The Big Picture Magazine
Orson Welles was never one to adhere to audience expectations, and when a contract deal forced him to adapt the pulpy novel Badge of Evil, the result was a delirious, baroque noir which had very little to do with the source material, but was all the better for it. To watch this study of racial […]
An angry-looking man hastily leaves a shabby house in the middle of nowhere, repeatedly throwing his walking stick to the floor. Each time, a young woman picks it up. The man is Tadao, the elderly protagonist of Haru’s Journey, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai. The woman is Haru, his grand-daughter, sublimely interpreted by Eri Tokunaga. […]
I began 2016 by watching a lot of Masaki Kobayashi. It was a year that year marked both the centenary of his birth, and the 20th anniversary of his death. My aim was to deepen my knowledge of his work, and to pay homage to a filmmaker I greatly admire by writing articles in which […]
Before I saw any of George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, it already terrified me. This preemptive fear was caused by a VHS cover that has remained burned in my memory ever since I first laid eyes upon it as a child. One of my favorite childhood activities was perusing the Styrofoam-filled […]
The tall fence encloses the camp on all sides. Its metal uprights are spiked at the top. The railway cuts along its far side with a caravan, broken Volvo and lonely horse in the shade of the Tilbury flyover. Brambles and broken pallets present their sharp thorns and splinters to all who pass. Mia is […]
According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, our personalities are formed through our relationship to language as we encounter things, and seek to explain who we are in relation to them. This is a completely personal: no one person has ever been – or ever will be able to experience this in the exact same way, because […]
Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just – the fate of these historical figures is well known. Consequently, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, based on the play The Danton Case is inevitably defined by the very idea of doom. In the shadow of the guillotine, prominently framed at the beginning and at the end, the Polish filmmaker develops reflections on individual […]
Easy Tavern is an infamous inn on the edge of town, in the wetlands of the Fukagawa. The inn’s regulars are petty crooks and smugglers. Sadashichi, one of the smugglers, not only looks dangerous: he demonstrates his ferocity by killing a police officer. Yet it’s clear from the beginning that the director’s sympathies lie with […]
The festive period seems a pertinent moment to explore representations of decadence in film.