The Big Picture Magazine
Holly is a 15-year-old girl living in a South Dakota town with her father. “Little did I realise,” she narrates in voice-over, twirling her baton on the street, “that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” What begins in the alleys and back […]
“It’s terribly beautiful here,” the priest tells a local woman, describing the landscape of his remote outpost. She agrees, but with an important caveat: “Yes, it’s terrible. And beautiful.” This conversation occurs late in Hlynur Pálmason’s remarkable Godland (2022) and encapsulates the writer-director’s cinematic worldview, one in which horror and grace coexist in unforgiving natural […]
The Big Picture is committed to giving young, emerging writers a voice in the world of film criticism. In this feature, student writers from around the world share their insights on contemporary film and new releases.
The Fossil (Kaseki, 1975), based on a novel by Yasushi Inoue, is about the elderly businessman Itsuki (Shin Saburi), who is diagnosed with cancer while on a trip to Europe. The film was initially a television miniseries consisting of eight one-hour episodes because for Kobayashi and for many other directors, including Akira Kurosawa, the decline […]
René Clément was the first to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s book The Talented Mr. Ripley for the big screen. And he made it his own. Titled Plein soleil (1960), his gripping thriller – which focuses on the cruel, but cool Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), who ingeniously and skillfully finds ways to further his finances and lifestyle […]
The Big Picture is committed to giving young, emerging writers a voice in the world of film criticism. In this feature, student writers from around the world share their insights on contemporary film and new releases.
In 1971, Clint Eastwood starred in three films, one of them being his directorial debut Play Misty for Me. The films in which he had previously starred were westerns or action films except for his role in a segment directed by Vittorio de Sica for the anthology film The Witches (Le Streghe, 1967). In Play […]
In Akira Kurosawa’s Scandal (Sukyandaru, aka Shubun, 1950), the aspiring painter Ichiro Aoye (Toshiro Mifune) and the famous opera singer Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) become victims of the gutter press, with a magazine claiming that the two young people are lovers. A surreptitiously taken photo showing them together at an inn in the countryside is […]
Several decades into its inception, the internet is the most prominent form of mass media. While today social media brain rot is the social concern du jour, twenty years ago the sheer expanse of accessible information online was an idea met with skepticism and fear. This paranoia was examined most patently in two films from […]