Alan Price

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman) 50th anniversary re-release. Review by Alan Price. Whenever people mention Cries and Whispers (1972) they cannot escape talking about its use of the colour red.  Sven Nykvist’s Oscar winning photography saturates, without recourse to red colour filters and employing lighting from one source only, the red interiors, of a period manor house, to create a place with as much soulful character as its three female inhabitants.

South (BFI Blu Ray) 3 disc set 2022. Review by Alan Price. I think “heroism” is an important attribute to highlight whilst watching these fascinating films.  The Antarctic was the last and largest land mass on our planet to be explored.  All that effort, given such harsh conditions, resources and equipment, compared to modern scientific exploration, is extraordinary

The Camera Is Ours – BFI dvd set 2022. Review by Alan Price. The Camera is Ours celebrates the women employed by an earlier, much more conservative, patriarchal and patronising film industry than the present.

Hungarian Masters: (Second Run Blu Ray) 2022. Review by Alan Price. Second Run, who has a specialist interest in East European cinema, has just issued a box set containing three films by Istvan Gaal, Zoltan Fabri and Miklos Jansco.

The Parallax View (Pakula) 1974 Imprint Blu Ray. Review by Alan Price. The Parallax View contains a celebrated film within a film.

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!

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. 

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.’

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.

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.