The Big Picture Magazine
In most accounts of the rise in mainstream popularity of American independent cinema, Wayne Wang’s culturally inquisitive neo-noir Chan Is Missing often serves as a footnote rather than as a prime example, perhaps because Wang arrived too early for the party. 1984 is usually cited as a banner year for American independent cinema, which is […]
Wallowing at the boundaries of what could be discussed — if not actually shown — on screen in 1965, Who Killed Teddy Bear (question mark conspicuous by its absence) must have looked at the time like some sort of paean to perversion. The story itself is a simple B-movie thriller: a would-be dancer, Norah (Juliet […]
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In Jack Smight’s criminally underappreciated No Way to Treat a Lady it proves to be the most effective and blackly amusing form of murder. Rod Steiger hams it up as murderous mother-fixated thespian Christopher Gill, donning various disguises and dispatching his victims with a quick strangle, […]
At the grand old age of 73, Hollywood veteran John Huston was still enamoured by social misfits, rebels and loners, and in adapting Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel Wise Blood Huston portrayed another of the idiosyncratic individualists that often took centre stage in his films. O’Connor’s Southern Gothic tale of disillusioned army vet cum street […]
Earlier this year, Clint Eastwood’s 80th birthday heralded a major celebration and retrospective for one of cinema’s most cherished elder statesmen. On 25th August, Sean Connery reaches the same milestone, but it’s doubtful it will be marked with anything like the same fanfare. Connery remains eternally underrated. Forever associated with James Bond, it’s become assumed […]
For film fans, Westerns are a serious business. In the Fifties, directors like Zinneman, Hawks and Mann garnered critical praise for their psychological realism and deconstruction of the genre. In the Sixties and Seventies, Peckinpah and Leone mixed stylized violence with mournful elegies in films which lamented the end of the frontier. And today the […]
My psychiatrist recently asked me to pinpoint the thing in my life that most annoys me. After considering the Go Compare! advertising campaign, people with trolley suitcases and the widespread habit among teens of always ending their sentences on a rising diphthong, I finally decided: it really annoys me when the films of master directors […]
The awkward marriage between art and exploitation has rarely been more evident than in Werner Herzog’s latest exercise in cinematic dementia, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, a film that has been in UK distribution limbo for a while, but has been granted some time off for good behaviour with a screening at the 16th […]
Hard though it is to believe, long before the lurid excesses of his Death Wish franchise, the bloated self-satisfaction of his Times restaurant reviews and the irritating ubiquity of his esure adverts, Michael Winner actually made films worth sitting through. One of them was released for the first time on DVD last year and is an […]