The Big Picture Magazine
Coming soon after his work as special effects supervisor on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running is his own take on the same space-bound genre. While it has its fans among sci-fi circles, the film was criticised by many for the blunt sentimentality of its story and ecological message. It never achieved […]
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 […]
Following the recent death of Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze’ 2009 film of his seminal children’s book Where The Wild Things Are has been back in public discussion and consciousness and it’s proved a fascinating illustration of how death can shift commentary on works of art. The film is still fresh in the memory and so […]
Had the stars aligned slightly differently, we might currently talk of Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch in the same breath as A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner, as one of the classics of modern cinema: a fearless and disturbing analysis of a modern society in which the desire for privacy is not so much seen as […]
Mark Fergus’ debut feature First Snow initially appears to have much in common with Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough success Memento (2000): both are neo-noirs with Guy Pearce in the lead role, while the central protagonist in each film becomes increasingly unstable due to never having quite enough knowledge to make sense of his predicament. First Snow, […]