News

Lea Massari, the Italian actress and European cinema icon famous for her roles in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura (1960), Dino Risi’s A Difficult Life (1961) and Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (1971), has died. She was 91.

Massari died at her home in Rome on Monday, Italian media reported.

In a decades-long career that spanned films, television and theater, Massari played alongside the likes of Alain Delon, Jean Paul Belmondo, Michel Piccoli and Omar Sharif. She was a critical and audience favorite but shunned the spotlight. After retiring from acting more than 30 years ago, she rarely appeared in public.

Born Anna Maria Massatani on June 30, 1933 — she took the stage name Lea in honor of her fiancé, Leo, who died in an accident shortly before they were to be married — her childhood was spent across Europe as her family followed her father, an engineer, to positions in Spain, France and Switzerland.

Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, streaming on Netflix, is the most pitch-perfect serialized romcom I’ve seen in years. It is smart, funny, impish, and wise, without making any visible effort to be any of these. The dialogues are unerringly bang-on and unfailingly amusing.

You can’t afford to skip a beat in this one, no Sirreee! Not without wondering why everyone else in the room is laughing. Ah, that is another thing about Nobody Wants This: you have to watch it with those whom you love. There is a sense of community joy in the way the characters address their own problems, without seeming self-centred. They aren’t telling us how to live our lives. But they aren’t ruling out any tips either.

So what is all the fuss about? It all begins when Joanne (Kristen Bell) meets a “hot rabbi” Noah (Adam Brody). Sparks fly, especially...

“Marcello Mastroianni was known, all around the world, as the Latin lover, the Italian seducer, especially after he starred in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s masterpiece,” says Fabrizio Corallo, the director of the new documentary Ciao Marcello, Mastroianni l’antidivo. “Mastroianni did not like this image. He didn’t want to be seen as an icon, as a sex symbol. He didn’t care much about his public persona; what did matter to him was his personal life. So, I tried to build an intimate portrait of this unique actor.”

Corallo is a journalist and an expert on the history of Italian cinema. For state broadcaster Rai he has made a number of documentaries about the great personalities of Italian cinema: Dino Risi, Vittorio Gassman, Virna Lisi, Ennio Flaiano and Giuliano Montaldo, among others.

Ciao Marcello, which was co-written with Silvia Scola, the daughter of Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola,...

The collection “Let's make it weird: Laughing with Italian Comedies” is now showing exclusively on Mubi.Most of us have experienced the joys of watching Italian cinema—not least of which is the delight of laughing at Italian comedies. In the second season of Mubi Podcast: Voci Italiane Contemporanee, we explore how Italian comedy has changed since the days of classic postwar “Commedia all’Italiana,” tracking the evolution of the genre to explore what makes us laugh today and why. Our guide is comedian and cinephile Saverio Raimondo, who has conducted five conversations with contemporary filmmakers, critics, and stand-up comedians. This episode features Paola Minaccioni:Does contemporary social awareness and sensitivity change the way we watch the films of Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli and Carlo Vanzina? Might we now perceive that these Italian comedy masterpieces are sexist?We discuss these questions with Paola Minaccioni, one of the leading authorities on Italian comedy,...

Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s Sophia Loren: La Signora Di Napoli

Edoardo Ponti’s The Life Ahead; Mario Mattoli’s Poverty And Nobility opposite Totò and Enzo Turco; Alessandro Blasetti’s Too Bad She’s Bad with Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio De Sica; Dino Risi’s The Sign Of Venus (Il Segno Di Venere) with Franca Valeri and Raf Vallone; Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Eleanora Brown, plus De Sica’s 1963 and Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio All’Italiana) with Mastroianni, and The Voyage (Il Viaggio) with Richard Burton; Stanley Donen’s Arabesque with Gregory Peck; Francesco Rosi’s More Than A Miracle (C’era Una Volta) with Omar Sharif; Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong with Marlon Brando; Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (Una......

Martin Scorsese’s 50-year filmmaking career and longtime side gig as a film preservation advocate has led to him being recognized as the world’s biggest cinephile for decades. But his increasingly vocal passion for the medium — and yes, his viral comments about Marvel movies — have given him a new kind of relevance in recent years as an aspirational figure for young cinephiles on the Internet who are dismayed by the state of the industry. So it feels appropriate (if surreal) that the 80-year-old auteur now has a Letterboxd account.

As part of the lengthy promotional cycle for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Scorsese has officially joined the film-centric social media site that encourages users to log and review films that they have seen. And he’s been busy, logging 69 films and curating a list of classics that he recommends pairing with his own work.

“I love the idea of...

