The Big Picture Magazine
One of the most fondly remembered works of silent cinema, Keaton and Bruckman’s The General is a masterpiece in both daring comic performance and narrative simplicity – many of the greatest visual jokes ever filmed all revolve around one man and his train. That man is Johnnie Gray (Keaton), a railroad engineer whose attempt to enlist […]
Criticisms of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking often centre on a lack of warmth and humanity, as if his style is a façade and that emotional content is something that is neglected or ignored, willfully or otherwise. But this doesn’t ring true; in this, his third film, the story reaches an emotional crescendo that the design, cinematography […]
World cinema’s hidden gems handpicked by the Big Picture. When I asked the writer/director of Tricks/Sztuczki, Andrzej Jakimowski, about the freshness and originality of his second feature film within the context of Polish cinema, and about any influences on his well-received sophomore effort, he replied that there were no conscious forebears to whom he wished […]
Cinema’s backlot is simply littered with severed fingers. They’ve been tenderised with hammers in Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) and Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), become the natural stage one amputation in such Torture Porn tours de force as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) and Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and have been bloodily obliterated in the urban shoot-outs of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, […]
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene is often cited as one of the major figures in the rise of post-colonial African cinema, producing context driven works of poignancy over his fifty year long career. Coming to filmmaking at later age, Sembene strove to use his work to reach a wider African audience. Based on his novel of […]
1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh) is often treated as the poster boy for discussions of the boom in American independent cinema, a wave that emerged at the end of the eighties and flourished for much of the early to mid-nineties. Soderbergh would eventually work a balance between more mainstream Hollywood efforts and smaller […]
From the moment Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter dons his new bowler hat in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment the film changes into a very different beast to what has come before. Baxter’s rise from struggling clerk amid the core of the 19th floor to 2nd administrative assistant with his own office is swift. The endless nights […]
Once upon a time, there was a plaid overnight case… It may not have the heft of a dinosaur bone or the bite of a trained leopard, but the plaid (that’s tartan, to UK readers) overnight case in What’s Up Doc? is a far more effective spur to action than anything in Howard Hawks’s Bringing […]
As The Lavender Hill Mob – one of the most glorious gems in the Ealing crown – enjoys a 60th anniversary re-release, Scott Jordan Harris takes a look at the odd little object at the center of this hilarious heist spoof – the gold Eiffel Towers. When a calculating bank clerk and an opportunistic artist […]