The Big Picture Magazine
If making a film was like baking a cake one would reasonably expect art school polymath Philip Ridley’s 1990 directorial debut The Reflecting Skin, with its combination of fine ingredients, to have turned out like the grandest Viennese sacher torte. So how come it looks and tastes like a Greggs jam doughnut? Actually that’s a […]
To qualify as a Big Picture ‘lost classic’ a movie usually has to have been grossly underwatched due to the lack of a video or DVD release, criminally overlooked by TV schedulers or (uncriminally?) not uploaded to video sharing websites. In the case of Thorold Dickinson’s Victorian psychological melodrama Gaslight (1940) its lost status was […]
If you look along the shelf of ‘American performing arts student coming-of-age movie’ high school yearbooks, back through time beyond the tans and tooth veneers of Glee and High School Musical, beyond the mullets and leg warmers of Fame, you’ll come eventually to a half-forgotten, suitably geeky, split-frame spectacled 70s gem called Jeremy. It’s one […]
An oddly memorable late-addition to the serial killer cycle of the 1990s, The Minus Man has maintained curiosity value beyond its brief theatrical release largely due to being the only directorial credit to date for Blade Runner (1982) screenwriter Hampton Fancher. It also boasts a solid cast led by an actor who would become a […]
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 […]
Few films fail quite so brilliantly as Altered States. Part chin-stroking talk-fest on trippy existentialism among the corduroy-jacketed academia of Harvard, part body-horror tripe of the silliest order, it’s a hallucinogenic broth combining Jung, Darwin and Timothy Leary which manages to be both deep and daft in equal measure. For all its shortcomings it remains […]
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, […]
A relief map of the career of Robin Williams would probably resemble that of a particularly active volcanic mountain range: a few dizzyingly high peaks such as Dead Poets Society (1989) and Good Will Hunting (1997), as well as the early stand-up work, along with some notable foothills like The Fisher King (1991), Mrs Doubtfire […]