The Big Picture Magazine
I recently saw Crazy Rich Asians, and afterwards joked that it’s one of the most interesting of the Disney cartoon-princess movies. Man—”Cinderella” is, apparently, immortal. The best way to understand this movie, I think, is to see it as a folktale. Which, after all, most romcoms essentially are. And doing so brings up many of […]
Andrzej Wajda started his career as a filmmaker in post-war Poland. His early films – A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Lotna and Samson – focus on both the Second World War and the civil war uprising and its aftermath. Wajda often emphasized the moral duty of the filmmaker in Poland, whose task it was to remember a […]
An angry-looking man hastily leaves a shabby house in the middle of nowhere, repeatedly throwing his walking stick to the floor. Each time, a young woman picks it up. The man is Tadao, the elderly protagonist of Haru’s Journey, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai. The woman is Haru, his grand-daughter, sublimely interpreted by Eri Tokunaga. […]
Cannes Film Festival’s most powerful weapon has long been its ability to make or break a film. Before a radically changing film landscape dulled this potency, one of its victims was Sofia Coppola’s third film, her deeply idiosyncratic portrait of Marie Antoinette. In truth, the film never really recovered from the boos of riled French […]
Since the success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon at the International Film Festival in Venice in 1951 – which opened the door for western critics and audiences to the rich but previously unknown Japanese film culture – the Venice-Berlin-Cannes festival circuit has been an important way of promoting Japanese films. In the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, […]
In Mikio Naruse’s 1956 film A Wife’s Heart, the family serves as a microcosm for tradition and changes in post-war Japanese society. It’s set in a provincial Japanese town in which cultural changes have been less extreme than in the capital: there are no modern office block towers, and both buildings and interiors are a mixture of Japanese […]
Writer-director Paul Schrader is both insider and outsider. His screenplays for Martin Scorsese include the masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, while as director he encapsulated the decedent aesthetic of the 1980s with American Gigolo, simultaneously carving out a lucrative career as a studio script doctor. Although considered to be one of the ‘movie brats’ of […]
If cinema is an ‘escape’ from real life, then Tommy Wiseau’s cult calamity is a feature-length detachment from reality itself. It’s unlikely there could ever be enough drugs in the world to fully comprehend a film that, for all intents and purposes, resembles something made by an alien trying to recreate about a hundred different […]
Now that M. Night Shyamalan is again enjoying critical and public success thanks to The Visit and Split, it’s high time we revisit what is perhaps his most misunderstood offering: the wildly uneven but oddly fascinating The Happening. Although derided as “that movie where Mark Wahlberg talks to a plant,” it remains the writer-director’s bleakest film to […]