The Big Picture Magazine
What makes a ghost story is known to us in that subconscious way we also know the sound of a nursery rhyme or Christmas carol when we hear one. We may have no idea how to explain the constituent parts of these things, or how these elements combine to achieve the desired result. It’s something […]
The Game is a film about awareness and relationships, with Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy businessman protagonist who keeps the world at a considered distance. Van Orton reduces almost all relationships to services – an that fits the capitalist economy in which he operates. His world is constructed of near-hermetically sealed spheres: the private […]
What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie? Here at The Big Picture HQ, we thought it would be fun to ask some of our regular contributors what their top ten favourite horror movies are. Do you agree with our writers’ choices? Mark Fletcher Horror has been a staple part of my movie watching since I was a […]
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 […]
Where a film is set is not always integral to the movie, unless it’s a Sci-Fi. Try setting Aliens or Moon on a council estate in Clapham and see where it gets you. But something like Midnight In Paris, for example, could be Midnight In Anywhere. It’s nice that it’s Paris, and it helps with […]
First of all, there is still an Art House in Champaign, IL. When I saw My Own Private Idaho there in 1991 it had been called the “New Art” theater since around ‘87, when it was resurrected from its seedy past as a 70’s porn venue. The theater has been in existence since the early […]
Gus (John Cassavetes) and Mary (Jenny Runacre) jump out of a black London cab and into the sanctuary of Henry’s Soup Kitchen, a non-descript café, Gus pausing momentarily to throw the fare through the cab window, desperate that the incessant rain doesn’t touch him. The pair have spent the night together, sharing a complicated, fleeting […]
It probably wasn’t planned this way but it’s really quite remarkable how often the film characters played by actress Shelley Winters met a watery grave. One of her most hauntingly bizarre demises features in Charles Laughton’s lone directorial outing The Night of the Hunter. To silence his new wife Willa (Winters) evil Reverend Harry Powell […]
Continuing our tie-in series of articles to celebrate the launch of the World Film Locations book series in July – and as a tribute to director Sidney Lumet who sadly passed away on April 8th – we look at how New York’s Hell Gate Bridge (which connects Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan), provided the perfect […]