Italian period drama “My Place Is Here” is being released in Italy by Adler Ent. on May 9, and is being sold at Cannes by Beta Cinema. Variety speaks to the film’s directors, Daniela Porto and Cristiano Bortone, and debuts its trailer (below).
“My Place Is Here” is set in the years following the end of World War II. Women have just been given the vote in Italy, but in Calabria, a conservative rural region in Southern Italy, men still rule the roost.
An unmarried single mother, Marta, who is deemed to have brought shame on her family, has been promised to an older farmer as his wife. While making preparations for the wedding, Marta meets Lorenzo, the village’s openly gay wedding planner. He encourages her to broaden her horizons and take typing lessons at the local Communist Party office as a means of finding work. Here she meets Communist activist Bianca,...
“My Place Is Here” is set in the years following the end of World War II. Women have just been given the vote in Italy, but in Calabria, a conservative rural region in Southern Italy, men still rule the roost.
An unmarried single mother, Marta, who is deemed to have brought shame on her family, has been promised to an older farmer as his wife. While making preparations for the wedding, Marta meets Lorenzo, the village’s openly gay wedding planner. He encourages her to broaden her horizons and take typing lessons at the local Communist Party office as a means of finding work. Here she meets Communist activist Bianca,...
- 4/30/2024
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s fortnightly strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are emerging in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.
This week we explore Italian movie hit There’s Still Tomorrow, which begins rolling out on cinema screens worldwide this spring with other key deals underway after a stellar release back home last fall, where it is now the ninth highest-grossing film in the history of the country’s box office.
Name: There’s Still Tomorrow
Country: Italy
Producer: Wildside
Seller: Vision Distribution
Where you can watch: In cinemas worldwide (see distributor list below)
For fans of: Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, Ettore Scola’s A Special Day,...
This week we explore Italian movie hit There’s Still Tomorrow, which begins rolling out on cinema screens worldwide this spring with other key deals underway after a stellar release back home last fall, where it is now the ninth highest-grossing film in the history of the country’s box office.
Name: There’s Still Tomorrow
Country: Italy
Producer: Wildside
Seller: Vision Distribution
Where you can watch: In cinemas worldwide (see distributor list below)
For fans of: Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, Ettore Scola’s A Special Day,...
- 1/24/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
by Eric Blume
Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role. Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.
A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...
Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role. Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.
A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...
- 6/25/2023
- by EricB
- FilmExperience
Adriana Chiesa, the pioneering Italian sales agent who has been a fixture at Cannes for 40 years, has sold her film library to Italy’s Minerva Pictures.
The 85-title Acek library comprises a broad mix of prominent works by revered directors such as Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” (pictured) and “Summer Night With Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and a Scent of Basil” and cult movies including Lamberto Bava’s gonzo horror “Macabro,” revenge Western “Garringo” by Rafael Romero Merchant, and Asia Argento’s directorial debut, “Scarlet Diva,” on which Chiesa and Minerva chief Gianluca Curti jointly served as executive producers.
“I am particularly happy because I know that Gianluca appreciates the value of my library and will carry on its legacy with all the love and respect that it deserves,” Chiesa told Variety. She added that she will now continue her production activity, making documentaries such as “Water and Sugar: Carlo...
The 85-title Acek library comprises a broad mix of prominent works by revered directors such as Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” (pictured) and “Summer Night With Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and a Scent of Basil” and cult movies including Lamberto Bava’s gonzo horror “Macabro,” revenge Western “Garringo” by Rafael Romero Merchant, and Asia Argento’s directorial debut, “Scarlet Diva,” on which Chiesa and Minerva chief Gianluca Curti jointly served as executive producers.
“I am particularly happy because I know that Gianluca appreciates the value of my library and will carry on its legacy with all the love and respect that it deserves,” Chiesa told Variety. She added that she will now continue her production activity, making documentaries such as “Water and Sugar: Carlo...
- 5/16/2023
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Italian director Mario Martone, who has been on the festival and awards circuit over the past year with Oscar submission and Cannes title Nostalgia, is at the Berlinale with his passion project Somebody Down There Likes Me.
The documentary pays tribute to late Italian actor and fellow Neapolitan Massimo Troisi who died tragically young at the age of 41 in 1994, just hours after filming wrapped on Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman).
Selected for the Berlinale Specials sidebar, the documentary plays at a sold-out screening on Saturday, on the eve of what would have been the actor’s 70th birthday on February 19. Deadline can reveal a trailer.
Martone says he wants to shed light on the popular actor who he believes has never been properly celebrated.
“Massimo has always remained alive in the collective consciousness because he was a great actor and a great artist,” says the director.
Il Postino,...
The documentary pays tribute to late Italian actor and fellow Neapolitan Massimo Troisi who died tragically young at the age of 41 in 1994, just hours after filming wrapped on Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman).
Selected for the Berlinale Specials sidebar, the documentary plays at a sold-out screening on Saturday, on the eve of what would have been the actor’s 70th birthday on February 19. Deadline can reveal a trailer.
Martone says he wants to shed light on the popular actor who he believes has never been properly celebrated.
“Massimo has always remained alive in the collective consciousness because he was a great actor and a great artist,” says the director.
Il Postino,...
