the candle burns out and he runs out of matches, must take […]
Wes Anderson’s films dispose of a rich scale of forms of expression and an astounding artistic freedom. He is the kind of director who has a true, artistic visual vision and he needs hand-picked, incredibly talented production designers who can speak the same language and bring his vision to life. This is creative filmmaking and […]
UFO Abduction now more commonly referred to as The McPherson Tape is a ground breaking science fiction horror movie shot in 1988. Set in 1983, it concerns the McPherson family who, while celebrating a child’s birthday party, find themselves under siege from alien beings. The film has a strange and chequered history that is perhaps […]
On September 26, 1993, a crew of eight people emerged from a huge ecological desert facility after two years of isolation. The facility, named Biosphere 2 and located in Oracle, Arizona, was constructed to replicate the earth’s various habitats in a closed environment as a forerunner for speculative ‘off world’ colonization. While the whole thing […]
What remains if people let go of their illusions, or delusions? In one of the best films of last year, Sean Durkin’s The Nest (2020), Jude Law is Rory, a high-risk investment specialist who moves back to his native England from New York with his American wife, Allison (Carrie Coon, in a wonderfully paced performance), and […]
A film is as good as the sum of its crafts, crafts that must seamlessly wove the threads that spun the illusion that is the story we watch so earnestly. That is why I find that it is fascinating to talk about a film from the point of view of each craft, such as costume […]
Movies come to us, so why go to the movies? Never has this idea loomed larger than in the last few months. And, yet, there is no doubt in the mind of any film maker, of any film industry insider or of any film lover that, when this is all over, people will want to […]
By the very nature of photography, you have to get in close in order to get a good picture. But on a movie set, that can become a very challenging job and to do it well can be extremely difficult. That’s the job of the film set photographer. Because a good unit still photographer must […]