“Killers of the Flower Moon” executive producer Niels Juul is in Cannes with several projects based on IP from the vault of Italy’s storied Cecchi Gori movie company that include a remake of the Dino Risi-directed classic “Il Sorpasso” and “Kafka,” a script about the turbulent love life of Franz Kafka by John Briley (“Gandhi”).

The IP and some other assets of the movie company that once dominated Italy’s film industry and collapsed in the mid-1990s were acquired late last year by a group of Italian investors under the new management of Rome-based CEO Federico Canfora and U.S-based Javier Balliero Madrid. Madrid is president of the new company, which is backing a partial relaunch of the Cecchi Gori brand, which is behind such Oscar-winners as “Life Is Beautiful,” “Mediterraneo” and “Il Postino.”

They have a producing agreement with Los Angeles-based Juul, who is a former Cecchi Gori Pictures CEO.

Luigi Comenicini’s The Sunday Woman makes for an intriguing blend of police procedural and comedy of manners. It isn’t really a giallo, despite an investigation into a bizarre murder that fuels further misdeeds. As a satire of Turin’s upper classes, it isn’t nearly as trenchant, let alone grim, as other examples of commedia all’italiana like Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned, though it does share their preoccupation with character types that border on the grotesque. Taken on its own terms, the film is absorbing, frequently amusing, and exceedingly well directed by Comencini, who keeps things moving with admirably brisk efficiency.

When sleazy architect Garrone (Claudio Gora) is found beaten to death with a large stone phallus (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Commissioner Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) takes up the case. A handy clue soon puts him on...

That English-language cinema has no parallel for the Garrel family is equal testament to their legacy and our shallow, piddling culture. While Philippe Garrel’s decades-long filmmaking career––which began with political documentation and silent features, but now represents modern cinema’s best studies of romance and longing––just added to its corpus his excellent The Plough, starring progeny Louis Garrel, Esther Garrel, and Lena Garrel, Louis is about to see the U.S. debut of The Innocent, his fourth feature in writing-directing-starring capacities.

If it barely resembles his father’s films––still attuned to human behavior, but packaging observations inside madcap scenarios Garrel proudly calls “completely unbelievable”––that’s all the better: watching The Innocent suggests less an heir to Philippe Garrel than Dino Risi or Pierre Etaix.

Ahead of a release this Friday beginning at NYC’s IFC Center, I talked to Garrel about the difficulty of constructing an intricate comedy-thriller,...

“Magic Mike’s Last Dance” (Warner Bros. Discovery) is #1 on the historically weak Super Bowl weekend. With distributors shying away from top new releases, and avoiding next week’s debut of “Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania” (Disney), the 51 million total for all films should be the low point for 2023.

It’s the first weekend this year to fall below the same date in 2022 (54 million). The year has been much improved so far, and momentum should return next weekend with the new Marvel film on a holiday.

The third time out for the male stripper franchise, again with Channing Tatum in the title role and with the return of original director Steven Soderbergh, grossed 8.2 million. Like last month’s “House Party,” this was a theatrical debut of a title initially anticipated for HBO Max. It opened in 1,500 theaters in top locations — smaller than a wide release, but enough to capture 80 percent-90 percent of its potential.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Museum of Modern Art

A series on Claudia Cardinale begins, including The Leopard this Friday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on awards-snubbed films continues with Altman, Elaine May, Mick Jagger and more.

Japan Society

A series celebrating Seijun Suzuki’s centennial continues with imported 35mm prints.

Roxy Cinema

The Todd Solondz retro continues with 35mm showings of Happiness and Storytelling, as well as Dark Horse; Stalker has showings.

IFC Center

Irreversible plays on 35mm; 28 Days Later, The Big Lebowski, Akira, I Married a Witch, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho also screen.

Film Forum

Dino Risi’s Una Vita Difficile is playing in a 4K restoration, while Funny Girl screens on Sunday.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: The Leopard, Mikey and Nicky & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Japan Society

A series celebrating Seijun Suzuki’s centennial begins with imported 35mm prints.

Roxy Cinema

35mm showings of Happiness continue; a Sara Driver series brings Stranger Than Paradise and Sleepwalk on 35mm, as well as Boom for Real.

Museum of Modern Art

A series on Claudia Cardinale begins, including Rocco and His Brothers this Saturday.

Film Forum

Dino Risi’s Una Vita Difficile has begun playing in a 4K restoration, while Howl’s Moving Castle screens on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on awards-snubbed films continues with Sirk, Cukor, and The Night of the Hunter.

IFC Center

28 Days Later, The Big Lebowski, Eraserhead, The Witches, and Psycho play.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: Seijun Suzuki, Sara Driver, Claudia Cardinale & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

To have and to hold, forever in history.