- 2/18/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
“Cinema is not pages and it’s not minutes: it’s the way you look at the minute that passes,” Syrian director Ameer Fakher Eldin is talking about the 55-page script of “Yunan,” his follow up to “The Stranger” (Al Garib), which played at Venice Days in 2021. Eldin knows from the experience of editing his first film that one page doesn’t equal one minute. “It’s a two hour film,” he says.
Eldin’s second feature is due to film in the first half of 2023 and is currently being presented at this week’s Red Sea Souk Project Market of the Red Sea Film Festival. Iconic figure of New German Cinema Hanna Schygulla and Syrian actor Bassem Yakhour have both been cast in the production. They join Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz (“Capernaum”), and German actor Sibel Kekilli, from “Game of Thrones” and Fatih Akin’s “Head On.”
Filming will...
Eldin’s second feature is due to film in the first half of 2023 and is currently being presented at this week’s Red Sea Souk Project Market of the Red Sea Film Festival. Iconic figure of New German Cinema Hanna Schygulla and Syrian actor Bassem Yakhour have both been cast in the production. They join Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz (“Capernaum”), and German actor Sibel Kekilli, from “Game of Thrones” and Fatih Akin’s “Head On.”
Filming will...
- 12/5/2022
- by John Bleasdale
- Variety Film + TV
“My need to work on monologues originates from my love of literature. I usually pick novels that have little or no dialogue, so that I perceive the book as a very long monologue. Since I make films where plot twists are rare, if not entirely absent, monologues help me to have something masquerade as a plot twist that is just not there,” says Paolo Sorrentino during a special event on the art of the monologue organized by the Torino Film Festival and held at the Teatro Astra on Friday. The talk was moderated by filmmaker David Grieco and festival director Steve Della Casa.
Reading the notes written by Andrea De Rosa (who could not take part in the event), Della Casa listed three types of monologues present throughout Sorrentino’s filmography. The first is the inner monologue, during which the character speaks alone, often with their voice over, while the...
Reading the notes written by Andrea De Rosa (who could not take part in the event), Della Casa listed three types of monologues present throughout Sorrentino’s filmography. The first is the inner monologue, during which the character speaks alone, often with their voice over, while the...
- 12/3/2022
- by Davide Abbatescianni
- Variety Film + TV
In “The March on Rome,” which world premieres in the Venice Days sidebar of Venice Film Festival Wednesday, Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins tracks the ascent of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. He also draws a dotted line from those events to the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January 2021.
The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and Cousins’ characteristic cinematic analysis, starts with Donald Trump defending his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
The issue of the Mussolini quote made a strong impression on Cousins at the time. “I remember seeing that thing on TV and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s actually not denouncing Mussolini,...
The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and Cousins’ characteristic cinematic analysis, starts with Donald Trump defending his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
The issue of the Mussolini quote made a strong impression on Cousins at the time. “I remember seeing that thing on TV and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s actually not denouncing Mussolini,...
- 8/30/2022
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Fascism – its roots, legacy and contemporary manifestations – is a leitmotif running throughout the 79th Venice Film Festival as Italy marks the centenary of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fateful power grab in 1922, in an era when totalitarian leaders are once again on the rise.
Northern Irish, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mark Cousin’s essay documentary March On Rome – which opens parallel section Giornate degli Autori on Wednesday (August 31) – offers an insightful cinematic primer into the events leading up to Mussolini’s forced appointment as Italian prime minister on October 31, 1922.
Opening with an extract of an interview with Donald Trump in which he openly quotes Mussolini, the film also provocatively connects the actions of latter-day populist leaders with the legacy of Italian fascism.
The infamous 1922 March on Rome grew out of a fascist rally in Naples on October 24 at which Mussolini declared: “Either the government will be given to us, or we will...
Northern Irish, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mark Cousin’s essay documentary March On Rome – which opens parallel section Giornate degli Autori on Wednesday (August 31) – offers an insightful cinematic primer into the events leading up to Mussolini’s forced appointment as Italian prime minister on October 31, 1922.
Opening with an extract of an interview with Donald Trump in which he openly quotes Mussolini, the film also provocatively connects the actions of latter-day populist leaders with the legacy of Italian fascism.
The infamous 1922 March on Rome grew out of a fascist rally in Naples on October 24 at which Mussolini declared: “Either the government will be given to us, or we will...
- 8/30/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
A round up of stories from Locarno Film Festival.
As the first week of the Locarno Film Festival (August 3-13) comes to an end, here is the latest from the industry side of the event in Switzerland.
Six projects at Locarno Pitching Day
Feature films from Italy, Austria and Switzerland were among the projects pitched at the Ticino Film Commission’s Locarno Pitching Day held yesterday (August 8).
Staged in collaboration with Locarno Pro, the event was aimed at film industry professionals seeking co-production partners, distribution and financing for projects that are in development and could be further developed in the Swiss region.
As the first week of the Locarno Film Festival (August 3-13) comes to an end, here is the latest from the industry side of the event in Switzerland.
Six projects at Locarno Pitching Day
Feature films from Italy, Austria and Switzerland were among the projects pitched at the Ticino Film Commission’s Locarno Pitching Day held yesterday (August 8).
Staged in collaboration with Locarno Pro, the event was aimed at film industry professionals seeking co-production partners, distribution and financing for projects that are in development and could be further developed in the Swiss region.
