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Since taking over in 2022, Nifff director Pierre-Yves Walder has made the festival’s socially tinged retrospective program a hallmark of his tenure. Rounding out a so-called trilogy that started with queer representation then followed with a gender focus that put the femme fatale and scream queen under the spotlight, this year’s retrospective will tackle class conflict in cheeky terms, putting the screws to those swells with a 20 film program titled Eat the Rich.

“Genre cinema has always treated questions of predation, exploitation and everyday brutality with such complexity,” says Walder, “which makes it so interesting to how this theme evolves over the course of film history.”

The far-ranging program tackles nearly a century worth of upper-class perfidy, beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s early-Soviet sci-fi “Aelita” from 1924 and running through to Jenna Cato Bass’ South African servitude creeper “Good Madam” from 2021. In between are landmarks like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope...

Following Ingmar Bergman, Agnès Varda, Bruce Lee, Federico Fellini, Godzilla, and Wong Kar Wai, the next major box set collection coming from the Criterion Collection has been announced. Arriving this June is Pasolini 101, a 9-Blu-ray set dedicated to the legendary, late Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

“Released in celebration of the 101st anniversary of Pasolini’s birth, this collector’s set provides an essential window onto a transformative period for an artist whose legacy remains a wellspring of freedom and revolutionary force,” Criterion notes. “Including nine provocative, lyrical, often scandal-inducing films from the 1960s––Accattone, Mamma Roma, Love Meetings, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Porcile, and Medea––the decade in which this celebrated poet, novelist, and intellectual embarked on a feature filmmaking career, Pasolini 101 is a monument to the artist’s daring vision of cinema.”

The release features new 4K digital restorations...

As Italy marks the centennial of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s birth with a series of special events, the Academy Museum is honoring the influential film director, poet, writer and intellectual, whose 1975 murder remains a mystery, with a complete retrospective.

Titled “Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” the Los Angeles tribute in the Academy’s Renzo Piano designed temple of cinema opened Feb. 17 with Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti on hand.

Ferretti, in a moving tribute, said he owed his career to Pasolini, having worked on nine of his films, starting with Pasolini’s first work “The Gospel According to Matthew” and ending with his incendiary condemnation of the Italian upper classes “Salò – or the 120 Days of Sodom,” released in Italy just a few weeks after Pasolini’s murder on Nov. 2, 1975, at age 53, in the seaside town of Ostia outside Rome.

The Academy’s complete retro of Pasolini’s...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe luminously thoughtful French actress Anne Wiazemsky, indelible for her starring roles in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, Jean-Luc Godard's Le chinoise, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema and Porcile, and Philippe Garrel's L'enfant secret, has died at the age of 70. Part of her memoir Un an après has been adapted in the controversial film Redoubtable, which premiered at Cannes this year.Significant writings concerning Miramax and The Weinstein Company co-founder Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse are appearing far and wide: Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker, Jodi Kantor & Rachel Abrams for The New York Times, Heather Graham for Variety, and Naveen Kumar for Vice. Recommended VIEWINGUploaded five months ago and undiscovered until now: Neil Bahadur has found the first trailer for Alan Rudolph's first film in 15 years, Ray Meets Helen.

Anne Wiazemsky, the actress best known as the star of “Au Hasard Balthazar” and for her appearances in French New Wave movies, has died at 70 after a battle with breast cancer. Her brother confirmed the news with the Afp. Wiazemsky was the second wife of Jean-Luc Godard and appeared in his 1967 dramas “La chinoise” and “Week End.”

The actress got her breakthrough in 1966 when Robert Bresson cast her in the lead role of Marie in “Au Hasard Balthazar.” The film memorably chronicled the relationship between the character, a shy farm girl, and her beloved donkey as they grow old and drift apart. Wiazemsky was only 18 year old when she appeared in the movie but became an instant favorite of Bresson. Her acting career continued until the late 1980s and she starred in films directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Teorema,” “Pigsty”) and Philippe Garrel (“L’enfant secret”).

Most recently, Wiazemsky had...

★★★☆☆ It's a dog eat dog world out there. Or is that a hawk eat sparrow world? Or pig eat man? Or perhaps man eat man? Our insatiable proclivity towards to devouring one another is manifested in various ways through the two Pier Paolo Pasolini films released on Blu-ray this week as part of Eureka's Masters of Cinema series. Hawks and Sparrows and Pigsty could hardly seem more different on the surface, but both are philosophical treatises that question the institutional complexes that power post-war European society. One is a shaggy dog story that pokes jocular fun at Catholicism and Marxism, the other savage satire of the grotesquery of Wirtschaftswunder - also implicating it as a legacy of Nazism.

The Italian film legend, known for his expressive face, made many films with Pier Paolo Pasolini and starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films

The Italian cinema legend Franco Citti has died in Rome aged 80 following a long illness. Friend and fellow actor Ninetto Davoli confirmed that Citti had died on Thursday.

