The Big Picture Magazine
The moment the title card is smashed to pieces and the famous samba and bossa nova sounds burst through, ushering in a sea of colour and movement, is both a physical shattering and a symbolic one. This playful and powerfully energetic film is not faithfully translating the classic Orpheus story to Brazil, it’s reimagining it in the heat, sweat and delirium of carnival, completely to its […]
As with the main character in Homer’s Odyssey, from whom Ulysses’ Gaze (1997) gets its name, Theo Angelopoulos’ sadly forgotten 1995 film follows another tragic figure on his journey home. A filmmaker named ‘A’ (believed to stand for Angelopoulos) tells a story of how he once took a photograph of a landscape, only for the […]
Joseph Pevney is a name you don’t hear often, although his output as a director was prolific. He made eighty or so productions, and gained success with a few commercial hits, including Female on the Beach, Tammy and the Bachelor, and (fun fact!) the first 14 episodes of Star Trek. His mostly forgotten The Midnight […]
From Philippe Mora, the director behind Swastika, Snide and Prejudice and German Sons, comes this no-frills albeit personal documentary about his visit to Auschwitz. A French-born Australian of Jewish descent, Mora had previously avoided going to the camp due to the sheer unparalleled horror of the place and the events associated with it. After discovering […]
At its core, farce is dependent upon ridiculous situations. So how’s this one for you? In the often overlooked 1986 film Ruthless People, Ken and Sandy Kessler (Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater) don duck masks and kidnap Barbara Stone (Bette Midler), the wife of Sandy’s ex-boss Sam (Danny DeVito). Sam stole the Kessler’s life savings […]
The parody/spoof genre has gone from strength to strength across both TV and film, but to pinpoint exactly where it began is a difficult task. No doubt its success over the last 20 years was ignited by the popularity of Police Squad, which morphed into Airplane and Naked Gun, and subsequently spawned many imitators looking […]
Propaganda films exist to sell a varnished version of real events, which makes it even more remarkable that a movie made when the outcome of World Ward Two was far from certain would so boldly write the epitaph for Hitler’s Third Reich. Adapted from Graham Greene’s magazine story, Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 classic Went The Day […]
Vicente Aranda (who died last year) was part of the avant-garde Barcelona School of filmmakers in the 1960s and became best known for entwining explicit sexuality with explorations of murky pasts. Although Freedom Fighters’ Spanish Civil War setting satisfies the latter of those directorial motifs, Aranda’s habitually fleshy depictions of carnal desire and twisted sexual jealousy […]
The technology of film can been considered a time machine of sorts. It can transport the audience from one particular time period to another, allowing them to bask in the glory of the neologistic innovations of the time. Let’s take a trip to a time when filmic and musical recording equipment such as the videocassette […]