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“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,...

Screenwriter Norma Barzman, who got her start during the Golden Age of Hollywood and was blacklisted with her husband during the McCarthy era, died Sunday in Beverly Hills, her son Paolo confirmed. She was 103.

Barzman and her husband, fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman, moved to Europe as did many other Hollywood progressives who came under McCarthy’s scrutiny. The couple and their seven children lived in London, Paris and Mougins, France between 1949 and 1976. Ben Barzman died in 1989.

Norma Barzman was also active in getting credits restored for blacklisted writers whose films were released with a “front” name, such as her film “The Locket.” In 1999, her writing credit was restored on the 1953 film “Luxury Girls,” which had carried the name of the front Ennio Flaiano.

Barzman spoke out in protest when Elia Kazan, who was a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was given an honorary Oscar in 1998, and was...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com audio Blu-ray DVD review of “La Dolce Vita,” the Federico Fellini film masterpiece that introduced the 1960s to itself, and the term “Paparazzi” to the language, now available through Paramount Pictures wherever Blu-rays are sold.

Rating: 5.0/5.0

This is the story of Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a tabloid journalist who lives the “La Dolce Vita” … the luxurious but self indulgent life. The story is split into seven days in his timeline, not consecutive days, in which he wrestles the themes of his existence – religion, sex, family and death – the usual things. Along the way his fiancee Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) is angry at him; he’s also trying to seduce a gorgeous starlet (Anita Ekberg), who is ignoring him; a religious miracle turns out not to be a miracle; and his estranged Dad (Annibale Ninchi) wants to hang out with him. His times, they are a-changin’.

La Dolce Vita...

Fellini’s 8½ Screenings In Los Angeles with Barbara Steele In Person at Royal Screening

By Todd Garbarini

Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8½ (Otto e Mezzo) will be shown in special 55th anniversary screenings at three of Laemmle's theatres in Los Angeles. Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, and Barbara Steele, the film, lauded by Roger Ebert as the greatest film ever made about filmmaking and the winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar for that year, runs 138 minutes and is being showcased on the big screen in a rare opportunity.

The film will be shown at the following locations:

Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025

Phone: (310) 478-0401

Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Please Note: Actor and film historian Douglas Dunning, longtime friend of actress Barbara Steele, announces that Barbara Steele is scheduled to appear in person for a Q & A prior to the screening at the Royal theatre.

Now for something truly remarkable from the neglected Spanish cinema. Luis García Berlanga's wicked satire is a humanistic black comedy, free of cynicism. The borderline Kafkaesque situation of an everyman forced into a profession that horrifies him is funny and warm hearted - but with a ruthless logic that points to universal issues beyond Franco Fascism. The Executioner Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 840 1963 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / El Verdugo / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 25, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Nino Manfredi, Emma Penella, José Isbert . Cinematography Tonino Delli Colli Film Editor Afonso Santacana Original Music Miguel Asins Arbó Written by Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, Ennio Flaiano Produced by Nazario Belmar Directed by Luis García Berlanga

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Criterion brings us 1963's The Executioner (El Verdugo), a major discovery for film fans that thought Spanish cinema began and ended with Luis Buñuel. I've seen politically-charged Spanish films from...

We here at The CriterionCast wear our admiration for The Criterion Collection squarely on our sleeves. Not only is it in the very title of this website and the podcast from which it spawned, but it is in the very DNA of what we strive to do through both ventures. At their very best, The Criterion Collection doesn’t so much bring to light gloriously dense home video releases of beloved, crystal clear classics from the history of film, but instead highlights lesser known masterpieces from throughout the world and spanning the entirety of film’s history as an artform. Be it esoteric experimental works like that of director Jean Painleve to baroque world cinema classics like La Cienaga, Criterion’s greatest achievement is giving the world a new glimpse at world history through the lens of those directors commenting on it through their films.

And few films quite hit...

La Dolce Vita

Directed by Federico Fellini

Written by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi

Italy, 1960

Right from the start of Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita, we know we’re in for something different, something exciting, something audacious. Fellini’s choice of initial imagery announces immediately that this is a film about the contradictions of modern life. First, we get a helicopter carrying a large statue of Christ over Rome. It’s a powerful image with extensive connotations. This holy figure stands as the traditional and the sacred, and is slightly vulgarized in its absurdity here. But it moves on, and what follows further illustrates that things have changed: out with Christ, in with Marcello (Rubini in the film, Mastroianni in real life). He and his “photo reporters,” now known because of this film as paparazzi, take time away from their coverage of the transport to...

