The Big Picture Magazine
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) was the film that gave the confused and alienated teenager an identity. But before James Dean burst onto the screen as sensitive high-school misfit Jim Stark in his Lee blue jeans, white t-shirt and red windbreaker, becoming the embodiment of a generation and cementing his image as cool rebel, another […]
Special Service agent Richard Chance (William Petersen) approaches both his job and his life with reckless abandon, throwing caution to the wind whether he is chasing a criminal or base-jumping when he is off-duty. His badge and gun give him license not only to consider himself above the law, but above life and death, too. […]
Catherine Deneuve (Marion Vergano) in La sirène du Mississippi, 1969 François Truffaut attributed part of the failure of La Sirène du Mississippi (the film was poorly received) to the difficulty he had persuading the public to accept an actor like Jean Paul Belmondo in the role of a defeated, desperate man: “It’s not hard to […]
Cinema is a woman’s art, François Truffaut used to say, and the great moments in cinema involve “the convergence of the gifts of a director and those of an actress who is being directed by him.” In his films, it’s his feminine characters who are more dynamic, more enterprising, it’s them who direct events. It’s […]
“I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game,” said Robert Altman about Gosford Park (2001), inspired by Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939). On the surface, Renoir’s film takes the superficial form of a country house farce resulted in an accidental death, a case of mistaken identity, while Gosford […]
On a little island in the Canaries with very rocky terrain that in times past made communication very difficult in the absence of modern day technology, the locals invented a whistling language, a whistled version of Spanish, “El Silbo”, that is still being used today. That was the idea where Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film originated. […]
What drew me to Howard Hawks’ safari film, Hatari!, in the first place was something I had read about one of the female characters, Dallas (Elsa Martinelli), having been inspired by real life wild life photographer Ylla, considered “the best animal photographer in the world”, who was killed while on the job in North India in […]
At first sight, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010) is a linear story, a tale of two people who are trying to get to know each other through the course of an afternoon. The heroine, Juliette Binoche, who is not named, attends a lecture in Tuscany by an art historian, James Miller (opera singer William Shimell, in his […]
The great frontier always drew dreamers. I am not an American, but I am a dreamer. And I’ve always considered the Western as one of the greatest adventure movies. Capturing the adventurous spirit, the making it on your own, and an ethic and style that are eternal. That’s what a cowboy embodies. Someone with a […]