Dino Risi’s 1961 historical comedy “Una Vita Difficile” charts the history of Italy’s economic slumber and subsequent boom post-wwii. Never released in the U.S., the film now makes its New York City debut at Film Forum with a new 4K restoration.

IndieWire exclusively premieres the trailer for the Rialto Pictures feature, with the restoration carried out at Vdm by Studiocanal.

In 1944, Roman student and ex-army lieutenant Silvio Magnozzi (Alberto Sordi) is on the run from the Germans. Elena (Lea Massari) saves Silvio’s life by killing a German soldier, and the duo becomes lovers, with their romance spanning decades and numerous locations.

The classic of commedia all’italiana stars one of Italy’s biggest box office attractions, Sordi, opposite Massari, in the story of an on-again, off-again, then on-again relationship told against 17 years of Italian history — from the last year...

Updated: Cecchi Gori, the movie company that once dominated Italy’s film industry and collapsed in the mid 1990s, is being revived by a group of Italian investors that are backing a partial relaunch of the storied brand behind Oscar winners “Life is Beautiful,” “Mediterraneo” and “Il Postino.”

Cecchi Gori Group was officially ruled bankrupt in 2006 by a Rome court after being awash in red ink for a decade after its owner, movie mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, branched out from film into television and acquired the A.C. Fiorentina soccer club in a bold expansion attempt that put him in competition with Silvio Berlusconi and went horribly wrong.

But even after the company’s various Italian sides went bust, its U.S. branches – Cecchi Gori U.S.A. and Cecchi Gori Pictures – continued to operate, headed by producer Niels Juul. Operating out of Los Angeles, Juul has been instrumental to...

A round up of stories from Locarno Film Festival.

As the first week of the Locarno Film Festival (August 3-13) comes to an end, here is the latest from the industry side of the event in Switzerland.

Six projects at Locarno Pitching Day

Feature films from Italy, Austria and Switzerland were among the projects pitched at the Ticino Film Commission’s Locarno Pitching Day held yesterday (August 8).

Staged in collaboration with Locarno Pro, the event was aimed at film industry professionals seeking co-production partners, distribution and financing for projects that are in development and could be further developed in the Swiss region.

White NoiseCOMPETITIONWhite Noise (Noah Baumbach)Il Signore Delle Formiche (Gianni Amelio)The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)L’Immensita (Emanuele Crialese)Saint Omer (Alice Diop)Blonde (Andrew Dominik)Tár (Todd Field)Love Life (Koji Fukada)Bardo, False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths (Alejandro G. Inarritu)Athena (Romain Gavras)Bones & All (Luca Guadagnino)The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)Beyond The Wall (Vahid Jalilvand)The Banshees Of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre)Chiara (Susanna Nicchiarelli)Monica (Andrea Pallaoro)No Bears (Jafar Panahi)All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)A Couple (Frederick Wiseman)The Son (Florian Zeller)Our Ties (Roschdy Zem)Other People’s Children (Rebecca Zlotowski)Out Of COMPETITIONFictionThe Hanging Sun (Francesco Carrozzini)When The Waves Are Gone (Lav Diaz)Living (Oliver Hermanus)Dead For A Dollar (Walter Hill)Call Of God (Kim Ki-duk)Dreamin’ Wild (Bill Pohlad)Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)Siccità (Paolo Virzi)Pearl (Ti West)Don’t Worry Darling...

While the new premieres at the world’s greatest film festivals usually garner much of the spotlight, the lineup of restorations should be equally as exciting to any cinephile. Venice Film Festival, which kicks off its 79th edition from August 31-September 10, has now unveiled the lineup of the Classics section.

Featuring Jacques Tourner’s Canyon Passage, Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion, plus films by Peter Greenaway, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Yasujirō Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, and more, it’s an embarrassment of riches. If you don’t happen to be in Venice later next month, hopefully we’ll get news of home video releases for these in the coming year.

See the lineup below via Screen Daily.

Teresa The Thief (Teresa La Ladra)(Italy, 1973)

Dir. Carlo Di Palma

Restored by: Cineteca Nazionale

My Little Loves (Mes Petites Amoureuses) (France, 1974)

Dir. Jean Eustache

Restored...

The section returns to the lido after two years.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem and Yasujiro Ozu’s A Hen In The Wind are among the 18 films selected for the Venice Classics strand of the 79th Venice Film Festival (August 31-September 10).

Pasolini’s Italian drama screened in competition at Venice in 1968 and received a special award from the International Catholic Film Office which was later revoked after the Vatican complained. It is restored by Cineteca di Bologna.

