The Big Picture Magazine
“Lost” masterpieces can be catnip for serious movie buffs and collectors. Now you can properly worship at the feet of kung fu action spectacular The Shaolin Plot (1977, directed by Huang Feng), a seldom-seen Hong Kong picture from the Golden Harvest production company. Celebrated martial arts actor, stuntman and filmmaker Sammo Hung worked with director […]
You may have met a man – quite young – A brisk-eyed youth, and highly strung: One whose desires And inner fires Moved him as wires … -From “So Various,” Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) The role of Gawain in David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) offers Dev Patel the opportunity to display a round table smorgasbord of […]
I AM NOT anti-Netflix. Of course not. Let’s face it – without Netflix, we wouldn’t have Roma. What’s that? Have I actually watched Alfonso Cuarón’s three-time Oscar-winning masterpiece? Er, no. I’m waiting for the right moment. Or the right big screen. Or the right home sound system. Really, really? I’d really rather watch it in […]
So there I was, standing in line, surrounded by a Sith Lord, a space rebel and a slave girl…
Unwittingly foreshadowing the fate of its four displaced protagonists, William Friedkin’s existential follow-up to The Exorcist was doomed the moment a certain lightsaber-rattling space opera arrived in cinemas from a galaxy far, far away. Sorcerer (1977) has been cited by some as the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood movement. However, a giant […]
Over the past several decades, something has happened to science fiction: once a genre of ideas, little but the spectacle now remains. Early classics, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), wanted us to think, to question ourselves and the world we lived in, while contemporary science fiction blockbusters like Avatar, seem driven […]
Since the dawn of cinema, filmmakers have been preoccupied with robots and their roles within the human world. From Fritz Lang’s humanoid robot in Metropolis to GERTY, the companion robot in last year’s Moon, our conception of robots is coloured by their human traits. Nicola Balkind looks at five films that exemplify the anthropomorphosis of […]