Citti, known internationally for his role as Calò in Francis Ford Coppola’s the Godfather I and III and as the face of films by director Pier Paolo Pasolini, came to fame at the age of 26 playing the title role in Pasolini’s 1961 Accattone. He continued to work with the legendary director throughout the 60s and 70s, appearing in films such as Mamma Roma, Edipo Re, Pigsty and The Decameron.

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On November 2, 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini was found by a beach in Rome’s Ostia neighborhood. Being the result of a heavy beating and multiple run-overs by his own car, this death is so ignoble — and so mysterious; despite a conviction, the culprit has never really, truly been identified — that it casts a permanent pall over his legacy. (Worse yet, as one below video will show, that Pasolini was still working on Salò, a movie whose controversial status is only heightened by the murder.) Today marks the horrible occasion’s 40th anniversary, but it doesn’t necessitate mourning. If anything, now is a time to honor the man who always forced us to consider things we might not wish to acknowledge — our desires, our vices, our limits, our connections to art, and our relationship with the alternately beautiful and disgusting human body.

Embedded for your viewing pleasure, then,...

Raro Video resurrects an excitingly obscure title this month with Liliana Cavani’s 1967 film, The Year of the Cannibals, a counter culture art house film modernizing Sophocles’ play Antigone to explore modern political unrest, here in the streets of Milan. Cavani, perhaps best known for her notorious 1974 film The Night Porter, posing star Charlotte Rampling in one of her most iconic roles, has crafted a stunningly photographed and arresting film in this early work that’s ripe for rediscovery. Shown in art houses and retrospectives after receiving favorable reaction upon domestic release and major film festival play (Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), the title never secured distribution in the Us, though this is mostly due to Cavani’s refusal to change the bleak finale when a major studio approached her to buy the film.

Set in a dystopic Milan, corpses litter the bustling streets after the government has squashed a vicious rebellion.

★★★★☆ Recently rereleased alongside comedic classic Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966) courtesy of Eureka's esteemed Masters of Cinema home entertainment label, Pier Paolo Pasolini's immeasurably dark satire Pigsty (Porcile, 1969) parallels two equably disturbing and disparate worlds which come together for a suitably bleak, yet ultimately satisfying finale. Though not quite plumbing the same depths as the depraved Salò (1975), Pasolini's austere exploration of pig-like greed resonates now more than ever.

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★★★★☆ Unarguably one of Italian cinema's greatest ever film directors and a child of the post-war neorealist movement, Pier Paolo Pasolini gets the Masters of Cinema treatment this week with the release of both Pigsty (Porcile, 1969) and the ever-enjoyable Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966), courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. A Chaucer-esque tale of life, death and conversing birds, Pasolini's divine farce bubbles with satirical wit and vigour.

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On October 30, 1975, three days before he was murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini was in Stockholm to present what was to be his last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, to Swedish critics. A roundtable discussion was recorded with the intent of turning it into a radio broadcast but news of the filmmaker's death oddly resulted in the withholding of the recording rather than, as would surely happen today, an immediate publication. Eventually, the recording was lost, but as Eric Loret and Robert Maggiori tell the story in Libération, Pasolini's Swedish translator, Carl Henrik Svenstedt, a passionate archivist, recently discovered his own private copy. In December, the Italian newsweekly L'espresso posted the audio recording and published an Italian transcript. Here, for the first time, is an English translation. After a couple of informal questions, the roundtable officially opens with "Ladies and gentlemen…"

What do you know about Swedish cinema?

I know Bergman,...

by Vadim Rizov

Veiko Õunpuu's second film, The Temptation of St. Tony, offers special thanks to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Buñuel in the end credits. That's apt for a film whose skepticism about religion as a redemptive force resembles the latter and which pays explicit homage to the former in a song cue. Odetta's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," used during the Nativity sequence of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, plays over a cannibalism scene directly reminiscent of Porcile. Despite that double-barreled reference, Õunpuu denies any direct influence: in an interview last year, he allowed that "the homage to all of them" (Tarkovsky, Fellini, Lynch and Bresson as well) "is there, whether I like it or not."

He very much does like it. His first film Autumn Ball reveled in post-Soviet architecture and dour, lifeless color. Despite one character's outburst that "Baltic consciousness" is a...

Yes, yet more New York happenings, and this time of the undead variety. The Museum of Arts and Design will be hosting "Zombo Italiano: The Italian Zombie Film Movement, 1972 - 1985" from July 8th - July 29th.

Okay, so straight from the horses mouth:

Zombo Italiano

The Italian Zombie Film Movement, 1972 - 1985

$10 a screening, $7 for students with valid ID or with zombie make-up

* discount for zombie make-up available in person only

All screenings will be held at the Museum of Arts and Design

2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019

212.299.7740

New York, NY (June 23, 2010)- Italian zombie cinema comes alive at the Museum of Arts and Design this summer in its latest film series, running from July 8 through July 29. At once gruesome and poetic, the 10 films showcased in "Zombo Italiano: The Italian Zombie Film Movement" underscore the prolific visions and technical achievements of noted Italian directors-including Lucio Fulci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and George A. Romero...

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...