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The HBO adaptation wrapped its four-season run up this week, but there’s plenty of other shows to watch next.

Six years, four seasons, and four novels later, HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend,” its adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, has come to its bittersweet end. The sprawling story follows lifelong friends Elena and Lila (played by eight actors collectively across the four-season run) throughout their 60-plus-year friendship as the elderly Elena recounts their lives together when Lila disappears.

Tackling female friendship and intimacy, class, gender, work, love, motherhood, and political clashes, “My Brilliant Friend” has been in a league of its own since its 2018 debut. While you can return to the epic at any time on Max, if you’re looking for similar stories in tone and scope, check out The Streamable’s recommendations for what to watch next!

My Brilliant Friend November 27, 2018

When the most important friend...

The impact of first love is incomparable, with even the tiniest details remaining rich and precise in memory even after decades have passed. Fleeting summer romances can become seismic events that shift the foundations of the self. Even after the heart has been hardened by a lifetime of disappointment, it can melt recalling those first joyful, intimate moments that stick in the mind as vivid and visceral as a recent trauma.

In ‘Nostalgia’, the first love is one that forms between two 15-year-old boys Felice and Oreste, getting into trouble on the streets of Naples, and while it is never shown to be sexual, it is deeply romantic and passionate. The two teenagers ride, arms wrapped around each other, on a moped, the Italian sunshine carefree and enraptured by each other’s presence. When Felice is beaten up by a rival gang it is Oreste that comes to his aid...

‘Tori And Lokita’ arrives fifth on Screen’s Cannes jury grid and divides the critics.

Mario Martone’s Nostalgia lands third on the jury grid while Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne’s Tori And Lokita splits our jurors.

The Palme d’Or winners secure a 2.5 average for Tori And Lokita which follows the friendship between a young boy and a girl as they make the perilous journey from Africa to Belgium. It gathered four threes (good) and three twos (average) from our jurors.

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Meduza’s Anton Dolin awarded the film a four (excellent), but a one...

Prolific Italian film and stage director Mario Martone, who is a Venice aficionado, is back in competition in Cannes 27 years after his Elena Ferrante adaptation “L’amore molesto” (“Troubling Love”) launched in competition from the Croisette in 1995. And there is a close connection between these two films that delve deep into the entrails of Martone’s native Naples.

In his well-received “Nostalgia”, praised by Variety as Martone’s “most rewarding film in years,” ace actor Pierfrancesco Favino plays the middle-aged Felice Lasco, who returns to the bustling port city after having lived in Egypt for 40 years. Once back, he is caught up in memories of a distant life spent in his hometown, as his criminal youth slowly catches up with him.

Martone spoke to Variety about why he adapted Neapolitan author Ermanno Rea’s novel by the same title and the elements that make it “more universal than a mere Neapolitan tale.

Exclusive: Deadline has your first look trailer at Cannes competition title Nostalgia, directed by Italian helmer Mario Martone.

The story follows Felice Lasco, played by Pierfrancesco Favino, who returns to Naples after living for many years in Egypt to visit his elderly mother whom he had left suddenly when he was still a boy. It’s his first time back since he left the bustling port city for Egypt some 40 years ago. When it becomes clear that Naples represents for him a life that is now lost and that he should return home as soon as possible to where he came from, he is pinned down by the invincible force of nostalgia.

The film, which is being sold by Italy’s True Colours, sees Martone return to the Cannes competition section 27 years after his adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love played on the Croisette in 1995. The Naples native also...

Italy’s True Colours has taken world sales on Italian director Mario Martone’s Cannes competition entry “Nostalgia,” starring Pierfrancesco Favino, who is known to Cannes audiences as the protagonist of Marco Bellocchio’s 2019 drama “The Traitor.”

Set in Martone’s native Naples, “Nostalgia” sees Favino play the middle-aged Felice Lasco, who returns to the bustling port city after having lived in Egypt for 40 years. Once back, he drowns into the memories of a distant life he spent in his hometown.

Martone will be returning to a Cannes competition berth with “Nostalgia” 27 years after his Elena Ferrante adaptation “L’amore molesto” (“Troubling Love”) launched in competition from the Croisette in 1995. His “The Scent of Blood” was in Directors’ Fortnight in 2004.

But the Neapolitan film and stage director has mostly been a Venice aficionado, most recently with “The Mayor of Rione Sanità” in 2019 and “The King of Laughter” in 2021, both sold by True Colours.

Film Movement has acquired U.S. rights to Italian director Mario Martone’s “The King of Laughter” (“Qui Rido Io”) ahead of its world premiere Tuesday in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

The film, being sold internationally by Italy’s True Colours, toplines Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”) as popular and prolific early 20th century Neapolitan actor and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta.

In 1904, at the height of his popularity, Scarpetta took a great risk: he staged a parody of “La figlia di Iorio,” a tragedy written by the greatest Italian poet of the day, Gabriele D’Annunzio. After all hell broke loose, Scarpetta ended up being sued for plagiarism by D’Annunzio himself. It was the beginning of the first copyright lawsuit in Italy, and a draining experience for Scarpetta and his family. It was also a challenging time that he overcame with an act worthy of a great thespian.

Film...

Filming on Marco Chiappetta’s first work, a Teatri Uniti and RiverStudio production, has wrapped in Naples. Shooting has wrapped on Santa Lucia, the debut work by the 29-year-old Neapolitan screenwriter and director Marco Chiappetta. Led by Renato Carpentieri and Andrea Renzi who are cast as two brothers, the film is produced by Teatri Uniti – the long-standing theatre company directed by Toni Servillo which has supported cinema productions such as Morte di un matematico napoletano and L’amore molesto by Mario Martone, as well as One Man Up and The Consequences of Love by Paolo Sorrentino – together with RiverStudio. The film recounts the return to Naples, following forty years spent in Buenos Aires, of Roberto, a writer who is now blind, of his meeting with his brother Lorenzo and of the troubling past which emerges from their childhood memories, set against the backdrop of the city as we’ve never seen.