I've made no secret when it comes to my love for the work of Federico Fellini's films, especially his classic La Dolce Vita, which was the first entry in my Best Movies section earlier this year. For the longest time I've owned the Koch Lorber, 2-Disc DVD edition of La Dolce Vita, continuously awaiting the day Criterion would be given the chance to add it to their esteemed collection with a transfer the film most definitely deserved. I speculated as to whether it would finally happen once Paramount had been granted exclusive rights last June and lo and behold, it is finally here and the result is exactly what fans of this film have been waiting for with visuals and sound so rich it will be almost as if you are seeing it for the first time. When it comes to the film itself, I'll point you to my...

The top 20. The scripts by which all others are defined and to which all others are compared. Brilliant scripts can be wordy. Brilliant scripts can be confusing. Brilliant scripts can be sweeping or intimate. This section runs the gamut, ranging from first time writers to established writing vets. It only gets better from here.

courtesy of wikipedia.org

20. Easy Rider (1969)

Written by Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Terry Southern

They’ll talk to ya and talk to ya and talk to ya about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.

This portion’s “anybody can write a film” segment comes from 1969, with a landmark film that truly doesn’t have much weight. A road movie if there ever was one, Easy Rider follows Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) as they ride their motorcycles across the country to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

Now it’s gettin’ good, right? This section of the list begins to get into the portion where “you’ve heard it before.” A number of the films below have been universally acclaimed for one reason or another, but the focus here is on the writing. Some are innovative, some are unexpected, and some completed changed the way films were written, creating a new style or sub-genre. After all, isn’t that what makes for good writing?

30. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Written by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary

I don’t wanna kill anybody. But if I gotta get out that door, and you’re standing in my way, one way or the other, you’re gettin’ outta my way.

Before he was one of the more recognizable directors in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino was a screenwriter just trying to make enough money to get the films he wanted to make off the ground.

Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games book series has often been compared with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, primarily because both center on a young female protagonist and have become phenomenons for their shared young-adult demo. This is arguably an insult to the novel and the big-screen adaptations, since The Hunger Games is leagues above Twilight in artistic credibility. The sense of familiarity of The Hunger Games goes much further back, recalling everything from William Golding to Phillip K. Dick to even Stephen King. Here are 12 films that come highly recommended, and should be essential viewing for any fan of the Hunger Games franchise.

****

1. Battle Royale

Written and directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Japan, 2000

The concept of The Hunger Games owes much to Koushun Takami’s cult novel Battle Royale, adapted for the cinema in 2000 by Kinji Fukasaku. The film is set in a dystopian alternate-universe, in Japan, with the nation utterly collapsed,...

Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria is getting a contemporary re-imagining, one that will star Juliette Lewis and be titled The Days of Mary. The original movie, written by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, followed a prostitute looking for love in Rome but finding only heartache. It won the 1958 Oscar for best foreign-language film. The movie was remade in 1969 as a Bob Fosse musical starring Shirley MacLaine titled Sweet Charity. The new movie, being directed by Brad Michael Gilbert (The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond), moves the action to Reno, Nev. Gilbert also wrote the

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51 years ago today, on April 19th 1961, Federico Fellini's masterpiece "La Dolce Vita" arrived in U.S. theaters. The film was already a phenomenon; it had premiered in Italy the previous February, was instantly condemned by the Catholic Church (it was banned entirely in Spain until 1975), and won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960. On its U.S. release, it was widely acclaimed by critics, became a huge box office hit, and picked up four Oscar nominations the following year, including director and screenplay, and won for costume design.

To mark the anniversary of the much copied, but never equalled film which follows a journalist, played by Marcello Mastroianni over the course of a tumultous week in Rome, we've assembled a selection of five pieces of info that even the biggest Fellini fans might not be aware of. Check them out below.

1. Paul Newman and Henry Fonda were considered for roles.

6- The 10th Victim (La Decima vittima) (The Tenth Victim)

Directed by Elio Petri

Written by Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvioni, Ennio Flaiano and Elio Petri

Italy,1965

The 10th Victim was the first film to offer up the concept of a TV show wherein people hunt and kill one another for sport and to expand the idea into a satire on gameshows. Set in the 21st Century, the government and the private sector have joined forces to create a solution to crime by giving it a profitable outlet titled “The Big Hunt,” a popular worldwide game show in which contestants are chosen at random to chase one another around the world in a kill or be killed scenario. The winner of the first round moves on to the next. After ten wins, a player is retired from the game and gets a cash prize of one million dollars, but very few make it that far.

