The Duke. Review by Graham Buchan. In The Duke the director Roger Michell establishes exactly the right tone from the outset and maintains it steadily right up to the film’s very satisfying conclusion.
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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.’

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.
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.
By Alan Price • film, year 2022 • Tags: Alan Price, film