- 8/9/2022
- by Martin Blaney
- ScreenDaily
The king and queen of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, star in this story of a sexy older woman’s affair with a middle-aged gay man—it sounds like one of the duo’s naughty farces from the early ’60s but Ettore Scola’s film is a tragedy set during Mussolini’s regime. Produced by Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti, the film won the César Award for Best Foreign Film and garnered two Oscar nominations.
The post A Special Day appeared first on Trailers From Hell.
The post A Special Day appeared first on Trailers From Hell.
- 6/29/2022
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
French film great Jean-Louis Trintignant, best known for his roles in “A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” and “The Conformist,” died Friday. He was 91.
Trintignant died at his home in southern France, his wife, Marianne, and agent told the Agence France-Presse.
Trintignant was more recently known for roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red” and for starring opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” winner of the 2013 Oscar for best foreign film.
Taciturn and enigmatic, the “reluctant” actor, who came by his profession by accident and several times announced he was quitting, returned time and again to appear in more than 100 films and achieve international stardom over of a period of more than 40 years working with some of the world’s great directors including Claude Chabrol, Abel Gance, Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras, Ettore Scola and Francois Truffaut, as well as Kieslowski and Haneke.
Though he claimed to prefer racing cards, he once told an interviewer,...
Trintignant died at his home in southern France, his wife, Marianne, and agent told the Agence France-Presse.
Trintignant was more recently known for roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red” and for starring opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” winner of the 2013 Oscar for best foreign film.
Taciturn and enigmatic, the “reluctant” actor, who came by his profession by accident and several times announced he was quitting, returned time and again to appear in more than 100 films and achieve international stardom over of a period of more than 40 years working with some of the world’s great directors including Claude Chabrol, Abel Gance, Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras, Ettore Scola and Francois Truffaut, as well as Kieslowski and Haneke.
Though he claimed to prefer racing cards, he once told an interviewer,...
- 6/17/2022
- by Richard Natale
- Variety Film + TV
Above: Italian poster for The Girl with a Pistol. Artist: Giorgio Olivetti.Monica Vitti, who died on February 2nd at the age of 90, was an icon of modern cinema—one of its most famous and most beautiful faces—but she is best known outside Italy for just four films, all of which she made for her one-time partner Michelangelo Antonioni. In the original Italian poster for L’avventura (1960), the film that made both their names, her head is tilted to the side, her face barely visible: she is mostly a shock of blonde hair. But in the posters that were created as that film travelled the globe, and in her ensuing posters for Antonioni's La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), she gets her close-up, usually staring into the middle distance or directly at the viewer. Always impassive, never smiling. But of course, in a career that lasted another 25 years there were many more films,...
- 2/17/2022
- MUBI
Monica Vitti, the Italian screen icon known for a string of 1960s classics, died Wednesday at 90, according to reports in Italy.
The news was conveyed by writer, director and politician Walter Veltroni on behalf of Vitti’s husband, Roberto Russo:
Roberto Russo, il suo compagno di tutti questi anni, mi chiede di comunicare che Monica Vitti non c’è più. Lo faccio con dolore, affetto, rimpianto.
— walter veltroni (@VeltroniWalter) February 2, 2022
The feted actress, best known for movies including L’Avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964), L’Eclisse (1962) and La Notte (1961), had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for two decades.
Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli on November 3, 1931, in Rome, Vitti acted in amateur productions as a teenager then trained at Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts.
The actress shot to global fame following spectacular collaborations with legendary director Michelangelo Antonioni in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Vitti starred in L’Avventura as a detached and...
The news was conveyed by writer, director and politician Walter Veltroni on behalf of Vitti’s husband, Roberto Russo:
Roberto Russo, il suo compagno di tutti questi anni, mi chiede di comunicare che Monica Vitti non c’è più. Lo faccio con dolore, affetto, rimpianto.
— walter veltroni (@VeltroniWalter) February 2, 2022
The feted actress, best known for movies including L’Avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964), L’Eclisse (1962) and La Notte (1961), had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for two decades.
Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli on November 3, 1931, in Rome, Vitti acted in amateur productions as a teenager then trained at Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts.
The actress shot to global fame following spectacular collaborations with legendary director Michelangelo Antonioni in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Vitti starred in L’Avventura as a detached and...
- 2/2/2022
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
French multi-hyphenate Amanda Sthers (“Holy Lands”) has recruited the U.K.’s Kelly Reilly, Italy’s Pierfrancesco Favino and France’s Jean Reno for English-language romantic drama “Promises,” set in Italy and London, which started shooting in Rome on Monday.
Based on Sthers’ novel by the same title, “Promises” turns on an unfulfilled love affair between Alexander, played by Favino — who won best actor at Venice last year for his role in Italian drama “Padrenostro” — and Laura, played by Reilly.
Commenting on her casting choices, Sthers in a statement noted that she grew up watching movies from around the globe and therefore “allowed myself to choose talent over everything else, and wanted the global sentiment of the film reflected in casting.”
“Together, Favino and Reilly look like a quintessential cinematic couple bringing a sense of timelessness to our story,” Sthers added.
Rounding out the cast are Cara Theobold (“Downton Abbey...
Based on Sthers’ novel by the same title, “Promises” turns on an unfulfilled love affair between Alexander, played by Favino — who won best actor at Venice last year for his role in Italian drama “Padrenostro” — and Laura, played by Reilly.