A Hen In The Wind is one of three Japanese films in selection. The other two are Profound Desires of the Gods by...

The section returns to the lido after two years.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem and Yasujiro Ozu’s A Hen In The Wind are among the 18 films selected for the Venice Classics strand of the 79th Venice Film Festival (August 31 - September 10).

Pasolini’s Italian drama screened in competition at Venice in 1968 and received a special award from the International Catholic Film Office which was later revoked after the Vatican complained. It is restored by Cineteca di Bologna.

A Hen In The Wind is one of three Japanese films in selection. The other two are Profound Desires of the Gods...

French film great Jean-Louis Trintignant, best known for his roles in “A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” and “The Conformist,” died Friday. He was 91.

Trintignant died at his home in southern France, his wife, Marianne, and agent told the Agence France-Presse.

Trintignant was more recently known for roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red” and for starring opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” winner of the 2013 Oscar for best foreign film.

Taciturn and enigmatic, the “reluctant” actor, who came by his profession by accident and several times announced he was quitting, returned time and again to appear in more than 100 films and achieve international stardom over of a period of more than 40 years working with some of the world’s great directors including Claude Chabrol, Abel Gance, Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras, Ettore Scola and Francois Truffaut, as well as Kieslowski and Haneke.

Though he claimed to prefer racing cards, he once told an interviewer,...

The upcoming Los Angeles-Italia Film Fashion and Art Festival will be honoring Italian directors Paolo Sorrentino (“The Hand of God”) and Enrico Casarosa (“Luca”) as well as costume-designer Massimo Cantini Parrini (“Cyrano”) all of whom have scored nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards.

The 17th edition of the pre-Oscars event will be held March 20-26 at Hollywood’s Tcl Chinese Theatre and also online.

This year’s opening ceremony will be hosted by veteran Italian-American actor Robert Davi, who is also this year’s president of the event. Sofia Milos (“CSI: Miami”) and Hollywood acting coach Bernard Hiller will co-host.

Consul General of Italy Silvia Chiave and Italian Institute of Culture chief Emanuele Amendola will also be introducing honorees both at the Chinese Theatre and during a separate March 25 event being held at the Italian Institute of Culture.

Other Los Angeles-Italia honorees this year are ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti actors Riccardo Scamarcio,...

Next month’s Mubi lineup for the U.S. has been unveiled, with a major highlight being their recent release Lingui, The Sacred Bonds and more films from director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (read our recent chat with him). Matías Piñeiro’s Isabella and Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft., two of last year’s highlights, will also arrive.

Two recent Cannes premieres, the Adèle Exarchopoulos-led Zero Fucks Given and Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again will also finally come to the U.S. courtesy of Mubi. In terms of older highlights, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, Hong Sang-soo’s The Power of the Kangwon Province, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, and more will arrive.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

March 1 | The Willmar 8 | Lee Grant | Down and Out in America: Lee Grant’s Documentaries

March 2 | Train Again | Peter Tscherkassky | Brief Encounters

March...

Late great Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, who is best known to U.S. audiences as the star of classics such as “Big Deal on Madonna Street” and “Il Sorpasso” (“The Easy Life”), will be celebrated by the Los Angeles-Italia Film Fashion and Art Festival, which will run March 20-26 at Hollywood’s Tcl Chinese Theater.

The annual pre-Oscars event comprising movies and music and celebrating showbiz ties between Italy and Hollywood, now at its 17th edition, will pay tribute to the centennial of Gassman’s birth with a mini-retro honoring the memory of the iconic thesp who, among other accolades, won the best actor prize at Cannes in 1975 for his performance as a blind man in Dino Risi’s ”Profumo di Donna,” later remade in English as ”Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino.

“We are honored and extremely pleased to pay a well-deserved tribute to an Italian genius whose...

Il bandito (1946) When his peers were busy whitewashing their nation’s crimes in the preposterous pietism of Neorealism, he made films that exposed the transactional individualism that ruled post-war Italy. When orthodox Marxists deemed commercial cinema the ultimate evil, he infused it with possibilities that exceeded box office returns. While everyone shot in Rome, he set many of his films in the anonymous provinces of northern Italy. Too popular to be considered an auteur yet too intellectual to be easily brushed aside, these may well be some of the reasons why Alberto Lattuada has occupied such an ambivalent place in the history of Italian cinema, one that has resisted canonization and has been largely confined to the country’s borders. An almost complete retrospective of his films, organized by Roberto Turigliatto during the last edition of the Locarno Film Festival, has given us the chance to (re-)discover a director who has worked across genres,...

