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Franz Rogowski plays a Nazi ringmaster in a deluded blend of magical realism, gratuitous violence and sentimentality

What better way to start the new year with what will surely be remembered as one of its worst films. This mashup of magical realism, gratuitous violence and sentimentality is an atrocity in filmic form. It’s only a bit offensive for its appropriation of the Holocaust as a dramatic engine. What really stirs revulsion is the film’s smug delusions of quality, a self-belief so strong that it has the gall to take two hours and 21 minutes to unfurl itself to the end. Everyone who whined about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon being too long should be strapped to a chair, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and forced to watch this in order to understand the difference between a film that’s long because it has a...

Exclusive: Vmi Releasing has picked up North American rights to the fantastical WWII drama Freaks vs. the Reich (formerly Freaks Out), which won eight awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, including the Grafetta d’Oro for Best Film, and went on to land six David di Donatello Awards from the Academy of Italian Cinema the following year. The second feature from director Gabriele Mainetti (They Call Me Jeeg) will bow in theaters and on digital on April 28th.

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The film set in 1943 Rome opens on an artisanal circus owned by elderly magician,...

Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out, co-written with Nicola Guaglianone, starring Franz Rogowski, Aurora Giovinazzo, Pietro Castellitto, Giancarlo Martini, Claudio Santamaria, and Giorgio Tirabassi opens Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s 21st edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema

Giuseppe Bonito’s A Girl Returned; Paolo Taviani’s Leonora Addio (The Demise Of Luigi Pirandello); Laura Bispuri’s The Peacock’s Paradise (Il Paradiso Del Pavone) starring Dominique Sanda, Alba Rohrwacher, Carlo Cerciello, and Maya Sansa; Chiara Bellosi’s Swing Ride (Calcinculo) with Gaia Di Pietro and Andrea Carpenzano; Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors with Margherita Buy, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Riccardo Scamarcio, Paolo Graziosi, and Rohrwacher, and Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out, co-written with Nicola Guaglianone, starring Franz Rogowski, Aurora Giovinazzo, Pietro Castellitto, Giancarlo Martini, Claudio Santamaria, and Giorgio Tirabassi are six highlights of Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s 21st edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

No one can accuse Freaks Out of lacking shock value. This historical fantasy drama directed by Gabriele Mainetti indulges in every conceivable twist and corny antic to tell the story of four circus performers in Nazi-occupied Rome. Unfortunately, they don’t pay off, and instead end up turning this lengthy flick into a mostly gimmicky slog.

The film opens in 1943 and Matilde, Cencio, Fulvio and Mario, four circus performers, are putting on a routine show. First up is Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), a lanky platinum-blond boy who can control insects (except bees because they annoy him); then comes Mario (Giancarlo Martini), a ...

No one can accuse Freaks Out of lacking shock value. This historical fantasy drama directed by Gabriele Mainetti indulges in every conceivable twist and corny antic to tell the story of four circus performers in Nazi-occupied Rome. Unfortunately, they don’t pay off, and instead end up turning this lengthy flick into a mostly gimmicky slog.

The film opens in 1943 and Matilde, Cencio, Fulvio and Mario, four circus performers, are putting on a routine show. First up is Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), a lanky platinum-blond boy who can control insects (except bees because they annoy him); then comes Mario (Giancarlo Martini), a ...

In the pantheon of notoriously unavailable films, Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried” occupies a special plinth: Its outline — a circus clown is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp where he cheers up Jewish children before being forced to lead them to their doom — makes it one of the few movies to have been suppressed purely on the grounds of “yikes.” It is perhaps unfair to compare it with “Freaks Out,” the second film from Italian director Gabriele Mainetti (“They Call Me Jeeg”), though given that Mainetti’s film also involves circus performers, Nazis and a train full of Jewish people being transported to the camps, quite which film the comparison is unfair to is up for debate. After all, Lewis’ boondoggle didn’t have in it a psychotic, ether-addicted, six-fingered, “Sieg Heil!”-ing pianist who can see into the future, and a whole host of references to, of all things,...