The Big Picture Magazine
Gaspar Noe’s psychedelic foray into the drug-soaked, neon-lit underbelly of central Tokyo is an acutely realised claustrophobic nightmare; a cacophony of wincing lights, narrow corridors and squalid rooms where humans scrabble to procreate and self-destruct in an unrelenting cycle of misery and personal tragedy. It’s long and grandiose, beautiful and repellent; a two-and-three-quarter hour tour […]
Psychological horror has long been the neglected offspring of a genre that too often falls back on lazy shocks, recycled storylines and dismembered body parts. Yet, it’s through this underused sub-genre that some of horror’s finest hours have emerged, not least of which the largely forgotten Jacob’s Ladder. Directed by Adrian Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder may […]
There was a time when Jake Scott was that bloke who did music videos. Then he did a movie. And people quite liked it, critics were sniffy, and it soon passed into the annals of history. Which is wrong, because it’s damn good. It’s essentially a love story buddy movie historical crime caper. With a […]
The Boston Phoenix may have predicted Peter Watkins’ potent philippic on the frightening consequences of unchecked power was a “cult hit waiting to happen – but 40 years after its controversial release, it’s still twiddling its thumbs waiting for the world to catch on. Watkins’ pioneering brand of radical pseudo-documentary filmmaking was always going to leave […]
One sunny afternoon in post-war 1940s Los Angeles, Father Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro), a Roman Catholic priest, sits down at his regular hide to join his brother Tom (Robert Duvall), an LAPD detective, for lunch. Their catch-up has barely commenced when up strides shady construction tycoon Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), all smiles and joviality […]
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene is often cited as one of the major figures in the rise of post-colonial African cinema, producing context driven works of poignancy over his fifty year long career. Coming to filmmaking at later age, Sembene strove to use his work to reach a wider African audience. Based on his novel of […]
1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh) is often treated as the poster boy for discussions of the boom in American independent cinema, a wave that emerged at the end of the eighties and flourished for much of the early to mid-nineties. Soderbergh would eventually work a balance between more mainstream Hollywood efforts and smaller […]
To qualify as a Big Picture ‘lost classic’ a movie usually has to have been grossly underwatched due to the lack of a video or DVD release, criminally overlooked by TV schedulers or (uncriminally?) not uploaded to video sharing websites. In the case of Thorold Dickinson’s Victorian psychological melodrama Gaslight (1940) its lost status was […]
If you look along the shelf of ‘American performing arts student coming-of-age movie’ high school yearbooks, back through time beyond the tans and tooth veneers of Glee and High School Musical, beyond the mullets and leg warmers of Fame, you’ll come eventually to a half-forgotten, suitably geeky, split-frame spectacled 70s gem called Jeremy. It’s one […]