Ace Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who was instrumental to the making of masterpieces such as Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” but also worked in Hollywood and was an Oscar nominee for Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” has died. He was 97.

Rotunno, who was nicknamed Peppino, died on Sunday in his Rome home, his family announced without disclosing the exact cause.

Born in Rome on March 23, 1923, Rotunno started his remarkable six-decade career as a still photographer at the Italian capital’s Cinecittà Studios in 1940 before being recruited in 1942 to serve as a newsreel cameraman with the Italian army where he cut his teeth as a cinematographer.

In 1943 at age 20, with World War II still raging, Rotunno was hired as an assistant Dp by Roberto Rossellini for the 1943 war film “L’Uomo dalla croce” (The Man with a Cross), a drama about a military chaplain.

After the war,...

After polling critics from around the world for the greatest American films of all-time, BBC has now forged ahead in the attempt to get a consensus on the best comedies of all-time. After polling 253 film critics, including 118 women and 135 men, from 52 countries and six continents a simple, the list of the 100 greatest is now here.

Featuring canonical classics such as Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Duck Soup, Playtime, and more in the top 10, there’s some interesting observations looking at the rest of the list. Toni Erdmann is the most recent inclusion, while the highest Wes Anderson pick is The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s also a healthy dose of Chaplin and Lubitsch with four films each, and the recently departed Jerry Lewis has a pair of inclusions.

Check out the list below (and my ballot) and see more on their official site.

100. (tie) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,...

Versatile star of Hollywood’s international years whose work spanned romantic comedies, period epics and spaghetti westerns

For more than a decade from the mid-1950s, the film star Elsa Martinelli, who has died aged 82, was one of the most prominent female Italian exports to Hollywood, along with her compatriots Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale. In addition, Martinelli’s appearance seemed to be the sine qua non of Italian co-productions of period epics, romantic comedies, erotic sketch movies and spaghetti westerns.

It was during Hollywood’s international years that Martinelli starred opposite Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Charlton Heston and Anthony Quinn, and, both in the Us and Italy, worked with directors such as André De Toth, Guy Hamilton, Dino Risi, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. Her slim, elfin looks led to her being described by one newspaper in the 1950s as a “kind of Audrey Hepburn with sex appeal”.

Continue reading.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

The Steadicam series continues with films by Tarantino, PTA, De Palma, Scorsese & more.

The Tampopo restoration is also showing.

Metrograph

Minnelli, Demy, Haynes, and Sirk fill up “Christmas at Metrograph.”

Coraline plays on Christmas Eve.

Museum of the Moving Image

Hugo screens in 3D on Christmas Eve.

Eyes Wide Shut...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Kubrick, De Palma, Stallone, and others are highlighted in the great series “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam.”

The Raúl Ruiz series continues.

Metrograph

The Maggie Cheung retrospective continues with Assayas, Wong, and others.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg will show this Friday.

Paranorman screens on Saturday.

Museum of the Moving Image...

The selection for the 2016 Venice Film Festival has been announced, with new films by Terrence Malick, Pablo Larraín, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Amat Escalante, Tom Ford, and more.COMPETITIONVoyage of TimeThe Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour)Une vie i (Stéphane Brizé)La La Land (Damien Chazelle)The Light Between Oceans (Derek Cianfrance)El ciudadano ilustre (Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat)Spira Mirabilis (Massimo D'Anolfi, Martina Parenti)The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz)La región salvaje (Amat Escalante)Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford)Piuma (Roan Johnson)Paradise (Andrei Konchalovsky)Brimstone (Martin Koolhoven)Jackie (Pablo Larraín)Voyage of Time (Terrence Malick)El Cristo Ciego (Christopher Murray)Frantz (François Ozon)Questi Giorni (Giuseppe Piccioni)Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)Les beaux jours D'Aranjuez (Wim Wenders)Out Of COMPETITIONSafariOur War (Bruno Chiaravolloti, Claudio Jampaglia, Benedetta Argentieri)I Called Him Morgan (Kasper Collin)One More Time with Feeling (Andrew Dominik)The Bleeder (Philippe Falardeau)The Magnificent Seven (Antoine Fuqua...

Titles this year range from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London.

The selection of restored titles screening at this year’s Venice Film Festival (Aug 31 - Sept 10) have been revealed.

Italian director Roberto Andò (The Confessions) will oversee the strand’s jury of cinema history students which will award two prizes: Best Restored Film and Best Documentary On Cinema (the line-up of the latter will be revealed at a later date).

Now in its fifth year, this year’s selection includes Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and George A Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead amongst a host of other restorations.

