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Paolo Sorrentino, who won Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards for the Fellini-esque “The Great Beauty,” returns for another visual feast of beautiful people and places on display. Below, check out a clip of Sorrentino’s new film “Loro” — which is now finally in U.S. theaters after a release in Italy more than a year ago — exclusive to IndieWire.

“Loro” offers a colorful history of Silvio Berlusconi (played by the wonderfully expressive Toni Servillo), the Italian media tycoon and politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy and was driven by all manner of appetites. The populist leader began running for office in 1994, and spent nearly two decades at the epicenter of Italian politics. He famously remained involved in his business holdings despite conflicts of interest, and was brought down on charges of bribery, child prostitution, and tax fraud.

The film looks at Berlusconi through the eyes of Sergio Morra,...

The Italian director puts his name to a remake of French comedy The Players, this time starring Valerio Mastandrea and Riccardo Scamarcio, who is also producing the movie. Filming has wrapped on Gli infedeli, the new film by Stefano Mordini and a remake of the homonymous French film (The Players), which took the box office by storm in 2014, earning itself a grand total of 2.3 million euros. Starring Valerio Mastandrea, Riccardo Scamarcio, Laura Chiatti, Valentina Cervi, Marina Foïs, Massimiliano Gallo and Euridice Axen, Gli Infedeli is an episodic film in the tradition of the Italian-style comedies popularised between the 1950s and the 80s. Through five short stories, we are told of the amorous misadventures of five men, each of them grappling with wives, girlfriends and lovers. It’s an irreverent and amusing though somewhat bitter look at love. Based upon an idea put forward by the actor-director Jean Dujardin, the...

"Sell them your dream of the future." IFC Films has unveiled an official trailer for the latest spectacle from Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, an epic political satire titled Loro. The film profiles the life of Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, played by Toni Servillo, an "egomaniac billionaire Prime Minister who presides over an empire of scandal and corruption." Sounds scary, but it's described as a "ferocious feast of satire" with plenty of Sorrentino's spunk and extravagance. "Exploding with eye-popping, extravagantly surreal set-pieces, the dazzling, daring new film from Academy Award-winning director Paolo Sorrentino is both a wickedly subversive satire and a furious elegy for a country crumbling while its leaders enrich themselves." Also starring Riccardo Scamarcio as the young hustler trying to move closer to Berlusconi, plus Elena Sofia Ricci, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Roberto De Francesco, Dario Cantarelli, and Anna Bonaiuto. Worth a look. Here's the official Us...

Watching “Loro 2” is a peculiar experience, because it never shakes the sense of being hurriedly edited from a much longer and better film. In some ways that’s what this is: the second part of Paolo Sorrentino’s initial Italian-release version of his highly anticipated semi-fantasy biopic of Silvio Berlusconi. Yet even if the two parts were viewed close together – they were released on the peninsula one week apart – the lack of buildup for a masterful early scene in “2” proves just how ill-considered it was to divide the movie in this way. In addition, it seems clear that a great number of scenes have been so severely cut down that they barely register. Taken as a whole, the film is a classic Sorrentino-esque tapestry about hubris woven on a grand scale, but when it’s divided and edited in this manner one is constantly aware that the effect was meant to be much greater.

After Paolo Sorrentino’s virtuoso evisceration of Italian politician Giulio Andreotti in “Il Divo,” expectations were sky high that the distinctive director would bring a similar caustic bravura to his treatment of Silvio Berlusconi. Yet “Loro 1,” the first of a two-part kaleidoscopic consideration of the four-time prime minister and the Italy he fostered, is not so much an invigorating acid bath as a subtly written, stylistically more classical look at one of the most divisive European leaders in recent memory. It aims to peer not just into Berlusconi’s monomaniacal soul, but to expose, as with “The Great Beauty,” the apotheosis of vulgarity and craving for attention that’s been the canny politician and media magnate’s lasting imprint on Italian society.

Whether it’s successful depends very much on “Loro 2,” to be released in Italy on May 10, roughly two weeks after this installment. Rumor has it the...

Stars: Alessandro Roja, Euridice Axen, Claudio Camilli, Benedetta Cimatti, Bianca Friscelli | Written by Cristiano Ciccotti, Daniele Misischia | Directed by Daniele Misischia

Claudio Verona is a young and cynical businessman. One day he gets locked in his Roman office elevator before an important meeting with a client. Soon this annoying obstacle will turn into a nightmare. For outside that metal cage a deadly virus has begun to infect and transform people into extremely violent and dangerous zombies!

Much like their directorial effort, The Arrival of Wang, the Manetti Bros. latest production, helmed by one of their longtime collaborators Daniele Misischia, manages to find the humanity, the human story, within a much larger plot. Both films focus on smaller parts of a much bigger story, really showing the impact it’s having on one person, not an indiscriminate number of random “heroes’ a la a number of big-budget apocalypse movies – for that...

Not By A Long Shot! On tap right now we have the first images and a poster from the latest zombie opus to light up the screen at FrightFest entitled The End? Director: Daniele Misischia. With: Alessandro Roja, Euridice Axen,… Continue Reading →

The post The End of our FrightFest 2017 Coverage? appeared first on Dread Central.

Hailing out of Italy is Daniele Misischia’s The End?, which will screen at the forthcoming FrightFest in London this August. Bloody Disgusting has some brand new images from the zombie film starring Alessandro Roja, Euridice Axen, Claudio Camilli, Benedetta Cimatti, and Bianca Friscelli. In The End?“, “Claudio Verona is a young and cynical businessman. One […]...