Commenting on her casting choices, Sthers in a statement noted that she grew up watching movies from around the globe and therefore “allowed myself to choose talent over everything else, and wanted the global sentiment of the film reflected in casting.”
“Together, Favino and Reilly look like a quintessential cinematic couple bringing a sense of timelessness to our story,” Sthers added.
Rounding out the cast are Cara Theobold (“Downton Abbey...
- 3/23/2021
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
What becomes a legend most?
Well, in the case of the Oscar-winning 86-year-old Sophia Loren, a terrific role in the new Netflix movie “The Life Ahead,” which premiered on Nov. 13 to rave reviews. The film is also a valentine from her youngest son Edoardo Ponti who co-adapted and directed the drama based on Romain Gary’s 1975 novel “The Life Before Us.”
Loren plays Madame Rosa, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor living in Naples who now takes care of children of prostitutes. But she has her hands full with her latest charge, a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant named Momo (Ibrahim Gueye). Rosa may seem like the ultimate earth foster mother, but she is haunted by fevered memories of her time at Auschwitz and more and more frequently drifts away from reality.
If the plotline of “The Life Ahead” sounds familiar, the Gary novel was originally adapted as “Madame Rosa,” an Oscar-winning...
Well, in the case of the Oscar-winning 86-year-old Sophia Loren, a terrific role in the new Netflix movie “The Life Ahead,” which premiered on Nov. 13 to rave reviews. The film is also a valentine from her youngest son Edoardo Ponti who co-adapted and directed the drama based on Romain Gary’s 1975 novel “The Life Before Us.”
Loren plays Madame Rosa, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor living in Naples who now takes care of children of prostitutes. But she has her hands full with her latest charge, a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant named Momo (Ibrahim Gueye). Rosa may seem like the ultimate earth foster mother, but she is haunted by fevered memories of her time at Auschwitz and more and more frequently drifts away from reality.
If the plotline of “The Life Ahead” sounds familiar, the Gary novel was originally adapted as “Madame Rosa,” an Oscar-winning...
- 11/17/2020
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
Since True Colours launched in 2015, it has rapidly doubled the size of its lineups to roughly 20 titles per year, while continuing to carefully curate distribution strategies for each film and made lots of global inroads.
The company is known among Italian producers for transparency and providing rapid sales reports, while foreign buyers like working with execs “because they always make things easy,” says Nicolas Zumaglini, head of content at prominent Latin American distributor Telefilms, who notes that “they have definitely helped spread Italian cinema in the region.” As for True Colours giving cinema Italiano more global reach, the most poignant recent example is “Il Testimone Invisibile” (“The Invisible Witness”), a remake of Spanish thriller (“Contratiempo”), directed by Italy’s Stefano Mordini. “Invisible Witness” is the European title that’s scored the highest gross at the Chinese box office, roughly $5 million, since movie theaters re-opened in China post-pandemic.
The True Colours...
The company is known among Italian producers for transparency and providing rapid sales reports, while foreign buyers like working with execs “because they always make things easy,” says Nicolas Zumaglini, head of content at prominent Latin American distributor Telefilms, who notes that “they have definitely helped spread Italian cinema in the region.” As for True Colours giving cinema Italiano more global reach, the most poignant recent example is “Il Testimone Invisibile” (“The Invisible Witness”), a remake of Spanish thriller (“Contratiempo”), directed by Italy’s Stefano Mordini. “Invisible Witness” is the European title that’s scored the highest gross at the Chinese box office, roughly $5 million, since movie theaters re-opened in China post-pandemic.
The True Colours...
- 11/9/2020
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
Six years ago, Sophia Loren emerged from retirement to film Jean Cocteau’s “The Human Voice” — her version of the one-act play that Tilda Swinton and Pedro Almodóvar recently adapted during lockdown, and which Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman had each tackled decades before. In the 25-minute project, which was directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, Loren plays a woman alone but for her housekeeper in an Italian villa, speaking to the man she once loved via a shaky phone connection.
“The only thing left between us is this telephone wire,” Loren says in the film, her voice torn.
In a way, that short feels like a forecast of Loren’s life today, as the coronavirus has forced so many into isolation — including the still vibrant acting legend, who laughs easily and often over the course of a career-spanning 90-minute phone call. The Italian star, the first person from any...
“The only thing left between us is this telephone wire,” Loren says in the film, her voice torn.
In a way, that short feels like a forecast of Loren’s life today, as the coronavirus has forced so many into isolation — including the still vibrant acting legend, who laughs easily and often over the course of a career-spanning 90-minute phone call. The Italian star, the first person from any...
- 11/2/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
by Cláudio Alves
To celebrate Pride Month, the Criterion Channel has chosen to highlight several works of queer cinema as well as various films featuring Lgbtqia+ characters. The selection is varied, spanning from Ettore Scola's Oscar-nominated A Special Day to the avant-garde work of Chantal Akerman and Cheryl Dunne. It's not all high-brow artistry -- there's space for kitschy entertainment, too. Such is the case of 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader directed by Jamie Babbit, a cult classic looking at gay conversion therapy through the prism of outrageous farcical humor. It's a movie I had never watched before, making it a great subject for this particular series…...