The full Venice Film Festival line-up will be revealed on Thursday (July 28).

Venice Classics 2016 line-up:

1848, Dino Risi (Italy, 1948, 11’, B/W)

restored by: Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa-csc-Cineteca Nazionale and Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Jessica Chastain, Juliette Binoche, Freida Pinto, Catherine Hardwicke, Amma Asante, Marielle Heller, Ziyi Zhang, Haifaa Al Mansour, and more women have launched the company We Do It Together to produce films and TV that boost the empowerment of women, Variety reports.

Dustin Hoffman discusses his screen test for The Graduate, plus read Frank Rich‘s Criterion essay:

Though The Graduate upholds some of the classic tropes of Hollywood romantic comedy dating back to the 1930s—especially in its climactic deployment of a runaway bride—Benjamin’s paralyzing emotional disconnect from the world around him is what makes his story both fresh and particular to its own time.

The...

Love is most definitely not a many splendored thing in the bedazzled artifice of Rome’s swinging 60s, at least as far as the good time gal depicted in Antonio Pietrangeli’s obscure 1965 title I Knew Her Well is concerned. A director lost in the shadows of other 60s Italian auteurs, where names like Antonioni, Fellini, Petri, Pasolini, Risi, or Visconti dominate contemporary conversations of the cinematic period, Criterion enables the resuscitation of Pietrangeli, a director whose filmography, notable for his complex portraits of women (sort of like the Italian version of later period Mizoguchi), is deserving of wider renown.

Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) is a young, beautiful woman who thrusts herself into the burgeoning social scene of Rome after fleeing her rural roots. A series of random lovers finds her elevating her occupational merits through a variety of professions before she begins to land opportunities as a model and budding actress,...

This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

A testament to the importance of restoration, the new digital transfer of Ettore Scola’s 1977 title A Special Day is a beauty to behold. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, it went on to collect a number of accolades, winning a Golden Globe and a Cesar for Best Foreign Film, and scoring Marcello Mastroianni an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Scola is one of the great Italian auteurs who hasn’t received the same international renown as Fellini, Pasolini, Petri, and others, all considerable forces by the time Scola’s career was taking off in the early 1970s. He’s played in competition at Cannes eight times (winning Best Director in 1976 for Ugly, Dirty and Bad and Best Screenplay in 1980 for La Terrazza), and his most recent film, 2013’s How Strange to Be Named Federico was a playful homage to Scola’s friend, Fellini. In 2014, Criterion restored his 1962 title Il Sorpasso,...

Akahige, Amarcord, Aleksandr Nevskij among Venice Classics titles; Bertrand Tavernier selects four films.

Akahige, Amarcord, Aleksandr Nevskij and A Matter of Life and Death are among 21 titles announced today to screen in Venice’s (September 2-12) Classics section, which will reveal further titles later this month.

Director Bertrand Tavernier, who is to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award, has selected and will present four films for the Classics strand: Pattes Blances (White Paws) by Jean Grémillion, La Lupa (The Vixen) by Alberto Lattuada, Sonnenstrahl (Ray of Sunshine) by Pál Fejös and A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger.

The 21 restorations:

Akahige (Red Beard) by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1965, 185’, B&W), restoration by Tōhō Co., Ltd.

Aleksandr Nevskij (Alexander Nevsky) by Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn (Ussr, 1938, 108’, B&W), restoration by Mosfilm

Amarcord by Federico Fellini (Italy, 1973, 123’, Color) restoration by Cineteca di Bologna with the support of yoox.com and the...

Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano's Samba, stars Omar Sy, Tahar Rahim (Grand Central) and Charlotte Gainsbourg Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At The Paris Theatre, the greats of the past - Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra - and Italy's recent past - Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Mario Monicelli - blended with Ken Loach, Michel Gondry and Woody Allen as Samba co-director Olivier Nakache and Omar Sy spoke with me on the red carpet. Sy also starred in Nakache and Eric Toledano's The Intouchables. Omar Sy will soon be seen in John Wells' (of August: Osage County fame) Adam Jones with Bradley Cooper and Alicia Vikander and is filming Ron Howard's Inferno with Tom Hanks, Ben Foster and Felicity Jones.

Samba co-director Olivier Nakache: "We like to discover something about society, but with humor." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Omar's wife, Hélène Sy, was joined by guests Michael Avedon,...

