The Big Picture Magazine
A taxi driving towards the camera through mist and snow on a wide road – this lengthy first shot sets the tone for Kichitaro Negishi’s What the Snow Brings (Yuki ni negau koto, 2005). A cut reveals a young man in the back seat of the car. Wearing a trench coat, suit and tie, clearly […]
Before using colours “like a singing Matisse” in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy made the most lyrical use of black and white in his first two films, Lola and Bay of Angels. Before singing heroines bursting on screen on a background of glorious colours and stylised sets (the citizens of Cherbourg allowed Demy to […]
A kitchen is one of the three settings in Masahiro Kobayashi’s Japan’s Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 2012), and the table is the most prominent piece of furniture in this small room. An open sliding door offering a view into a small hallway and the adjacent bedroom creates some depth in the film’s opening eleven-minute scene, […]
One of the most acclaimed films in Cannes this year, Trang Anh Hung’s La passion de Dodin Bouffant, which also won the award for best director, is not just a story about “The Napoleon of the culinary arts”, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his beloved cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), but one that distinguishes itself visually […]
David Mamet, the great American man of letters, once said: “The genius of Jaws is the ability to terrify us with a shot of empty ocean.” When those yellow barrels pop up, it only adds to the terror, ratchets it up, taking us beyond “simple” storytelling towards multi-faceted layers of myth and mystery, beyond: “What lies beneath?” […]
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu, Japan, 1977) is a coming-of-age film that mixes horror and fantasy elements with humour and an undisguised penchant for the experimental. The title itself is programmatic – seven schoolgirls find themselves trapped in a haunted house. Shocked by the unexpected news that her widowed father has remarried while on a business […]
Even after sitting through its underwhelming trailer, I held out hope for Franck Khalfoun’s Night of the Hunted (2023). After all, the French writer-director is responsible for 2012’s Maniac remake, which – through its brutal melding of the arthouse with the grindhouse – may be this century’s best slasher. But his latest is a far […]
No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku, 2019) has the same title as a famous novel by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai (1904-1948). Several adaptations of this novel first published in 1948 have been produced for both the big and the small screen. However, despite its title, Mika Ninagawa’s film is not another adaptation of the novel […]
Holly is a 15-year-old girl living in a South Dakota town with her father. “Little did I realise,” she narrates in voice-over, twirling her baton on the street, “that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” What begins in the alleys and back […]