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U.K.-based ITV Studios recently bought a majority stake in top Italian production shingle Cattleya, which made “Gomorrah” for Sky and “Suburra” for Netflix. The deal marked the biggest foreign acquisition in the Italian media sphere in recent memory. Cattleya founding partner Riccardo Tozzi spoke exclusively to Variety about the vision behind the company’s increasingly international scope, what he thinks is driving the success of Italian TV dramas in the global marketplace and the next necessary steps.

What prompted the Cattleya sale to ITV Studios and what’s its significance — not just for Cattleya but perhaps for the Italian TV industry at large?

ITV Studios is the largest aggregator of production companies in Europe. Being part of it brings us into the core of the international TV production system. It’s a recognition of the quality of the products we make, but also, indirectly, of the high level achieved by Italian scripted production.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSNicolas Winding Refn, the provocateur known for sleekly mixing art-house and genre cinema in such films as Drive and The Neon Demon, has announced a new initiative: A new online cinema showcasing "restored films and other content with the aim of inspiring a new generation of cinephiles." Mubi is partnering with the Danish director to premiere these newly restored movies on our platform before they are available on byNWR.com, which officially launches in February, 2018.Recommended VIEWINGThe first trailer for a project we're very excited for, Spike Lee's expansive remake of his sophomore feature She's Gotta Have It (1986).Critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin also have a new video essay on the nuances in gesture and expression in the cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder for Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. For Filmkrant,...

Above: French grande for Volcano (William Dierterle, Italy, 1950). A few weeks ago, I featured the posters of Anna Karina; now it’s the turn of that other legendary Anna... La Magnani or “La Lupa”, the she-wolf, as she was known. Magnani is currently being fêted at Lincoln Center in an all-celluloid retrospective showing 24 of her films that runs through June 1 before traveling to Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Columbus.Magnani became a star with her powerhouse performance in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1945, and the indelible image of her chasing down the Nazi soldiers who have taken her resistance-hero husband, is one that seems to have informed her persona throughout her career. No sex-kitten, Magnani was the personification of the great actress, and in her posters she is almost always emoting. She is rarely shown smiling (look at her scowling at Ingrid Bergman—in real life she had good...

Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable...

Starting today, the 29th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, one of the world's major festivals of film restoration, is off and running through July 4. A slew of programs will be presenting masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave, jazz classics, restored work by Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Leo McCarey and Renato Castellani, films Ingrid Bergman made before going to Hollywood, producer Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940), an homage to the festival's late director, Peter von Bagh—and much more. » - David Hudson...

Starting today, the 29th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, one of the world's major festivals of film restoration, is off and running through July 4. A slew of programs will be presenting masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave, jazz classics, restored work by Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Leo McCarey and Renato Castellani, films Ingrid Bergman made before going to Hollywood, producer Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940), an homage to the festival's late director, Peter von Bagh—and much more. » - David Hudson...

Above: Us 2014 re-release poster for Othello (Orson Welles, Morocco/Italy, 1952) designed by Dark Star, Paris.

Orson Welles' glorious, noirish, idiosyncratic, benighted Othello opens in New York and Chicago today in a new restoration. And Wednesday, not coincidentally, saw the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Shakespeare has been adapted for film since the silent dawn of cinema, so it seems only right and fitting that I should mark this occasion with the best posters for Shakespeare on film through the ages, presented here in chronological order.

Above: German poster for Hamlet (Svend Gade & Heinz Schall, Germany, 1921).

Above: Us one sheet for The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Taylor, USA, 1929).

Above: Us lobby card for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Dieterle & Max Reinhardt, USA, 1935).

Above: 1956 Polish poster for Henry V (Laurence Olivier, UK, 1944) by Jozef Mroszczak.

Above: Australian poster for Henry V (Laurence Olivier, UK, 1944).

Above: French poster for Hamlet (Laurence Olivier,...