The more ludicrous life gets, the more we need Italian comedy. When the world gets you down, the most surefire cure might be Anna Magnani — in a blond wig and a skintight evening dress dotted with flirty crystal fringe — traipsing from one end of Rome to the next, desperately in search of New Year's Eve fun. She's the shimmery, shimmying center of Mario Monicelli's 1960 farce The Passionate Thief, which has never been released in the United States on VHS or DVD. But che fortuna! It rolls into town, newly restored, for a one-week run on December 5, as part of Film Forum's two-week celebration of the Italian comedy maestro.

Monicelli, along with Dino Risi and Pietro Germi, was one of the foremost figures of the commedia all'italiana, ...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

Italian actor-director to receive Excellence Award.

Italian actor and director Giancarlo Giannini is to attend the 67th Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16) as one of the guests of honour of the Titanus retrospective and will receive an Excellence Award Moët & Chandon.

Giannini will receive the honour on the Piazza Grande on Aug 12. As per Locarno tradition, the next day the Festival audience will have the opportunity to attend an “In Conversation” session with the actor at the Spazio Cinema (Forum).

A series of screenings will accompany this tribute. In addition to Non stuzzicate la zanzara and Indian Summer, screened as part of the Titanus retrospective, there will also be a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981) in his honour.

Locarno 2014 line-up

An Excellence Award is also being presented to Juliette Binoche this year.

Previous recipients of the Excellence Award include Susan Sarandon, John Malkovich, Michel Piccoli, Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, [link...

Chicago – With the recent popularity of road trip movies in both mainstream films and the art house, it is a fitting pleasure that the Criterion Collection has released Dino Risi’s “Il Sorpasso,” a jazzy road trip movie that takes the story structure to its basics. Two opposing types meet unexpectedly, travel to random exotic locations, and interact with people who are rest stops in themselves.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The film has two great performances from leads Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and various bits of Italian culture from a different time. For those who find road movies to be repetitious (especially considering the movies that use the formula like a crutch), “Il Sorpasso” is enlightening to an intriguing type of wild fun that can be had when watching characters throw their fate and sense of direction into the wind. While the movie might seem like the foundation for many that follow,...

In the spirit of spring, Dino Rici’s tragicomedy Il Sorpasso from 1962 has been given a vibrant rebirth courtesy of Criterion. Rarely seen and largely forgotten in recent years, Il Sorpasso retains many structures of the classic road movie, seasoned with glimpses of the era’s growing sense of rebellious dissatisfaction. Over the years, it has proven to be an influential work; its descendant branches laced throughout any analysis of the classic film genre of wandering heroes. Artistically, Il Sorpasso may not rank among the best of the category, but its seductive amalgam of bildungsroman, social commentary and cautionary tale make for a compelling and infectious watch.

Il Sorpasso’s unlikely odyssey orbits around the burgeoning friendship between Bruno (Vittorio Gassman), a zesty 40 year old raconteur and Roberto (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a quiet, bookish law student half his age. Bruno dashes about the ancient streets of Rome in a battered Lancia...

Dino Risi’s 1962 Italian comedy “Il Sorpasso” is finally making its way to The Criterion Collection after years of being unavailable in a high-quality print. This is the late Dino Risi’s first entry into the Collection, much to the excitement of director Alexander Payne, who cites “Il Sorpasso” as being a major influence on “Sideways.” Payne talks about the movie’s influence and the brilliance of director Dino Risi in a three-minute video of which you can see below. The clip, presumably, is an excerpt of Alexander Payne’s introduction of the film, which you can find as a special feature on the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray. “I found ‘Il Sorpasso’ through a friend of mine, Bernard Friedman, even before ‘Sideways,’ ” says Payne, “He and I were looking for something to do together, he was producing at the time. And he said, ‘What about a remake of Il Sorpasso, The Easy Life?...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 29, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Vittorio Gassman hit the road in Il Sorpasso.

The ultimate Italian road comedy, the 1962 film Il sorpasso stars the unlikely pair of Vittorio Gassman (Big Deal on Madonna Street) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Le Combat dans l’ile, Amour) as, respectively, a waggish, free-wheeling bachelor and the bookish law student he takes on a madcap trip from Rome to rural Southern Italy.

An unpredictable journey that careens from slapstick to tragedy, Il sorpasso, directed by Dino Risi (the original Scent of a Woman), is a wildly entertaining commentary on the pleasures and consequences of the good life.

Considered by many to be a holy grail of commedia all’italiana, Il sorpasso remains a fresh and lively entertainment, and one that has long been adored in its native Italy.

Presented in Italian with English subtitles Criterion’s Blu-ray...

Scorsese doc in Berlin, Tokyo sets dates, Pan-Asia Film Festival stretches across UK, Locarno to honour Titanus studio, and Ilkley plans first edition.Scorsese & Tedeschi doc added to Berlin

Untitled New York Review Of Books Documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi is the newest addition to the Berlinale Special, where it will be shown as a work in progress, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and key contributors. More here.

