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Italian auteur Mario Martone, who was recently in Cannes with “Nostalgia,” is set to direct a high-profile doc about the late Massimo Troisi, one of Italy’s most beloved comic actors who starred in the Oscar-winning film “Il Postino.”

Troisi, who played the simple postman who rides his bicycle on the sandy terrain of an Italian island to deliver mail to his sole client, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, died tragically of congenital heart failure at age 41 in June 1994, the day after “Il Postino” finished shooting at Rome’s Cinecittà studios.

The film directed by Michael Radford, which also starred Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Philippe Noiret, became an arthouse sensation one year later when it opened in the U.S. distributed by Miramax.

“Il Postino” went on to win an Oscar in 1996 for best dramatic score, having earned five nominations, including for best film, as well as best director for Radford,...

Hometowns forget us quickly when we leave them, even if some of the people left behind do not. Architecture, infrastructure and whole communities can change with scant warning or regard for our memories, or our bearings when we return. When you go home again — and you can, contrary to the popular adage — even what you remember has to be reintroduced to you; sidewalks once accustomed to your footprints have to be broken in again, like a new pair of shoes. For Felice, an unmoored Italian expat visiting Naples after a four-decade absence, it’s not what he recognizes of his home city that brings him comfort, but the new, younger life surging past the ghosts that kept him away so long. “Nostalgia” is thus a barbed title for Mario Martone’s gruffly lyrical urban portrait: Sometimes you need to go back, the film says, but it’s best to keep looking forward as you do.

“I’ve never liked artists who have more fun offstage than onstage,” says Italian comic star Eduardo Scarpetta (played by Toni Servillo) in “The King of Laughter.” If that was indeed Scarpetta’s belief, he would have thoroughly approved of Mario Martone’s big, brash, garishly frosted celebration cake of a biopic, in which everyone involved seems to be having the very best of times, tumbling onto screen with the breathless energy of a community theater crew given a very generous spotlight. How much fun viewers will be having with them is open to question. Those au fait with the particular chapter of Italian theater history outlined in Martone’s film might join in the eager applause from the local press contingent at Venice. Others may be more bemused by its unrelenting, dialed-to-11 spirit of cinematic carousing.

“The King of Laughter” is Martone’s third film in four years to premiere in competition at Venice,...

Italian filmmaker Mario Martone is set for a Venice return later this month with some familiar material: a new feature film based on the classic play “The Mayor of Rione Sanità” by Eduardo De Filippo, the kind of story that combines Martone’s love of complex Neapolitan crime stories with the age-old battle between good and evil. Martone is a frequent player at Venice, and has previously screened films like “Noi credevamo,” “Leopardi,” and “Capri-Revolution” at the annual festival.

The competition entry is inspired by the De Filippo play of the same name, though the playwright’s work is best known to movie lovers for another adaptation it inspired: Vittorio De Sica’s 1964 Sophia Loren-starring “Marriage Italian Style,” which was based on the play “Filumena Marturano.” The material is a natural fit for Martone, who has often crafted films about the people of his native Naples forced to deal with issues regarding crime,...

Annapurna Pictures’ Dick Cheney biopic “Vice,” starring Christian Bale as the former American vice president, will launch in Europe as the opener of Italy’s Capri, Hollywood Film Festival.

The hotly anticipated “Vice” chronicles Cheney’s political life, starting with his beginnings as a Washington bureaucrat. Directed by Adam McKay (“The Big Short), the film will screen on the Italian island of Capri on Dec. 27 after opening on Christmas Day in the U.S.

Bale reportedly had to shave his head, bleach his eyebrows and put on 40 pounds for the role ,which explores Cheney’s service in the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and as the CEO of energy management company Halliburton.

Amy Adams co-stars as Lynne Cheney, and the rest of the star-studded cast includes Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush. The producers are Megan Ellison,...

A sensual, sexual and intellectual awakening proves mostly asleepening in “Capri-Revolution,” a nobly intended period saga from high-minded Italian filmmaker and playwright Mario Martone that rather buckles under the weight of its exhaustively footnoted ideas. Set in the anxious months preceding World War I, and mapping out a battle of wits and wills between two contrastingly educated men for the soul of a humble lady goatherd on the sun-blasted slopes of Capri, Martone’s film plants a flag for liberal philosophical progress and cultural blending in the face of insular, buttoned-up conservatism. Which is all well and good, but can’t patch over the tired misogynistic undertones of a premise that effectively hinges on gaseous male egos oppressively mansplaining a young woman into liberation. Though it implores audiences to look outward, this attractively appointed Franco-Italian production is unlikely to travel far beyond its own shores.

Bowing in competition at Venice...

Mario Martone, who is active as a director in theatre as well as in film, first made a splash on the festival circuit in 1995 with his Elena Ferrante adaptation “L’amore molesto” which went to Cannes. The last time he was in Venice was in 2014 with “Leopardi” which did great at the Italian box office and also travelled. Martone’s latest work “Capri-Revolution” is set in 1914 on the Italian island where a group of Northern European artists at the time formed a commune which helps emancipate an independent-minded young local woman, a goat herder named Lucia. Martone spoke to Variety about his fascination with Capri as a germinator of big societal changes that were to come. Excerpts

Let’s start with Capri. There’s a great quote at the beginning of the film describing the island as a place that is still “virgin territory.”

Yes that’s a homage to...