Throne of Blood. Review by Alan Price. T.S.Eliot rarely went to the cinema. However in 1957 he did see Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and called it his favourite film (though I’ve not been able to trace Eliot’s announcement back to any interview, letter or newspaper article).
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Oil Lamps. Review by Alan Price. Dysfunctional marriages are rife in contemporary film dramas yet often don’t shift gear into a high tragic dilemma set against a backcloth of decadence.
Kubrick An Odyssey. Review by Alan Price. Throughout late 1980’s and all of the 1990’s the question that moviegoers often asked was what’s Kubrick up to now? We were aware that Stanley Kubrick took a long time creating a film because of his fastidious micro-managing of every aspect of filmmaking.
Yojimbo – 1961 / Sanjuro 1962 – (Kurosawa). Review by Alan Price. The BFI continue their new 4k Kurosawa restorations with two of his most famous samurai films Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Both feature superb performances by Toshiro Mifune as a ronin (a vagrant samurai drifter).
The Barnabas Kos Case. Review by Alan Price. The Barnabas Kos Case is a subtle and witty satire directed by Peter Solan and adapted from the 1954 short story of Peter Karvas. It is a Slovak oddity still retaining its power to disturb and entertain.
Golem – Piotr Szulkin. Review by Alan Price. Golem is a brave oddity: an out to lunch curiosity that equally attracts and repels. It’s great that Second Run have made it available again.
High and Low and Stray Dog (Kurosawa). Review by Alan Price. Crime films with a tinge of film noir are not the obvious genres that spring to mind when you think of the typical output of Akira Kurosawa.
Films. Review by Barbara Lewis. Antwerp-based drawer, ceramicist, installationist, and now film maker Rinus Van de Velde defines his work as “fictional autobiography”. To the core a studio artist, four white walls are, for him, liberating rather than constraining.
Alfred Hitchcock – All the Films. Review by Alan Price. The first thing to do with a book like this is to check that all of Hitchcock’s films have been covered. And not just the well-known titles but lesser-known works too.
Powell and Pressburger’s War. Review by Alan Price. From 1939-1946 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger produced eight remarkable propaganda feature films but neither felt their artistic integrity was compromised from being backed by The Ministry of Information.
Emilia Perez. Review by Graham Buchan. A story about violence as a musical? A drug lord wanting to transition to a woman? A song by a Thai sex-change surgeon? A singer who cannot sing? A director working in a language he doesn’t know? None of it should work. But it does, brilliantly.
Billy Wilder & Ernst Lubitsch. Review by Alan Price. Without Ernst Lubitsch we wouldn’t have had a sophisticated American film comedy that drew upon a cosmopolitan culture and in particular a vanishing memory of Viennese society. And therefore maybe a different Billy Wilder style.
By Alan Price • film, year 2025 • Tags: Alan Price, film