Tokyo sets 2014 dates

The 27th Tokyo International Film Festival (Tiff) will be held from October 23-31. Tiffcom will run earlier than last year, from Oct 21-23.

The festival revealed that its 2013 edition drew 121,771 people, up 14%. Tiffcom 2013 hosted 316 exhibitors, up 15%, and 1,074 buyers, up 9%. More info here.

Locarno to celebrate Titanus

The 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16) is planning a retrospective on the Italian production studio Titanus.

The production company was founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904, and Locarno will celebrate the company...

Scorsese doc in Berlin, Tokyo sets dates, Pan-Asia Film Festival stretches across UK, Locarno to honour Titanus studio, and Ilkley plans first edition.Scorsese & Tedeschi doc added to Berlin

Untitled New York Review Of Books Documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi is the newest addition to the Berlinale Special, where it will be shown as a work in progress, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and key contributors. More here.

Tokyo sets 2014 dates

The 27th Tokyo International Film Festival (Tiff) will be held from October 23-31. Tiffcom will run earlier than last year, from Oct 21-23.

The festival revealed that its 2013 edition drew 121,771 people, up 14%. Tiffcom 2013 hosted 316 exhibitors, up 15%, and 1,074 buyers, up 9%. More info here.

Locarno to celebrate Titanus

The 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16) is planning a retrospective on the Italian production studio Titanus.

The production company was founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904, and Locarno will celebrate the company...

Tokyo sets dates, Pan-Asia Film Festival stretches across UK, Locarno to honour Titanus studio, and Ilkley plans first edition.Tokyo sets 2014 dates

The 27th Tokyo International Film Festival (Tiff) will be held from October 23-31. Tiffcom will run earlier than last year, from Oct 21-23.

The festival revealed that its 2013 edition drew 121,771 people, up 14%. Tiffcom 2013 hosted 316 exhibitors, up 15%, and 1,074 buyers, up 9%. More info here.

Locarno to celebrate Titanus

The 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16) is planning a retrospective on the Italian production studio Titanus.

The production company was founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904, and Locarno will celebrate the company’s history as well as its present day output.

The Festival audience will have the opportunity to see melodramas starring the screen couple Nazzari-Sanson, directed by Matarazzo, the Pane amore and Poveri ma belli series directed by Comencini and Risi.

It will also screen films that revealed auteurs such as Fellini, Visconti, Lattuada...

Criterion has announced the new titles coming in April 2014 and among them are two titles teased on their New Years 2014 illustration, those being Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (4/15) and Don Siegel's prison drama Riot in Cell Block 11 (4/22). Breaking the Waves has long been one of von Trier's more acclaimed films starring Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgaard, a wonderful faith-based drama you might not expect if you're only familiar with von Trier from films such as Antichrist, Melancholia and the upcoming Nymphomaniac. Personally I would love to see Dancer in the Dark get the Criterion treatment, but this should be a good one with a selection of features that includes a selected-scene audio commentary featuring von Trier, editor Anders Refn and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle, as well as new and old interviews, Watson's audition tape and more. As for Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11, I've...

Catherine Deneuve: 2013 European Film Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Catherine Deneuve has been named the recipient of the the European Film Academy’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award for her "outstanding body of work." And outstanding it is. Yesterday, I posted an article about Dirk Bogarde (Victim, Death in Venice, Despair), one of the rare performers anywhere on the planet to have consistently worked with world-class international filmmakers. The Paris-born Catherine Deneuve, who turns 70 next October 22, is another one of those lucky actors. (Photo: Catherine Deneuve at the Potiche premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.) Deneuve’s directors have included an eclectic and prestigious list of filmmakers from various countries. Those include Belle de Jour and Tristana‘s Luis Buñuel; Le Sauvage and La Vie de Château‘s Jean-Paul Rappenau; The Hunger‘s Tony Scott; Un Flic‘s Jean-Pierre Melville; The Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro‘s François Truffaut...

Veteran actress Catherine Spaak - star of Italian classics like Dino Risi's The Easy Life and Dario Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails - will star in a new gore movie, The Thousand And One Deaths (Le Mille e Una Morte) directed by Elisabetta Marchetti. The story is about a  horror film-maker who decides to explore the world of snuff movies, with real torture and death. Spaak will play the mother of the protagonist while the legendary Sergio Stivaletti - who worked with all the major genre directors of Italy, from Lamberto Bava to Michele Soavi, Dario Argento and Sergio Martino - will take care of the bloody special effects....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...