The Big Picture Magazine
Asian film enthusiasts will surely find their interest piqued by East Winds: A Third Window Film Festival which takes place at the Warwick Arts Centre from February 11-13 and includes titles from China, Japan and South Korea. The closing film of the festival will be Chen Kou-fu and Gao Qunshu’s excellent espionage thriller The Message, […]
In a year in which, for many, there was no standout film, a whole array of exciting new cinema clamoured for the limelight and this year’s festival was, not least, a splendid showcase for British talent – which is both heartening and terrifying in an industry about to be hit by an almighty austerity drive. […]
With all the timeliness of a significant planetary alignment it seems only fitting to spy Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) through the telescope of reappraisal, in what is after all the year in which it was set (if you hadn’t noticed), to see if we can spot any intelligent signs of […]
At the grand old age of 73, Hollywood veteran John Huston was still enamoured by social misfits, rebels and loners, and in adapting Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel Wise Blood Huston portrayed another of the idiosyncratic individualists that often took centre stage in his films. O’Connor’s Southern Gothic tale of disillusioned army vet cum street […]
I imagine few of those who made The Prowler, and few of those who have seen it, regard it as either brilliant or a failure – and yet it warrants inclusion in this series as much as any movie we have featured. The Prowler (which is available on Region 2 DVD under its alternate title, […]
Earlier this year, Clint Eastwood’s 80th birthday heralded a major celebration and retrospective for one of cinema’s most cherished elder statesmen. On 25th August, Sean Connery reaches the same milestone, but it’s doubtful it will be marked with anything like the same fanfare. Connery remains eternally underrated. Forever associated with James Bond, it’s become assumed […]
For film fans, Westerns are a serious business. In the Fifties, directors like Zinneman, Hawks and Mann garnered critical praise for their psychological realism and deconstruction of the genre. In the Sixties and Seventies, Peckinpah and Leone mixed stylized violence with mournful elegies in films which lamented the end of the frontier. And today the […]
In the age of commercial chains and franchise operations, most hotels are anonymous environments that would seem to offer little in the way of inspiration for filmmakers looking for an appropriate location to stage an exercise in unease. The Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), […]
According to Richard Stanley, the idea for Dust Devil came to him in a dream whilst studying at Cape Town Film School, and the roots of the project are evident in the vividly realised opening sequence that is mostly free of dialogue and drenched in a feverish atmosphere reminiscent of Dario Argento at his peak. […]