The Big Picture Magazine
David Mamet, the great American man of letters, once said: “The genius of Jaws is the ability to terrify us with a shot of empty ocean.” When those yellow barrels pop up, it only adds to the terror, ratchets it up, taking us beyond “simple” storytelling towards multi-faceted layers of myth and mystery, beyond: “What lies beneath?” […]
Even after sitting through its underwhelming trailer, I held out hope for Franck Khalfoun’s Night of the Hunted (2023). After all, the French writer-director is responsible for 2012’s Maniac remake, which – through its brutal melding of the arthouse with the grindhouse – may be this century’s best slasher. But his latest is a far […]
When Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) first meets Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) in the bird shop in San Francisco, his look is impeccably executed. In his charcoal grey suit – fit cut, slim tie and white shirt – he is an urban careerist in San Francisco (a defense lawyer), equally brash and charming, arrogant and worldly. […]
Detroit has produced many mean sounds in its volatile history – The Stooges and the MC5 to name but two bands that pushed the rock and roll sound to new and lurid heights. But surely the meanest of them all comes from the growling purr of a Detroit-made 1957 Plymouth Fury, lovingly named Christine. The […]
What more needs to be said about Psycho, other than it has exercised influence over every horror-thriller post 1960. Forgoing the larger budgets of Vertigo and North by Northwest, director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to dabble in the burgeoning independent market, so he stripped back the crew, retained the members from his tv show ‘Alfred Hitchcock […]