The Big Picture Magazine
“We all have a past, but it doesn’t define us” one character says in Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father the Devil (2021). The film holds this assertion under close scrutiny. The story focuses on Marie, played by Babetida Sadjo, a Guinean immigrant living and working in rural France at a sleepy retirement home. She maintains a […]
Murmur of the Heart consists of two halves: the first a celebration of youth, and the second an awakening to adulthood’s messy realities.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
One sunny afternoon in post-war 1940s Los Angeles, Father Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro), a Roman Catholic priest, sits down at his regular hide to join his brother Tom (Robert Duvall), an LAPD detective, for lunch. Their catch-up has barely commenced when up strides shady construction tycoon Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), all smiles and joviality […]
With Ruby Sparks (2012), is Zoe Kazan attempting to deconstruct that most idealised of ‘noughties’ cinematic tropes, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or MPDG)? And if so, just where will a sensitive ‘new’ man be able to go from there to reassert his ‘masculinity’? Calvin Weir-Fields, the ‘wonder boy’ author at the centre of Ruby […]
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 […]