Adam Wingard uses close attention to sightlines and shot-reverse-shot editing to atomise and dislocate relations in a grief-stricken New Mexico family in their 2014 horror-thriller The Guest. The Petersons have lost their eldest son, Caleb, who has died in combat whilst fighting for the US army. The unexpected arrival of David (Dan Stevens), a charismatic […]
Tag: Tragedy
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 […]
There Was a Father (1942) is one of two films Yasujirô Ozu made during Japan’s efforts in World War II and, as such, is a film that was influenced by the Japanese government’s increased control over all aspects of the country’s film industry. Under the watch of the ruling powers, films were encouraged to promote […]
The pivotal narrative moment in Jacques Audiard’s Rust And Bone (2012) is an accident involving a killer whale that sees one of the film’s protagonists, Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer Stéphanie, lose her legs. The sequence clearly poses a test for the filmmaker. Should one render the act using CGI, or retain rawness and attempt to convey […]
For all Disney’s early innovations in the field of animated movement of characters and environments, from the use of rotoscoping to the multiplane camera technique, it is this moment of relative stillness from Bambi that is perhaps his most affecting piece of work. It’s easy to be cynical about Disney, but this truly breaks the […]