The Big Picture Magazine
The weight of memory has long been portrayed as an onerous facet of life, and in Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together, it’s as heavy as a ball and chain. “Lai Yiu-Fai, we could start over,” is the first line we hear, but Yiu-Fai has heard his boyfriend Po-Wing say it numerous times before. Their […]
Long before the box office submitted to the inevitable adaptation of E. L. James’ mummy porn juggernaut, another altogether more fascinating Mr Grey indulged in a spot of big screen sadomasochism. It helps that the Mr Grey of Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002) is played by the jittery genius that is James Spader, whose career has […]
Have there ever been two artists more different from each other than director Abel Ferrara and singer Madonna Louise Ciccone in Dangerous Game? Although Madonna is an icon of artificiality and calculation, Ferrara is one of brute sincerity and bedraggled aesthetics. Even Ferrara’s occasional forays into the exploitation market also belie any interest in genre […]
Hardly ones to take themselves too seriously, the Fab Four nevertheless provided the perfect foils for the grandfather of music mockumentaries. Before Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984) there was The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978), a Beatles parody given form partly thanks to its lead guitarist George Harrison. Originally conceived as a […]
Los Angeles, 1977: Two years after China and Russia engage in germ warfare, Colonel Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) believes he is the only person immune to the resulting plague that wiped out the world’s population. Seemingly, the only other survivors are a cult of plague sufferers (known as “The Family”) led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe) […]
Richard Stanley’s grim and gory debut may never be counted among the greats of science fiction, but that hasn’t stopped it chiselling out a place in the hearts of a loyal band of cult followers. Squabbles over the rights to Hardware meant the only way to check it out for a good few years was […]
If there’s one sci-fi film that comes to mind at the mention of George Lucas, it’s Star Wars. And yet, six years before his grand space opera undeniably changed the course of the genre, Lucas gave us THX-1138, a lower key and much more cerebral piece of science fiction. Despite both commercial and critical failure […]
Paranoia is a commodity rich with cinematic potential, but few pictures have mined it with such bleak and powerful unease as Seconds (1966). Ostensibly a work of science fiction, John Frankenheimer’s chilling dystopian nightmare addresses themes that, if anything, are more timely now than they were in the so-called Swinging Sixties. Our fear of aging […]
When Robin Williams died in August 2014, the many tributes recognized his award-winning performances and beloved family films. Few mentioned his first big screen starring role as the title character in Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980). Since its release critics have dismissed Altman’s adaptation of E.C. Segar’s comic strip about the spinach-eating sailor as a catastrophic […]