The Big Picture Magazine
“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 […]
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 […]
(Warning: This article contains plot spoilers) M. Night Shyamalan has undergone an identity crisis. The writer, director, and bit-part ‘actor’ of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village came something of a mid-career cropper. With his subsequent movies failing to impress, Shyamalan went from being the new master of suspense and king of the […]
Neil Mitchell takes a trip into the American backwoods, where the spontaneous rendition of a musical ditty provides a tuneful, striking contrast to the events that follow in a classic ‘70s thriller. Film history is littered with iconic music, both original compositions and existing pieces co-opted to complement, contradict or heighten the emotional reaction to […]
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 […]
Neil Mitchell dips a tentative toe in the water as one of the most famous theme tunes in movie history runs through his mind. Duun dun…duun dun…dun dun dun dun…you’d be hard pressed to find anyone – cinephile or casual movie viewer – that doesn’t instantly recognise John Williams’ theme tune to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, […]
Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that ‘cinema is truth 24 times a second… and every cut is a lie.’ The silent, grainy footage shot by Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963 as US President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas lasts less than 30 seconds, features no cuts, and provides the ‘truth’ […]
The philosophical and religious overtones of Infernal Affairs(2002) are captured beautifully in the one-sheet that accompanied the Chinese theatrical release. That the identity of the men silhouetted at the centre is obscured forms a very telling statement about the lonely and troubled characters of Chan Wing-yan (Tony Leung), an undercover cop who infiltrates a triad gang, […]
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has become one of the most iconic bad guys in cinema history. With his penchant for quiet weaponry and disquieting conversation, the character takes on a mythic quality that reads to both the audience and the inhabitants of the film as an unstoppable force of evil, an angel of death, or, perhaps, […]