The Big Picture Magazine
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 […]
In 1968 Michelangelo Antonioni was hot property. He’d captured the Carnaby Street cool of late 60s London in Blow Up and turned a tidy profit for MGM in the process. The studio wanted the second film of his three-picture deal to be made in America in an attempt to snare the youth market and take advantage of […]
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 […]