The Big Picture Magazine
Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tom Waits… The cast of Jim Jarmusch’s newest film is an impressive list of well-known character actors. These people might also be the only ones who could pull off a Jim Jarmusch film about the zombie apocalypse. And they almost do. The film begins with two policemen entering the […]
If you hated Hereditary (2018), you’re likely to hate Ari Aster’s sophomore film, Midsommar (2019), too. Even if you appreciate or even love Hereditary, there’s still a good 50/50 chance you’ll come out of Midsommar feeling disgusted, bored or a bit of both. Midsommar follows Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) who, after a family tragedy, tags […]
Did I feel guilty when I enjoyed Ken Russell’s The Fall of the Louse of Usher (UK, 2002)? I probably told myself: “This looks trashy, but …” I was undoubtedly overwhelmed by the huge amount of visual and acoustic resources and the multiple references to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, including the film’s subtitle: […]
After languishing in obscurity for decades, Tony Williams’ cult horror oddity, Next of Kin (1982), has finally been released on Blu-ray, thanks to Second Sight Films. While the disc comes loaded with excellent special features, including multiple audio commentaries and two of Williams’ shorts, the biggest draw, naturally, is the pristine quality of the film […]
Pale Flower (Kawaita hana, 1964), set in the yakuza milieu, questions the codes of Japanese gangsters and subverts the gangster codes of the films that flooded the Japanese film market in the early 1960s. It deals with obsessive love but replaces the carnal element with gambling. Shinoda’s film harks back to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The […]
After serving eight years in prison for the murder of his wife, Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) is released on probation and opens a barber shop in the home town of his parole officer, an elderly Buddhist priest (Fujio Tokita). Shohei Imamura’s The Eel (Unagi, 1997) depicts the slow return to normality of the former salaryman […]
Sang-il Lee’s Unforgiven (Yurusarezaru mono, 2013) bears many similarities with Clint Eastwood’s eponymous masterpiece from 1992. The storyline and narrative details as well as the characters and the frontier setting of Lee’s remake parallel Eastwood’s Western. This also applies to the insistence on shadows and half-shadows in the interior shots and the symbolic use of […]
2018 has been another great year for cinema. Read on for our regular contributors’ eclectic top 5 lists, in which more than 25 different films are represented. Share your favourites with us @BigPicFilmMag. Neil Fox The Dreamed Path (Dir. Angela Schanelec) MUBI had the goods this year when it came to new discoveries. Alongside […]
At the core of Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985) is the ambition of the central character, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), to produce in her small ramen noodle shop the best ramen (Chinese-style wheat noodles served in a broth) in Tokyo. Truck driver Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and four other men help the widow to turn her business around. […]