To celebrate Pride Month, the Criterion Channel has chosen to highlight several works of queer cinema as well as various films featuring Lgbtqia+ characters. The selection is varied, spanning from Ettore Scola's Oscar-nominated A Special Day to the avant-garde work of Chantal Akerman and Cheryl Dunne. It's not all high-brow artistry -- there's space for kitschy entertainment, too. Such is the case of 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader directed by Jamie Babbit, a cult classic looking at gay conversion therapy through the prism of outrageous farcical humor. It's a movie I had never watched before, making it a great subject for this particular series…...
- 6/13/2020
- by Cláudio Alves
- FilmExperience
Ferzan Ozpetek’s The Fortune Goddess and Sergio Castellitto’s new film starring Bérénice Bejo Il materiale emotive are both in the line-up of the expanding Italian sales agency. True Colours, a firm in full, international expansion, is bulking up its own list of films on the occasion of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival’s Online Marché du Film (22-26 June). New works include Il materiale emotivo by Sergio Castellitto (in post-production): an Italian-French co-production courtesy of Rodeo Drive together with Rai Cinema, Mon Voisin Productions and Tikkun Production, which is based upon a screenplay by the great master Ettore Scola, who passed away in 2016. Starring in the cast alongside Castellitto himself is the French star Bérénice Bejo and Matilda De Angelis. Among the titles for 2021 featuring in the line-up, there’s the highly promising Supereroi, which is the new sentimental dramedy by Paolo Genovese who directed the box-office champion (which has.
My own private tribute to Italy and friends in the business.
We were so lucky in the Berlinale that no one seems to have contracted Covid 19. But my heart goes out to those returning home to lockdown. During this time of Corona, backward looks are common along with thoughts of those we love and need to connect with. All that may serve a purpose in redirecting our paths toward more important and even urgent ends when we return to a new normal.
One of my backward looks goes to 2009 when I attended Rotterdam Film Festival…part of this festival included a workshop for four chosen upcoming film critics. I needed someone to help me write articles and asked the four if any could help me. Two responded to my request but only one followed up with me after Rotterdam. Gaetano Maiorino and I thus became acquainted; he wrote a book...
We were so lucky in the Berlinale that no one seems to have contracted Covid 19. But my heart goes out to those returning home to lockdown. During this time of Corona, backward looks are common along with thoughts of those we love and need to connect with. All that may serve a purpose in redirecting our paths toward more important and even urgent ends when we return to a new normal.
One of my backward looks goes to 2009 when I attended Rotterdam Film Festival…part of this festival included a workshop for four chosen upcoming film critics. I needed someone to help me write articles and asked the four if any could help me. Two responded to my request but only one followed up with me after Rotterdam. Gaetano Maiorino and I thus became acquainted; he wrote a book...
- 5/1/2020
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Sales also secured on ‘The Goddess Of Fortune’, ‘Once Upon A Time… In Bethlehem’ and more.
Rome-based sales company True Colours has secured deals on a raft of titles out of the Efm, led by Sergio Castellitto’s romantic drama A Bookshop In Paris.
The film, starring Castellitto and Berenice Bejo, has pre-sold to Taiwan (Andrews Film), Poland (Aurora), Benelux (Paradiso), former Yugoslavia (Stars Media), Sweden (Studio S Entertainment), Finland (Future Film), Denmark (Another World) and Israel (Nachshon).
The romantic drama, now in post-production, marks the last screenplay written by the late Ettore Scola and has subsequently been adapted by Castellitto and novelist Margaret Mazzantini.
Rome-based sales company True Colours has secured deals on a raft of titles out of the Efm, led by Sergio Castellitto’s romantic drama A Bookshop In Paris.
The film, starring Castellitto and Berenice Bejo, has pre-sold to Taiwan (Andrews Film), Poland (Aurora), Benelux (Paradiso), former Yugoslavia (Stars Media), Sweden (Studio S Entertainment), Finland (Future Film), Denmark (Another World) and Israel (Nachshon).
The romantic drama, now in post-production, marks the last screenplay written by the late Ettore Scola and has subsequently been adapted by Castellitto and novelist Margaret Mazzantini.
- 3/3/2020
- by 1101325¦Gabriele Niola¦0¦
- ScreenDaily
Director Castellitto also stars in the film alongside Berenice Bejo.
Sergio Castellitto’s romantic drama A Bookshop In Paris has been acquired by True Colours as the Rome-based sales company arrives at the Efm with a reshuffled team.
Castellitto also stars in the film as an antiquarian bookseller living in Paris whose life revolves around his love for rare books and his paraplegic daughter. But his life changes when he meets an exuberant young woman, played by actress and Berlin international jury member Berenice Bejo. The cast also includes 2018 European Shooting Star Matilda De Angelis.
True Colours will begin sales of film,...
Sergio Castellitto’s romantic drama A Bookshop In Paris has been acquired by True Colours as the Rome-based sales company arrives at the Efm with a reshuffled team.
Castellitto also stars in the film as an antiquarian bookseller living in Paris whose life revolves around his love for rare books and his paraplegic daughter. But his life changes when he meets an exuberant young woman, played by actress and Berlin international jury member Berenice Bejo. The cast also includes 2018 European Shooting Star Matilda De Angelis.
True Colours will begin sales of film,...
- 2/20/2020
- by 1101325¦Gabriele Niola¦0¦
- ScreenDaily
by Eric Blume
Variety recently announced that Netflix has acquired rights to an Italian remake of the 1977 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa. Now titled The Life Ahead, it stars Sophia Loren in the Simone Signoret role, who this time "forges a bond with a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant boy named Momo."
