THE OUTFIT, John Flynn, director/Arrow

While Donald Westlake’s achievement as a crime writer is legendary, many readers have a sneaking regard for the cold, spare Parker novels he wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Stark. Rarely was a nom de plume so well chosen: the Parker books, with their ruthless, largely unemotional mob hitman as a central character, are truly existential enterprises – everything is stripped away that does not facilitate the fast-moving plot. In The Hunter (now better known by the title given to its celebrated film adaptation, Point Blank. Parker  (renamed as Walker) is shot and left for dead. Is the character played by Robert Duvall in the earlier The Outfit Parker? Yes, he is, although he is renamed here Earl Macklin. This brutal and diamond-hard outing is one of the great modern films noir, directed with energy and precision by the talented John Flynn, The always reliable Duvall is backed up by a solid supporting cast: Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan. Karen Black and other luminaries. The set pieces are among the best that American cinema has to offer.

Barry Forshaw

El, Luis Buñuel, director/Radiance

A key work of his Mexican period, Buñuel’s sardonic and transgressive drama has pre-echoes of his later films with its dark humour and surrealist underpinnings; it’s a little-seen curio from a giant of international cinema. In recent years, the more difficult-to-see of Buñuel’s films have been making their way onto the silver disc medium and this chance to revisit one of the cinema’s great masters is much to be applauded. As the appearance of El attests, it’s not just the better-known classics such as Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel which deserve our attention. This new transfer from Radiance maintains the company’s impeccably high standards.

Barry Forshaw

Many filmmakers have tried to create instant cult movies, but such a strategy is often a fraught one. Cult movies are often brought about by the result of a combination of factors, and manufacturing those factors is more easily said than done. Russell Mulcahy’s spectacular Highlander, however, took very little time to establish itself as a cult film and produced a series of sequels. The first film remains the most entertaining: a smorgasbord of fantasy element with the unlikely casting of French/American actor Christopher Lambert as an immortal 16^th century Scotsman, and the charismatic presence of Sean Connery as an equally long-lived swordmaster. The energy and spectacle are on display from beginning to end, and this spectacular new 4K edition ensures the film is looking better than it has ever done before.

ZEN & SWORD: THE MIYAMOTO MUSASHI SAGA AT TOEI, Tomu Uchida, director/Eureka

With this welcome issue from Eureka, we have been given a truly impressive set. The limited edition three-disc Blu-ray collection enshrines one of the defining samurai sagas of the 1960s, featuring a remarkable cast of actors (of whom the most familiar in the West will be Ken Takakura). The films have been newly restored in 4K by Toei, and take the viewer on a visit to a long-distant epoque. The discs represent in total 566 minutes of cinematic splendour.

Barry Forshaw

Bear Manor Media are well known for their extremely eclectic catalogue – and for coming up with a variety of book concepts which have simply not been tried before. Here’s a classic example. Double Shock Horror by Barry Atkinson is subtitled ‘Sci-Fi Fantasy Combos in British Cinema 1958 – 1970’, and is the first major attempt to tabulate and add some light analysis of the genre double bills that emblazoned British cinema billboards for a decade or so; it will be a welcome nostalgia trip for many cinemagoers – and not just in Britain. There is an interesting phenomenon whereby a goodly proportion of Americans are intrigued by the treatment of genre products in the UK (there is a similar interest in British reprints of American comics), and Atkinson crams his sizeable volume with some fascinating information. There is also a personal touch – the author often describes the actual cinema experience of seeing particular double bills, and while readers may not share those particular experiences, they will no doubt have their own equivalent – and memories will be ignited via which personal comparisons can be made.

Double Shock Horror by Barry Atkinson is published by Bear Manor Media

LE NOTTE BIANCHI, Luchino Visconti, director Radiance

A much-needed Blu-ray release for a key Italian classic, Le Notte Bianchi (White Nights), based on a Dostoyevsky novella. Luchino Visconti, a key contributor to the neorealist movement, produced his greatest work of personal cinema in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963), a massive, elegiac masterpiece (much mutilated in its day by its distributors). Much less well-known but h sought after by admirers of Visconti is Le Notte Bianchi. The plot features the saturnine Mario (played by perhaps the most significant actor in Italian Cinema, Marcello Mastroianni) running into a suicidal woman, Natalia (played by Maria Schell) with significant consequences for both. Lacking the visual sumptuousness of other Visconti films such as Senso (also available from Radiance), this is nevertheless a rigorous and intelligent take on Dostoyevsky’s novella, and the 4K restoration is quite stunning – as are the extras on the disc.

JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH 4K, Gareth Edwards, director/UNIVERSAL

Lovers of spectacular SF or fantasy adventure have been regally catered for by the Blu-ray medium (and latterly the even more spectacular 4K idiom). The ability to transport the viewer into a version of our world in which dinosaurs roam the planet more often than not depends on top-notch special effects, and the new 4K medium undoubtedly shows such film magic to best advantage. And stunning special effects are, of course to be found in a splendid new addition to the Jurassic Park franchise initiated so resoundingly by Steven Spielberg in 1993. Apart from the presence of the always welcome Scarlett Johansson, centre stage in this new iteration, the real ace in the hole here is the presence of director Gareth Edwards – one of the most prodigiously talented craftsmen at work today (his sprucing up of the Godzilla franchise was splendid – as is this new addition to the Jurassic Park series. And perhaps the most praiseworthy thing is how many new elements Edwards and his colleagues have incorporated – if you think you’ve seen every possible dangerous situation involving a rampaging dinosaur in this series, you have to watch this latest addition.

STORM CENTRE, Daniel Taradash, director/Indicator

With very few exceptions, there was hardly ever a film in which the actress Bette Davis did not earn her money several times over – and that’s very much the case with this late entry in her career. Davis plays a widowed librarian who finds herself pilloried as she resists a campaign to remove from her shelves a book on Communism, even though she does not agree with its precepts. Directed and written by Daniel Taradash, Storm Centre (or ‘Center’ as the credits have it) is a powerful plea for tolerance, and has become particularly relevant in the 20^th century when America is once again undergoing a wave of book banning. But it is the writing by Taradash rather than his direction which holds things together here. And, as always, it’s Bette Davis who excels as the beleaguered, principled librarian.

THE SHOOTIST, Don Siegel, director/Arrow

It’s always to be applauded when a successful film career ends with a flourish rather than a disappointment. After one of the most stellar careers in Hollywood, the actor John Wayne was able to draw on his own battle with cancer to lend total credibility to this melancholy tale of the last days of a celebrated gunfighter – and the fact that the directing chores were handled by one of the finest in the business, Don Siegel, was a match made in heaven. Another plus is the contribution by one of the most reliable composers for the Western, Elmer Bernstein, perhaps best known for his iconic score for The Magnificent Seven. Wayne plays an famous gunfighter (perhaps ‘notorious‘ would be a better word) who opts to make his departure in a very significant fashion. Apart from Wayne – giving one of his best performances – Siegel put together a stellar cast including James Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Scatman Crothers and John Carradine.

WOMEN IN LOVE, Ken Russell, director /BFI Blu-ray 4K  A very welcome 4K issue. It’s hard to remember in the 21st-century just what a seismic impact Ken Russell’s film of DH Lawrence’s scandalous classic had in 1969. Apart from its quartet of then-hot young players bringing Lawrence’s characters to life (Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden), Russell’s frank treatment of sex was groundbreaking. Until recently, the film has only been available in a substandard MGM release which – being non-anamorphic – did no justice whatever to the exquisite cinematography. But the BFI are to be applauded for this beautiful restoration of what is probably Ken Russell’s best film for the cinema, looking more eye-popping than it has ever done before. Lawrence’s theme, of course, was always the clash of the intellect and the erotic impulse, and the iconoclastic Russell was just the director to tackle that. But interpretations of the erotic can easily slip into being prosaic descriptions of the mechanics of the act — or move into more rarefied poetic realms which transcend the merely physical. The most conspicuous exemplar of the latter approach was (it goes without saying) DH Lawrence, and the accounts of sexual activity in such novels as The Rainbow and Women in Love (both filmed by Russell at various intervals) so melded and intermingled the physical with the poetic that it was difficult for the reader to figure out precisely what was happening between the lovers. Was that an orgasm we’d just encountered? Or a metaphysical merging of psyches? But Lawrence was at least trying to articulate what was previously terra incognita, and more complex and subtle attitudes to the erotic were a concern for various writers and filmmakers. WH Auden was obliged to pseudonymously publish his one-poem pamphlet ‘The Platonic Blow’ in 1965 with its description of a sexual encounter between two men — two years before such sexual activity was legal. Women in Love also dealt with the taboo. With Alan Bates and Oliver Reed sporting facial hair (and nothing else) in their celebrated nude wrestling scene, cinema was subtly changed in a sequence shot with chiaroscuro candle-lit effects (and to the sensuous sound of Georges Delerue’s sweeping orchestral score). It was this scene, more than those involving the actresses in the film, which was much discussed; Jennie Linden’s dress being pulled up by Bates, and Glenda Jackson’s naked breasts kissed by Oliver Reed had the requisite effect on audiences, but they had seen similar things before — the homoerotic wrestling was something new. Russell had made his name with TV biographies of such classical composers as Delius, Elgar and Debussy, and was well aware that yoking in the other arts would enhance the effect of his feature films; a most serviceable element in this strategy, he knew, was music, although the swelling strings traditionally used in Hollywood love-making scenes had become the hoariest of clichés. Accordingly, Russell encouraged a more unusual score from Georges Delerue. The film is released with a host of special features.