The Big Picture Magazine
The technology of film can been considered a time machine of sorts. It can transport the audience from one particular time period to another, allowing them to bask in the glory of the neologistic innovations of the time. Let’s take a trip to a time when filmic and musical recording equipment such as the videocassette […]
It may have been released back when computers were still the size of refrigerators, but the dire warnings expounded by this cautionary slice of Nixon-era paranoia have only become louder. Professor Stephen Hawking’s apocalyptic exhortation that artificial intelligence could possibly spell the end of mankind if allowed to evolve unchecked will come as little surprise […]
Making a change can be difficult at the best of times, but doing so as a way of beginning again following the tragic loss of a loved one is a challenge that almost breaks the Sullivans, the wounded family at the centre of Jim Sheridan’s achingly moving In America. The clan – dad Johnny (Paddy […]
The Coens’ A Serious Man is rooted visually in the nostalgic memory of the brothers’ lives and thematically in the idea of chaos; there is a fondness for symbols from the filmmakers’ collective memory but also a real cynicism towards religion and the mysticism of meaning. The film is beautifully, tightly wound, building around the […]
It’s a trait that has remained constant throughout much of his career, but the dangerous consequences of obsession were never more strikingly explored than in Darren Aronofsky’s distinctive debut. The high contrast provided by the jarring black and white reversal film stock on which Aronofsky filmed Pi (1998) is emblematic of the madness/genius see-saw its […]
There were the trails. Then there were the rails. Then there was the road. In David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche there is the road. This is the road movie – literally. Two men restore, rebuild, and re-imagine the road following a sweeping, tragic natural disaster. Across the course of the film, they travel eight miles physically and, like in all […]
LU.MIERE. read the emblazoned jackets of two moviemakers, cranking their Cinematograph outside the Giza pyramids, circa 1895. Suddenly a Mummy rushes over the dunes, grabs the tripod-mounted camera and smashes it into the sands. An intertitle reads, “Censorship Already!!” The year is actually 1995, and the Lumières are played by two actors under the direction […]
It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when the political process finally surrendered to the whim of the media machine and devolved into little more than a playground trade-off centred on bite-sized slogans and soundbites. ‘Playing the game’ has become a damning pre-requisite for those who seek to govern us, as Robert Redford’s idealist-turned-stooge Bill McKay comes […]
With the UK’s General Election now over, those curious about what goes on behind the scenes of an election campaign may find interest in The War Room, a documentary produced by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus as they followed the campaign staff of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run. Trailing the team from the early […]