Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). Review by Alan Price. In 1993 Naked was an abrupt shift from Leigh’s domestic comedy dramas. This raw and provocative film, full of black humour, about the underbelly of London cutting into a morally confused lower-middle class, both excited and dismayed people.
film
Memoria (2021). Review by Alan Price. Memoria is a remarkable non-judgemental and hypnotic experience. It makes you simply look, examine and contemplate the evidence of the image.
Les Enfants Terribles (Melville) 1950 BFI Blu Ray 2021. When critics write of Les Enfants Terrible, Jean-Pierre Melville’s superlative film of Jean Cocteau’s novel, they use terms like “sibling rivalry” and “an obsessive incestuous relationship.’
West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg In the new West Side Story Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent music and Stephen Sondheim’s incisive and witty lyrics have all been preserved and bring as much pleasure as before.
BFI. Ingmar Bergman Vol 2 (5 Blu-Ray discs). In the 1950’s we experience Ingmar Bergman’s gradual progression to full maturity as a filmmaker. The culmination of that journey was internationally recognised in such (now) iconic films as Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.
Spencer. Review by Graham Buchan. Pablo Larrain’s Spencer achieves a great deal that the other major bio-pic, Diana, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and released in 2013, did not.
Director David Greene has gone on record as saying that he finds upheaval in society to be dramatic and exciting. “I like my films to be a sort of reportage of the world around the action.” For me this accurately describes the effect of his three remarkable films of the late sixties. I Start Counting (1969), The Shuttered Room (1968) and The Strange Affair (1968) reveal a brilliantly confident sense of circumvention of plot and action.
Rarely does the cinema provide us with such perfect opportunities for directly (and appropriately) comparing the work of two very different auteurs, but the release, just two months apart, of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, provides just such an opportunity.
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, Victoria and Albert Museum. Review by Carla Scarano. .”..a marvellous but unsettling journey through the origin of Alice’s stories and their adaptations and reinventions in films, art, music, fashion, photography and design.”
A Fine Day for Seeing: ten artists/ten poets. In the wide art world, artists are often inspired by literature and writers write about artworks. This exhibition focuses on the collaboration between ten internationally known artists and ten renowned poets.
Licorice Pizza (2021). Review by Alan Price. The title Licorice Pizza comes from a long gone record store that director Paul Thomas Anderson knew when he was growing up in Southern California. It featured a female cook holding up her freshly baked ‘licorice pizza’ – a yummy black vinyl record!
By Alan Price • film, year 2022 • Tags: Alan Price, film