The Big Picture Magazine
We first see Anabel walking the halls of her palatial home impeccably dressed for the evening and wearing towering heels. She stumbles briefly. A subtle but distinct foreshadow of her imperfect perfect life, a preordained sense of future events. Anabel (Susi Sánchez, the recipient of this year’s Best Actress Goya Award for her performance) abandoned […]
As he is spiraling down, she is blossoming. He is a seasoned, hard-drinking country-rock legend, she is a talented newcomer who is just starting to find success. He is a tormented man clinging on regrets of the past, she is a rising star. But it is Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine, not Lady Gaga (Ally), who […]
“Eschewing the normal rules of commercial entertainment, Roeg’s films deal in raw emotion, shaking our preconceptions about civilisation and cinema. His aesthetic is founded on a masterly montage of time and space and elliptical narratives through which his character’s are cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings,” writes Jason Wood in the introduction […]
Human Desire (1954), directed by Fritz Lang “It seems that Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang had in common a taste for the same theme: an old husband, a young wife, a lover (La chienne, La bête humaine, The Woman on the Beach for Renoir; Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window, Human Desire for Lang). […]
One of film noir’s defining actors, Gloria Grahame gave her femme fatale characters a raw, vulnerable sensuality. She was not simply pretty. Her glamour and sexuality hid surprising, unexpected emotional registers. Her bad girls were human. Her characters were smart, daring, warm. I can never quite figure out Gloria Grahame on screen. Isn’t this one […]
Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) has just met Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) for a double match at a tennis club in Manhattan. She is getting ready to engage him in their first conversation. They’re back in street clothes, which, for Annie, means a white men’s shirt and loose wrinkled beige trousers, black vest and wide white […]
Like a star from the thirties, Dominique Sanda is leaning against a door with a cigarette in her mouth and her thumbs in her trouser pockets in classic Dietrich style. “Directing actors means, above all, liking people, liking certain things about people. I looked at Sanda and I imagined her look like that and we […]
Monica Vitti, L’eclisse Michelangelo Antonioni’s characters are always in crisis, but they are always dressed well, too. Furthermore, their easy access to luxury is a key part of their forced and vacuous lives, of their constant longing for a self that doesn’t exist. The costumes in Antonioni’s films speak in the most subtle way. It […]
55 years ago, Boccaccio ’70 opened the fifteenth Cannes film festival. Modeled on Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the four short stories of love and life in 1960s Italy were directed by four different filmmakers: Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica. Spanning comedy, melodrama and fantasy, the four tales form a sly satire of […]