There's a lot to unpack here. The original Madame Rosa movie is notoriously one of the worst winners of that Oscar category, and for good reason: the movie is sentimental garbage. This French film won over, among others, Luis Bunuel's challenging The Obscure Object of Desire and Ettore Scola's A Special Day, starring Marcello Mastroianni and...Sophia Loren...
Variety recently announced that Netflix has acquired rights to an Italian remake of the 1977 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa. Now titled The Life Ahead, it stars Sophia Loren in the Simone Signoret role, who this time "forges a bond with a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant boy named Momo."
There's a lot to unpack here. The original Madame Rosa movie is notoriously one of the worst winners of that Oscar category, and for good reason: the movie is sentimental garbage. This French film won over, among others, Luis Bunuel's challenging The Obscure Object of Desire and Ettore Scola's A Special Day, starring Marcello Mastroianni and...Sophia Loren...
- 2/18/2020
- by Eric Blume
- FilmExperience
Valerio Mastandrea on Abel Ferrara: "An American frame by Abel is different from any other one. Because he moves people to feel cinema inside, you know." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
At Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York, first-time director Valerio Mastandrea of Laughing (Ride), starring Chiara Martegiani, told me how he was influenced by Ettore Scola, Mario Monicelli and Aki Kaurismäki. Valerio talks about getting inside the story with the directors he has acted for, including Silvio Soldini's Garibaldi's Lovers (Il Comandante E La Cicogna) opposite Alba Rohrwacher, Marco Bellocchio's Sweet Dreams (Fai Bei Sogni), and Valeria Golino's Euphoria (Euforia) with Riccardo Scamarcio, Jasmine Trinca and Isabella Ferrari.
Valerio is Nico Naldini, confidant to Pier Paolo Pasolini, played by Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara's Pasolini.
Valerio Mastandrea on Abel Ferrara: "The way Abel looked at me who observed - that's the difference that he can...
At Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York, first-time director Valerio Mastandrea of Laughing (Ride), starring Chiara Martegiani, told me how he was influenced by Ettore Scola, Mario Monicelli and Aki Kaurismäki. Valerio talks about getting inside the story with the directors he has acted for, including Silvio Soldini's Garibaldi's Lovers (Il Comandante E La Cicogna) opposite Alba Rohrwacher, Marco Bellocchio's Sweet Dreams (Fai Bei Sogni), and Valeria Golino's Euphoria (Euforia) with Riccardo Scamarcio, Jasmine Trinca and Isabella Ferrari.
Valerio is Nico Naldini, confidant to Pier Paolo Pasolini, played by Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara's Pasolini.
Valerio Mastandrea on Abel Ferrara: "The way Abel looked at me who observed - that's the difference that he can...
- 8/16/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
His latest film Adults In The Room is to screen out of competition.
Greek-born French director Costa-Gavras is to be honoured with the the Glory to the Filmmaker prize at the 76th Venice International Film Festival (Aug 28 – Sept 7).
The ceremony will take place on August 31 in the Palazzo del Cinema, ahead of the world premiere of the director’s latest Adults In The Room, screening out of competition.
It is based on the memoir by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, which recounts the torturous negotiations between Greece and the EU during the country’s debt crisis in 2015.
Costa-Gavras previously...
Greek-born French director Costa-Gavras is to be honoured with the the Glory to the Filmmaker prize at the 76th Venice International Film Festival (Aug 28 – Sept 7).
The ceremony will take place on August 31 in the Palazzo del Cinema, ahead of the world premiere of the director’s latest Adults In The Room, screening out of competition.
It is based on the memoir by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, which recounts the torturous negotiations between Greece and the EU during the country’s debt crisis in 2015.
Costa-Gavras previously...
- 8/14/2019
- ScreenDaily
After recently hosting Michael Bay’s big-budget actioner “6 Underground” and George Clooney-directed series “Catch 22,” Rome’s Cinecittà Studios is set to welcome several more productions with Hollywood ties.
The next one is Netflix witchcraft series “Luna Nera,” helmed by a trio of Italian women: Francesca Comencini (“Gomorra”), Susanna Nicchiarelli and Paola Randi (“Little Tito and the Aliens”). Domenico Procacci’s Fandango is producing for the U.S. streaming giant. “Luna” is Netflix’s third Italian original.
Cattleya and ITV’s upcoming Ancient Rome origins skein, “Domina,” will also be setting up camp on the backlot of the revamped studios, Variety has learned.
At a presentation Friday for international producers in Cannes, Luce Cinecittà president Roberto Cicutto said the sprawling facilities are on track to complete their refurbishment plan, which entails three new sound stages, including a nearly completed green-screen stage, and a tank for indoor and outdoor underwater filming.
The next one is Netflix witchcraft series “Luna Nera,” helmed by a trio of Italian women: Francesca Comencini (“Gomorra”), Susanna Nicchiarelli and Paola Randi (“Little Tito and the Aliens”). Domenico Procacci’s Fandango is producing for the U.S. streaming giant. “Luna” is Netflix’s third Italian original.
Cattleya and ITV’s upcoming Ancient Rome origins skein, “Domina,” will also be setting up camp on the backlot of the revamped studios, Variety has learned.
