The Big Picture Magazine
Inspired by and adapted from the novel of the same name, Perfume (2006) by Tom Tykwer is an offbeat thriller with oversaturated cinematography. The most illuminating aspect of film is its ability to impress, shock, and stimulate the minds of the audience, but movies such as Perfume lose their essence in pursuit of marketability and visual effects. In […]
Paranoia is a commodity rich with cinematic potential, but few pictures have mined it with such bleak and powerful unease as Seconds (1966). Ostensibly a work of science fiction, John Frankenheimer’s chilling dystopian nightmare addresses themes that, if anything, are more timely now than they were in the so-called Swinging Sixties. Our fear of aging […]
It’s become somewhat of a British horror tradition to have a plot based around local country bumpkin-satanist types. Elliot Golder’s found-footage debut The Borderlands, with its unfriendly villagers and sheep-burning teenagers, certainly looks as if it’s going that way. It’s quick to pay homage to Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) but swiftly skirts the local […]
What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie? Here at The Big Picture HQ, we thought it would be fun to ask some of our regular contributors what their top ten favourite horror movies are. Do you agree with our writers’ choices? Mark Fletcher Horror has been a staple part of my movie watching since I was a […]
The zombie film was, to excuse the pun, a sub-genre that had flatlined at the turn of the century. Movies thrown together by hacks with low budgets and even lower ambitions had consigned the undead to the DVD shelves. What this sub-section of horror needed was an injection of life, and British genre-spanning director Danny […]
Stuart Cooper’s dream-like interweaving of stunning archival footage with the fictional narrative of the training of a new recruit, Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner), won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1975, but Overlord (the codename for the D-Day landings) seemingly received little attention until Criterion recently issued it on Blu-ray. The film […]
There is something elusive and majestic about deers that film directors seem unable to ignore. These beautiful animals have appeared in movies covering a wide range of genres, and whilst their fleeting appearances often only add up to a few seconds of screen time their impact is usually integral to the filmmaker’s vision. Take the […]
At the end of the 19th Century, the Lumiere brothers’ short film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) defined the technological advancements of the era, and terrified audiences who, having seen nothing like it before, believed the train would fly out of the screen. Over a hundred years later, at the turn of […]
Neil Mitchell dips a tentative toe in the water as one of the most famous theme tunes in movie history runs through his mind. Duun dun…duun dun…dun dun dun dun…you’d be hard pressed to find anyone – cinephile or casual movie viewer – that doesn’t instantly recognise John Williams’ theme tune to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, […]