The Big Picture Magazine
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When Chris Rock hosted the 77th Annual Academy Awards, a pre-filmed segment flashed across the screen. Edited for giggles, it showed a microphone-equipped Rock smirking mischievously as he wandered around a Los Angeles cinema asking regular Joes which movies they’d paid to see that year. To refresh our collective short-term memories, films like Finding Neverland, Ray, […]