The Big Picture Magazine
Stuart Cooper’s dream-like interweaving of stunning archival footage with the fictional narrative of the training of a new recruit, Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner), won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1975, but Overlord (the codename for the D-Day landings) seemingly received little attention until Criterion recently issued it on Blu-ray. The film […]
Few images more powerfully evoke the stark reality of 21st Century city survival than the Sisyphean struggle of Pakistani immigrant Ahmad dragging his cart along the indifferent Manhattan streets in Rahim Bahrani’s mournfully poetic debut feature. It’s an image Bahrani revisits throughout the extraordinary Man Push Cart (2005) as Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) toils away day […]
If they ever considered stopping by our planet, aliens should prepare themselves for a rough welcome if our exhaustive list of films featuring malevolent little green men is anything to go by. Aliens have been many things in the movies, but peaceful is rarely one of them. Even Steven Spielberg, who waved the flag for […]
Unwittingly foreshadowing the fate of its four displaced protagonists, William Friedkin’s existential follow-up to The Exorcist was doomed the moment a certain lightsaber-rattling space opera arrived in cinemas from a galaxy far, far away. Sorcerer (1977) has been cited by some as the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood movement. However, a giant […]
Dark Habits falls through the cracks between Pedro Almodóvar’s crude and anarchic first two films and the creative stride that he hit in the mid-1980s, which is a shame because it is the first of his films that is recognizably ‘Almodóvarian’. The film opens with a time-lapse shot of dusk falling on Madrid and this […]
At the end of the 19th Century, the Lumiere brothers’ short film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) defined the technological advancements of the era, and terrified audiences who, having seen nothing like it before, believed the train would fly out of the screen. Over a hundred years later, at the turn of […]
Cinema’s dustbin is littered with movies that disappeared between the cracks or didn’t fit neatly into any easy-to-sell marketing category. It’s a fate that befell the criminally under-seen Red Rock West, John Dahl’s sophomore feature that, according to the late Roger Ebert, “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and […]
No doubt frazzled by the Cold War running ever hotter, it is not surprising that audiences in 1964 preferred their nuclear scare movies in the mould of the scabrously satirical Dr Strangelove, rather than the grimly portentous Fail Safe. No film before or since has played out the nightmarish endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction to […]
If you’re looking for the perfect antidote to yet another Christmas cooped up for days on end with family members you don’t get on with, we would direct you to seek out a copy of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, a dark little gem from the mid-90s, although you’re currently limited to a heftily priced US […]