The Big Picture Magazine
‘I Like to watch.’ So says simpleton Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers) in Hal Ashby’s filmed version of Jerzy Kosiński’s novel ‘Being There’; a story about the improbable rise of a holy fool from lone obscurity to vaunted celebrity through a series of fortuitous ‘chance’ events. Skewering the hollowness of political rhetoric, racial entitlement and […]
The psychosexual thriller has survived many iterations, from the highbrow (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), to the gloriously over-the-top (Dressed to Kill, 1980), to the painfully dated (Jade, 1995). Scott J. Ramsey’s X (2019) is something of a Frankenstein’s monster, borrowing a bit from Kubrick’s final masterpiece (masked orgies, recurring mirror imagery) and a lot from […]
Rainbow imagery plays a central role in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the enigmatic Eyes Wide Shut.
The most oft-discussed visual aspect of Stanley Kubrick’s morally exasperating anti-war polemic Paths Of Glory is the stunning camerawork that accompanies the early sequences in the beleaguered French army trenches. However, one of the most memorable and infuriating moments surrounds the deployment of a piece of furniture. Following the inevitable failure of the suicide mission […]
It seems any film set in ‘outer space’ will have the daunting honour of being compared, almost always unfavourably, to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Hailed as the greatest achievement in cinematic history, Kubrick’s cold, grand masterpiece has been keeping audiences mystified since its release 46 years ago and banished all subsequent cinematic offerings to […]