The Big Picture Magazine
In Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (Akahige, 1965), Dr. Niide (Toshiro Mifune), called “Red Beard”, offers medical treatment cheaply or for free in Edo (as Tokyo was formerly called) in the first half of the 19th century. The nickname Red Beard hints at “red medicine” (komo i gaku), designating the treatment practised by the Dutch (the […]
Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) pitches us into an unforgiving wintry environment and declares once and for all, as if we didn’t know already, that this writer-director will be a survivor. And yes, his movie grips and informs and entertains along the way. A female, big-city-loneliness FBI agent finds herself tracking a rapist and murderer, his […]
After languishing in obscurity for decades, Tony Williams’ cult horror oddity, Next of Kin (1982), has finally been released on Blu-ray, thanks to Second Sight Films. While the disc comes loaded with excellent special features, including multiple audio commentaries and two of Williams’ shorts, the biggest draw, naturally, is the pristine quality of the film […]
Pale Flower (Kawaita hana, 1964), set in the yakuza milieu, questions the codes of Japanese gangsters and subverts the gangster codes of the films that flooded the Japanese film market in the early 1960s. It deals with obsessive love but replaces the carnal element with gambling. Shinoda’s film harks back to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The […]
After serving eight years in prison for the murder of his wife, Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) is released on probation and opens a barber shop in the home town of his parole officer, an elderly Buddhist priest (Fujio Tokita). Shohei Imamura’s The Eel (Unagi, 1997) depicts the slow return to normality of the former salaryman […]
Sang-il Lee’s Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono, 2013) bears many similarities with Clint Eastwood’s eponymous masterpiece from 1992. The storyline and narrative details as well as the characters and the frontier setting of Lee’s remake parallel Eastwood’s Western. This also applies to the insistence on shadows and half-shadows in the interior shots and the symbolic use of […]
At the core of Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985) is the ambition of the central character, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), to produce in her small ramen noodle shop the best ramen (Chinese-style wheat noodles served in a broth) in Tokyo. Truck driver Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and four other men help the widow to turn her business around. […]
Andrzej Wajda started his career as a filmmaker in post-war Poland. His early films – A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Lotna and Samson – focus on both the Second World War and the civil war uprising and its aftermath. Wajda often emphasized the moral duty of the filmmaker in Poland, whose task it was to remember a […]
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. […]