The Big Picture Magazine
When the sun is high, it casts the most unyielding shadows. And in Jodorowsky’s unflinchingly off-kilter masterpiece The Holy Mountain (1973), the sun is always out, illuminating the improbable tangents of the human condition and stirring the dark impulses that lurk in our culture’s crevices. As a piece of high-camp, low-inhibition social commentary, The Holy […]
“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 […]
Ridley Scott’s fascination with omniscience goes to the outer limits in his 2012 science fiction film, Prometheus (2012). Often assumed a prequel to Alien (1979), Prometheus focuses on discovering mankind’s “engineers,” while amalgamating concepts of heroes and villains. Scott’s unsurpassable directing techniques are shown through the tiniest features in his characters. Even the unsettling soundtrack brings […]
The recent discovery of Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron (Kumokiri Nizaemon, 1978), a film that I had never seen before, has added a new work to my stock of movies for my research on Japanese film in general and on Gosha’s oeuvre in particular. Not as well known as Goyokin (1969) or Hitokiri (1969), Bandits vs. […]
Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) pitches us into an unforgiving wintry environment and declares once and for all, as if we didn’t know already, that this writer-director will be a survivor. And yes, his movie grips and informs and entertains along the way. A female, big-city-loneliness FBI agent finds herself tracking a rapist and murderer, his […]
Cinema’s dustbin is littered with movies that disappeared between the cracks or didn’t fit neatly into any easy-to-sell marketing category. It’s a fate that befell the criminally under-seen Red Rock West, John Dahl’s sophomore feature that, according to the late Roger Ebert, “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and […]
If you’re looking for the perfect antidote to yet another Christmas cooped up for days on end with family members you don’t get on with, we would direct you to seek out a copy of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, a dark little gem from the mid-90s, although you’re currently limited to a heftily priced US […]
Released last year for the first time on DVD, the Boulting brothers’ Seven Days to Noon is nearly sixty years old now but seems more relevant and frightening than ever. As well as working as an entertaining thriller it offers an interesting insight into how people might have dealt with the ultimate threat of annihilation […]
Agnès Varda’s piquant tale of a beautiful young singer’s existential crisis, told in real-time, is part subversive fairy-tale and part innovative character study. This dynamic and influential film has remained impervious to the ravages of time yet, despite its radiance and reputation, it is currently only available on second-hand VHS or Region 1 DVD. Cléo de […]