At a presentation Friday for international producers in Cannes, Luce Cinecittà president Roberto Cicutto said the sprawling facilities are on track to complete their refurbishment plan, which entails three new sound stages, including a nearly completed green-screen stage, and a tank for indoor and outdoor underwater filming.
- 5/17/2019
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
‘I was extraordinarily lucky to have waited fifty-two years to make this film.’
Paris-based Other Angle Pictures has boarded world sales on French director Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years Of A Life ahead of its Out of Competition premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film reunites Lelouch with legendary actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the follow-up to his Palme d’Or, Academy Award, Golden Globe-winning 1966 romantic drama A Man And A Woman.
Its storyline revisits the original characters of Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Duroc – a script girl and a racing driver who embark on a hesitant...
Paris-based Other Angle Pictures has boarded world sales on French director Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years Of A Life ahead of its Out of Competition premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film reunites Lelouch with legendary actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the follow-up to his Palme d’Or, Academy Award, Golden Globe-winning 1966 romantic drama A Man And A Woman.
Its storyline revisits the original characters of Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Duroc – a script girl and a racing driver who embark on a hesitant...
- 5/8/2019
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
The Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival has provided some strong picks this year, including French heist comedy The World Is Yours which was rousingly received. The second feature from Romain Gavras (son of Costa-Gavras), who is best known for his music video work with such artists as Mia, Kanye West and Justice, stars Vincent Cassel who appeared in and produced his 2010 debut Our Day Will Come. The collaborators chatted with Deadline this week about the film, riffing on one another and the influence of Italian comedies on this stylish sophomore effort (check out the video above).
The World Is Yours follows François, a small-time drug dealer who wants to call it quits and become the official distributor of the Mr Freeze popsicle brand in North Africa. His dream vanishes when he learns that his mother (Isabelle Adjani) has spent all his life savings. When his boss presents...
The World Is Yours follows François, a small-time drug dealer who wants to call it quits and become the official distributor of the Mr Freeze popsicle brand in North Africa. His dream vanishes when he learns that his mother (Isabelle Adjani) has spent all his life savings. When his boss presents...
- 5/17/2018
- by Nancy Tartaglione
- Deadline Film + TV
Author: Linda Marric
Actor & director Vincent Perez is every bit as European as his name would suggest. Born in Switzerland to a German mother and a Spanish father, Perez first cut his teeth playing classical roles in some of the most popular French movies of the 1990s, and went on to star in Cyrano de Bergerac (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990), La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) and Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992) to name but a few.
Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of meeting Vincent for an interview and asked him about his new movie Alone In Berlin, which he co-wrote as well as directed. Adapted from Hans Fallada’s popular 1947 novel by the same name, the film tells the story of a law abiding German couple and their quiet resistance during Nazi rule in Berlin. Staring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, Alone In Berlin has so far been met with mixed reviews,...
Actor & director Vincent Perez is every bit as European as his name would suggest. Born in Switzerland to a German mother and a Spanish father, Perez first cut his teeth playing classical roles in some of the most popular French movies of the 1990s, and went on to star in Cyrano de Bergerac (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990), La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) and Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992) to name but a few.
Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of meeting Vincent for an interview and asked him about his new movie Alone In Berlin, which he co-wrote as well as directed. Adapted from Hans Fallada’s popular 1947 novel by the same name, the film tells the story of a law abiding German couple and their quiet resistance during Nazi rule in Berlin. Staring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, Alone In Berlin has so far been met with mixed reviews,...
- 6/29/2017
- by Linda Marric
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The Video Essay is a joint project of Mubi and Filmadrid Festival Internacional de Cine. Film analysis and criticism found a completely new and innovative path with the arrival of the video essay, a relatively recent form that already has its own masters and is becoming increasingly popular. The limits of this discipline are constantly expanding; new essayists are finding innovative ways to study the history of cinema working with images. With this non-competitive section of the festival both Mubi and Filmadrid will offer the platform and visibility the video essay deserves. The seven selected works will be shown during the dates of Filmadrid (June 8 - 17, 2017) on Mubi’s cinema publication, the Notebook. Also there will be a free public screening of the selected works during the festival. The selection was made by the programmers of Mubi and Filmadrid.Telefoni NeriA video essay by Hannah LeißAs a reaction to the...
- 6/9/2017
- MUBI
December 28, 2016. R.I.P. Debbie Reynolds, actress and singer. Age 84.There is a nice moment in the documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds where Carrie’s brother Todd is showing the filmmakers a wall in his living room that tells the story of his mother’s life through movie posters. When Debbie Reynolds passed away on December 28—the day after her daughter Carrie in what was certifiably the last straw of 2016— I tried to find a great poster to commemorate her, but I couldn’t find anything really worthy of her (she was rarely the star of her own posters for one thing). I had forgotten, however, about this lovely Italian poster for Singing’ in the Rain which captures her as the burst of sunshine she always was.More often than I would have liked last year I found myself using my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr as a memorial,...
- 1/14/2017
- MUBI
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.Hector BabencoArgentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.
Hector Babenco
Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.
He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.
Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).
After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.
Hector Babenco
Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.
He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.
Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).
After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...
- 12/31/2016
- ScreenDaily
‘The Salesman’ (Courtesy: Habib Majidi)
By: Carson Blackwelder
Managing Editor
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re well on our way to seeing how the best foreign language film race will shape up at the Oscars in 2017. Leading the pack of the shortlist is The Salesman from Iran, which could land filmmaker Asghar Farhadi a rare second win in the category. How often do we see someone with more than one win in this worldwide competition?
