The Big Picture Magazine
It’s rare in the modern Hollywood landscape to see movies that deal with faith in a very direct way. Religious epics were once a staple genre with the American world of movies, but perhaps more than any other genre, they’ve disappeared from popular American filmmaking since their heyday in the 1950s. What remains is a […]
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.
When the sun is high, it casts the most unyielding shadows. And in Jodorowsky’s unflinchingly off-kilter masterpiece The Holy Mountain (1973), the sun is always out, illuminating the improbable tangents of the human condition and stirring the dark impulses that lurk in our culture’s crevices. As a piece of high-camp, low-inhibition social commentary, The Holy […]
“We all have a past, but it doesn’t define us” one character says in Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father the Devil (2021). The film holds this assertion under close scrutiny. The story focuses on Marie, played by Babetida Sadjo, a Guinean immigrant living and working in rural France at a sleepy retirement home. She maintains a […]
Anatomy of a Fall (Dir. Justine Triet)This fitting and worthy Palme d’Or winner, with lead player Sandra Huller surely destined to pick up more awards, is something of a miracle, raw and real yet magnificently melodramatic in its courtroom twists and turns (writer-director Triet studied some classics, Anatomy of a Murder and Compulsion, both 1959, […]
Even after sitting through its underwhelming trailer, I held out hope for Franck Khalfoun’s Night of the Hunted (2023). After all, the French writer-director is responsible for 2012’s Maniac remake, which – through its brutal melding of the arthouse with the grindhouse – may be this century’s best slasher. But his latest is a far […]
“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 sad news of Treat Williams’s recent death seems particularly poignant ahead of the Criterion Blu-ray release of Smooth Talk, which saw the actor play one of his more menacing roles as Arnold Friend opposite Laura Dern’s teen-tearaway Connie Wyatt. The film, directed by Joyce Chopra and based on Joyce Carol Oates’s short story […]
In the closing moments of Ari Aster’s latest ‘elevated horror film’, our beleaguered hero Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is sat in a small motorboat – forcefully moored in a giant pool within a darkened stadium full of all the people he has ever known – having to defend his life against none other than his […]