Oh, lord. In a story about Precious director Lee Daniels moving to CAA, I expected to find some indication of whether his next film would indeed be The Butler for Sony, or if he might actually make Selma, the film he worked to get off the ground for much of this year. It's still looking like The Butler will be his next. But there's another tidbit in there, too: the director is attached to remake Frederico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. What? Deadline [1] doesn't offer much more than a single note about the attachment, so we don't know if he might write a new version of the screenplay or if someone else is on board. (The original film had Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli as writers, but Pier Paolo Pasolini also worked on the script. And Nino Rota did the score. Beat that lineup.) The 1957 film starred Fellini's...

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...

The second and fantastic trailer for Rob Marshall’s new musical “Nine,” which features Kate Hudson performing “Cinema Italiano,” has been released. Check it out below and enjoy.

Nine | Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard

“Nine” tells the story of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis), a world famous film director as he confronts an epic mid-life crisis with both creative and personal problems. He must balance the many women of his life, including his wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), his sexy mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz), his film star muse Claudia Jenssen (Nicole Kidman), his confidant and costume designer Lilli (Judi Dench), an American fashion journalist Stephanie (Kate Hudson), the girl from his youth Saraghina (Stacy Ferguson – Fergie) and his mother (Sophia Loren).

Marshall’s musical is based on the “8 1/2″ movie written by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano. The screenplay for “Nine” was written by late Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin.

More great photos from the upcoming Rob Marshall’s musical “Nine” have been released.

“Nine” following a film director named Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is in his middle age. He is trying to complete his next film. His main problem is that he has too many women in his life – Luisa (Marion Cotillard) his wife, Carla (Penelope Cruz) his sexy mistress, and Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his muse and protege.

Nine | Daniel Day-Lewis and Penelope Cruz

Marshall’s move is based on the Broadway musical of the same name written by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano. The screenplay for the movie was written by late Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin. So, the Broadway musical and the movie are adaptation of the book by Arthur L. Kopit.

Nine | Nicole Kidman

Nine | Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman

The original 1982 Broadway production of “Nine,” nominated for twelve Tony Awards and winning five, including Best Musical,...

Earlier we posted some Hi-Res images from the upcoming Rob Marshall’s new musical “Nine″ and today we have a international poster.

Marshall’s movie is based on the Broadway musical of the same name written by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano. Adapted from the 1982 Tony-winning Broadway musical, “Nine” is set to be helmed by “Chicago” director Rob Marshall. The film actually was set to be tackled by the late writer/director Anthony Minghella and previously scheduled to begin filming in March 2008.

“Nine” is a musical following a film director named Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis instead Javier Bardem), who is in his middle age. He is trying to complete his next film. His main problem is that he has too many women in his life. Luisa (Marion Cotillard), his wife, Carla (Penelope Cruz) his sexy mistress, and Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his muse and protege.

The film, also stars Judi Dench, Sophia Loren,...

9 and Nine, two different movies but both look I’m very much looking forward to seeing. This post is about ‘Nine’, a movie based on the Broadway musical of the same name written by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano. This movie has a cast which gives it very high expectations. The calibre of the movie is so high that it’s cast has a total of 17 Oscar nominations between them with a whopping seven.

The cast includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren. I’ve previously posted the trailer and images for the movie which hits UK cinemas 25th November.It’s directed by Rob Marshall who has previously brought us Chicago and is going to direct Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth in the ‘Pirates’ franchise. I’ve embedded the images below, some of which we’ve...

We posted amazing trailer for Rob Marshall’s new musical “Nine” and some great photos but we have more fantastic Hi-Res images from the movie today.

As always, click on any of the photos to enlarge

Nine | Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard

“Nine” is based on the Broadway musical of the same name written by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano. The screenplay for the movie was written by late Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin. So, the Broadway musical and the movie are adaptation of the book by Arthur L. Kopit.

The movie following a film director named Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is in his middle age. He is trying to complete his next film. His main problem is that he has too many women in his life – Luisa (Marion Cotillard) his wife, Carla (Penelope Cruz) his sexy mistress, and Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his muse and protege.

Nine...

We saw beautiful trailer for Rob Marshall’s new musical “Nine” and some great Hi-Res photos from the movie.

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Day-Lewis In “Nine”

Take a look at this absolutely fantastic as well as great cast – behind the scenes clip.

The movie following a film director named Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is in his middle age. He is trying to complete his next film. His main problem is that he has too many women in his life – Luisa (Marion Cotillard) his wife, Carla (Penelope Cruz) his sexy mistress, and Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his muse and protege.

“Nine” is based on the Broadway musical of the same name written by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano. The screenplay for the movie was written by late Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin. So, the Broadway musical and the movie are adaptation of the book by Arthur L. Kopit.

The movie which also stars Judi Dench,...