‘Ryan’s Daughter’ actor Christopher Jones dead at 72: Quit acting following nervous breakdown after Sharon Tate murder, in later years turned down Quentin Tarantino movie offer Christopher Jones, who had a key role in David Lean’s 1970 romantic epic Ryan’s Daughter, died of complications from gallbladder cancer last Friday, January 31, 2014, at Los Alamitos Medical Center, approximately 35 km southwest of downtown Los Angeles. Christopher Jones (born William Franklin Jones on August 18, 1941, in Jackson, Tennessee) was 72. After growing up in a children’s home, joining the army at 16 and then going Awol, being handpicked by Tennessee Williams for a small role in the playwright’s The Night of the Iguana in 1961, and starring in the television series The Legend of Jesse James (1965-1966), Christopher Jones began getting film roles. His first was the title role in Allen H. Miner’s 1967 clash-of-generations drama Chubasco, in which Jones plays a misunderstood youth...

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Venice International Film Festival (1932-2012), the 2012 edition will feature a retrospective of ten films presented during past Venice Films Festivals.

The films were selected on the basis of rarity, using the copies from the Collections of the Historic Archives of the Contemporary Arts of the Biennale (Asac).

As has often been pointed out by historians and researchers, the films from the Venice Film Festival preserved over the years in the Asac represent a valuable and extremely important legacy of documents. In many cases, they are the only copies of films that were considered lost, or of versions that differ from the copies successively released in theatres.

The retrospective project consists of a limited number of films not otherwise available in 35mm or DVD copies, and that have never been restored. The Biennale will keep one 35mm or Dcp/HD-cam copy of all the restored films,...

Romeo and Juliet: Hailee Steinfeld, Douglas Booth Starring Lol‘s Douglas Booth and True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld, a new version of Romeo and Juliet is currently being shopped around at the Cannes Film Festival. Partly financed by Austrian design house Swarovski, this latest adaptation of Shakespeare’s love story was written by Academy Award winner Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and directed by Carlo Carlei. A Best New Director David di Donatello nominee for The Flight of the Innocent (1993), Carlei’s previous English-language foray, the Matthew Modine vehicle Fluke, was a major box-office flop in 1995. In recent years, Carlei has worked on Italian television; his most recent TV movie was a remake of Roberto Rossellini’s Il General della Rovere (2011), starring Pierfrancesco Favino in the old Vittorio De Sica role. According to the Los Angeles Times blog 24 Frames, producer Ileen Maisel wants “every teenager in the world to come see” Romeo and Juliet.

William Shakespeare’s iconic tale “Romeo and Juliet” has probably been brought to screen more than any other story. There is George Cukor’s 1936 production that won four Academy Awards, Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation which earned two Academy Awards, Renato Castellani’s 1954 version and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “Romeo+Juliet” (starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio) with its MTV Generation-targeting soundtrack. Of course, let's not forget the Hailee Steinfeld vehicle that will begin filming this summer. The premise of the story has also been successfully and widely adapted for other television and film productions such as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 film “West…...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 Jesse Eisenberg & Kristen Stewart star in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (2009) Billie Bob Thornton is naughty in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa: Unrated Director’s Cut (2003) French cult classic Betty Blue: Original Theatrical Release (1986) Val Kilmer stars in Blood Out (2011) John Travolta stars in Brian de Palma’s Blow Out: Criterion Collection (1981) D.A Pennebaker’s documentary Bob Dylan: Don’T Look Back (2010) Matt Damon & Heath Ledger star in terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (2005) Ben Affleck stars in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997) Korean horror director Shin Jung-Won’s Chawz (2011) Renee Zellweger & Catherine Zeta-Jones star in Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002) Kevin Smith’s Clerks: 15th Anniversary Edition (1994) Sylvester Stallone & Viggo Mortenson star in Daylight (1996) Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13: Blu-Ray/DVD Combo pack (1963) Jeffrey Obrow’s The Dorm That Dripped Blood:...

Italian screenwriter who worked with directors such as Visconti and Zeffirelli

The Italian screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico, who has died aged 96, collaborated on the scripts of more than 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), Mario Monicelli's I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) and Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962). She also worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) and Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but she was best known for her creative contribution to the films of Luchino Visconti, including Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963).

She was born Giovanna Cecchi in Rome to a Tuscan painter, Leonetta Pieraccini, and the literary critic Emilio Cecchi, a major figure in 20th-century Italian letters. For a few years in the early 1930s, before the Cinecittà studios were built in Rome, her father had been entrusted by Mussolini's government with...