The Big Picture Magazine
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s The Way, Way Back is a typical teen movie in so many ways. It captures that feeling of taking a holiday from teenage angst – a holiday with the promise of being whoever you want to be for a short period of time. In a way, however, the film feels […]
Obsession is not a reticent discourse within horror cinema. Most of the horror genre’s notorious villains (and their nefarious intentions) are obsessive: Norman Bates is the obsessive lunatic masquerading as his deceased mother, Freddy Krueger is the obsessive dream demon hell-bent on vengeance, and John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer is the dogmatic obsessive who ‘rehabilitates’ his victims […]
The story of Cinderella has been adapted countless times, from the iconic Disney animation to Kenneth Branagh’s recent live action take. One less well-known adaptation is Three Wishes for Cinderella, a Czech-German co-production regarded in Central Europe as a Christmas classic. Václav Vorlícek’s film gives a different take on Cinderella to what we’re used to. […]
If “art is an act of violence” as the uncompromising Nicolas Winding Refn has attested, then his vicious Viking abstraction Valhalla Rising must surely belong in the Louvre. Cut to the bone in terms of narrative and dialogue, the only thing harsher than the inevitability of (often brutal) death in Refn’s powerful and primeval journey […]
Norman Jewison’s Rollerball opens with the rituals of any sports match. The stadium is prepared, team executives shake hands, and crowds cheer as the players emerge. But one of the first hints that this is not sport entirely as we know it comes when the players stand not for The Star-Spangled Banner or God Save […]
“I really couldn’t respect a man unless he were a great swimmer,” says Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers) to Joe Holt (Joe E. Brown) in Lloyd Bacon’s comedy You Said A Mouthful (1932). A common feature of screen comedies in the 1920s and ’30s was social commentary on masculinity, with comedians often cast as shy, timid […]
Federico Fellini’s films often present a caricaturist view of society by magnifying our faults, a trait which is particularly distinct in Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), a film with an unusually strong political message from the Italian filmmaker. The movie presents itself as a faux documentary, with a television crew filming an orchestra’s rehearsal. When the musicians enter an […]
He’s the greatest jazz guitarist in the world except for a “gypsy in France”, declares Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), the subject of Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), a fictitious docu-comedy about a talented musician forgotten by history. Emmet is not a likeable character. He is unfaithful, a kleptomaniac and an egomaniac. On the surface, […]
To give you an impression of how disappointing and utterly miscalculated Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon really is, let me say that it contains a scene in which a character engages in heartbroken sex with an iced-over corpse, and your gut response somehow turns out to be, “Is that honestly all you’ve got?” It […]