Categories
Feature Music & Film

The Score: Titus (Composer: Elliot Goldenthal, 1999)

  In the first of a regular web series, our resident film music aficionado Sean Wilson takes an indepth look at a carefully chosen motion picture soundtrack. Up first is the score to a truly unique cinematic experiment from 1999. Stage director Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s grisly revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus is generally faithful […]

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Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: The System (Michael Winner 1964)

Hard though it is to believe, long before the lurid excesses of his Death Wish franchise, the bloated self-satisfaction of his Times restaurant reviews and the irritating ubiquity of his esure adverts, Michael Winner actually made films worth sitting through. One of them was released for the first time on DVD last year and is an […]

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Feature One Sheet

One Sheet: The Godfather Poster, Re-imagined

To help promote the re-release in cinemas of The Godfather later this month, The Big Picture editor asked a select group of students at the University of the West of England’s celebrated graphic design course to have a crack at re-designing the film poster to connect with a new audience. The simple brief asked students […]

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Feature

Dearly departed: A theory on queer stereotypes in film

With popular Oscar-nominated films like Milk, Brokeback Mountain and , everything in cinema these days seems to be coming up queer. It was recently reported that even Brad Pitt now wants a gay role to increase his credibility-factor. This heightening of gay/lesbian/queer/transgendered/bisexual representation in dominant culture has been delighting modern, progressive society for some time now, bolstered […]

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Feature Screengem

Screengem: Michael Myers’ Mask in Halloween (1978)

A definitive feature of the definitive slasher film, the Michael Myers mask is an unlikely masterpiece of movie design. It was, in a favourite titbit of horror fan trivia, adapted by production designer Tommy Lee Wallace from a store-bought Halloween mask of William Shatner. Mercifully, the mask looked little like Captain Kirk when Wallace acquired […]

Categories
Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: Seven Days To Noon (John and Roy Boulting 1950)

Released last year for the first time on DVD, the Boulting brothers’ Seven Days to Noon is nearly sixty years old now but seems more relevant and frightening than ever. As well as working as an entertaining thriller it offers an interesting insight into how people might have dealt with the ultimate threat of annihilation […]

Categories
Feature Screengem

Screengem: The Sled in Citizen Kane (1941)

Practically every notable bit of movie memorabilia has been bought for some obscene sum by some obsessive fan. But the sale of the Rosebud sled was special: the buyer who forked out a fortune for it wasn’t bidding on behalf of an ostentatious movie museum-cum-café or an anonymous Charles Foster Kane-esque collector – he was […]

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Feature

Really most sincerely dead?: the myth of the hanging Munchkin

As urban myths go, the one about the suicidal Munchkin, supposedly visible dangling from a tree as Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man meander down the yellow brick road in The Wizard Of Oz is fairly easily debunked, as any cursory study of the clip on youtube will attest. But does the myth say something about the viewing […]

Categories
Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

Agnès Varda’s piquant tale of a beautiful young singer’s existential crisis, told in real-time, is part subversive fairy-tale and part innovative character study. This dynamic and influential film has remained impervious to the ravages of time yet, despite its radiance and reputation, it is currently only available on second-hand VHS or Region 1 DVD. Cléo de […]