The Big Picture Magazine
Though not a silent film, Jules Dassin’s Rififi is most famous for the absence of audio, strikingly creating a relationship with sound and then removing it. Following a group of robbers attempting a daring diamond heist in the middle of Paris, this crime film delivers on generic expectation from the outset. After a piece of […]
One of the most fondly remembered works of silent cinema, Keaton and Bruckman’s The General is a masterpiece in both daring comic performance and narrative simplicity – many of the greatest visual jokes ever filmed all revolve around one man and his train. That man is Johnnie Gray (Keaton), a railroad engineer whose attempt to enlist […]
Taxi Driver’s portrait of ’70s downtown New York, complete with neon signs and porno theatres flashing through the night, is an image that sticks with you like no other. Never before has a film so full of sexuality, rage and loneliness been kept at boiling point for so long, and Travis’ final howl of violence […]
As the recent tragic events in Paris demonstrate, religious satire is a dangerous game to play. And yet comedians across the ages have often found organised religion to be a prime target. A great and daring example of this is Life of Brian, which takes on the world of the New Testament, plus contemporary issues […]
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off may have as its star the titular character who’s laissez-faire attitude to bunking off makes for an entertaining thrill ride, but the beating heart of the film belongs to Ferris’ long suffering best friend Cameron. A neurotic, self-loathing pessimist who only seems to come alive when telling Ferris what a goof […]
Everyone dreams about travelling the world and seeing the sights, and in Amelie, as Georgina Guthrie tells us, a very unusual globetrotter got to do just that. Fairy tales inform us that the gnome is a reclusive figure, content to hide in the safety of his underground burrow. How apt, then, that suburbia adopted him […]
(Minnie) “Oh, before I forget, this is for you from Roman and me. It’s just a little present is all. For moving in… It’s real old, over 300 years… The green inside is tannis root. That’s for good luck.” (Rosemary) “It’s lovely, but I… I can’t accept it.” (Minnie) “You already have. Put it on. […]
Billy Wilder’s Oscar Winning picture, The Lost Weekend (1945) starring Ray Milland as a washed-up New York writer, is one of the more frank depictions of alcoholism on film; unusual in 1945 for its candid depiction of dissolution and for its unflinching portrayal of a self-indulgent and unsympathetic ‘hero’ driven to despair by frustrated ambition. […]
During the late 1930’s, no period Hollywood adventure was complete without Errol Flynn or Basil Rathbone. These two men epitomised the archetypal male from the golden age of the silver screen – rakish, suave, and debonair. The swashbuckling extravaganzas in which they starred reached their zenith with the technicolour fantasy The Adventures of Robin Hood, […]