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Feature Lost Classic

Flowers of evil in Cold War Japan: Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower

Pale Flower (Kawaita hana, 1964), set in the yakuza milieu, questions the codes of Japanese gangsters and subverts the gangster codes of the films that flooded the Japanese film market in the early 1960s. It deals with obsessive love but replaces the carnal element with gambling. Shinoda’s film harks back to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The […]

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Feature Reviews

Big Picture contributors’ top 5 films of 2018

2018 has been another great year for cinema. Read on for our regular contributors’ eclectic top 5 lists, in which more than 25 different films are represented. Share your favourites with us @BigPicFilmMag.   Neil Fox The Dreamed Path (Dir. Angela Schanelec) MUBI had the goods this year when it came to new discoveries. Alongside […]

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Feature On Location

On Location: Angels Flight railway, Bunker Hill, Downtown Los Angeles as seen in Kiss Me Deadly (Dir.Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Kiss Me Deadly—a brutal, brilliant film noir that set the high-water mark for Cold War paranoia—is finally getting the deluxe DVD reissue it deserves on June 21st courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Criterion Collection. Below is a pivotal scene from the film as featured in the World Film Locations: Los Angeles book available […]