The shortlist of nine films — more about those here — will, on January 24, be trimmed down to the official five nominees that will eventually face off at the Oscars on February 26. This site’s namesake, The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, lists the current frontrunners as: Germany’s Toni Erdmann (written and directed by Maren Ade), Denmark’s Land of Mine (written and directed by Martin Zandvliet), Sweden’s A...
By: Carson Blackwelder
Managing Editor
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re well on our way to seeing how the best foreign language film race will shape up at the Oscars in 2017. Leading the pack of the shortlist is The Salesman from Iran, which could land filmmaker Asghar Farhadi a rare second win in the category. How often do we see someone with more than one win in this worldwide competition?
The shortlist of nine films — more about those here — will, on January 24, be trimmed down to the official five nominees that will eventually face off at the Oscars on February 26. This site’s namesake, The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, lists the current frontrunners as: Germany’s Toni Erdmann (written and directed by Maren Ade), Denmark’s Land of Mine (written and directed by Martin Zandvliet), Sweden’s A...
- 12/26/2016
- by Carson Blackwelder
- Scott Feinberg
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
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The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
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Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Today in 1994, Passion opened at the Longacre Theatre, where it ran for 97 performances. Passion is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. The story was adapted from Ettore Scola's film Passione d'Amore. Passion is notable for being one of the few projects that Stephen Sondheim himself conceived, along with Sweeney Todd and Road Show. Set in 19th century Italy, the plot concerns a young soldier and the changes in him brought about by the obsessive love of Fosca, his Colonel's homely, ailing cousin.
- 5/15/2016
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
She's beautiful, desired and enjoys a social mobility in the improving Italian economy... but she's also a pawn of cruel materialist values. Stefania Sandrelli personifies a liberated spirit who lives for the moment, but who can't form the relationships we call 'living.' Antonio Pietrangeli and Ettore Scola slip an insightful drama into the young Sandrelli's lineup of comedy roles. I Knew Her Well Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 801 1965 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 115 min. / Io la conoscevo bene / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 23, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Stefania Sandrelli, Mario Adorf, Jean-Claude Brialy, Joachim Fuchsberger, Nino Manfredi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Ugo Tognazzi, Karin Dor, Franco Nero. Cinematography Armando Nannuzzi Production design Maurizio Chiari Film Editor Franco Fraticelli Original Music Piero Picconi Written by Antonio Pietrangeli, Ruggero Maccari, Etore Scola Produced by Turi Vasile Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Did a new kind of woman emerge in the 1960s?...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Did a new kind of woman emerge in the 1960s?...
- 3/15/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Love is most definitely not a many splendored thing in the bedazzled artifice of Rome’s swinging 60s, at least as far as the good time gal depicted in Antonio Pietrangeli’s obscure 1965 title I Knew Her Well is concerned. A director lost in the shadows of other 60s Italian auteurs, where names like Antonioni, Fellini, Petri, Pasolini, Risi, or Visconti dominate contemporary conversations of the cinematic period, Criterion enables the resuscitation of Pietrangeli, a director whose filmography, notable for his complex portraits of women (sort of like the Italian version of later period Mizoguchi), is deserving of wider renown.
Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) is a young, beautiful woman who thrusts herself into the burgeoning social scene of Rome after fleeing her rural roots. A series of random lovers finds her elevating her occupational merits through a variety of professions before she begins to land opportunities as a model and budding actress,...
Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) is a young, beautiful woman who thrusts herself into the burgeoning social scene of Rome after fleeing her rural roots. A series of random lovers finds her elevating her occupational merits through a variety of professions before she begins to land opportunities as a model and budding actress,...
- 2/23/2016
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Above: Us one sheet for Knight Of Cups (Terrence Malick, USA, 2015); designer: P+A.Leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, the beautiful new poster for Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups was by far the most popular poster (tallied in likes and reblogs) that I have posted on my daily poster Tumblr since last October. Unveiled nearly a whole year after the first poster for the film premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival (that which made my top ten posters of 2015), the new poster retains the arcane and antique feel of that design—not to mention the palm trees—while making it only moderately more commercial with its image of star Christian Bale (albeit upside down and barely recognizable) haloed by a giant harvest moon.Sadly, much of the past month or two has been spent commemorating those we lost: Jacques Rivette, Haskell Weller, Ettore Scola, artist...
- 2/12/2016
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins ("Dead Man Walking," "Mystic River"), producer and distributor Ben Barenholtz ("Eraserhead," "Blood Simple," "Requiem for a Dream"), and German exhibitor Marlies Kirchner will each receive the 2016 Berlinale Camera, awarded since 1986 to film personalities or institutions to which the festival feels a particular debt of gratitude. In addition, this year's Berlinale will pay tribute to late film icons David Bowie, Alan Rickman, and Italian director Ettore Scola ("A Special Day") with three special screenings: for Bowie, "The Man Who Fell to Earth"; for Rickman, "Sense and Sensibility," which won the Golden Bear in 1996; and for Scola, "Le bal," winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director in 1984. Read More: "David Bowie Rocked the Moves, Too." The festival has also completed this year's jury, to be presided over by Meryl Streep. Joining her are...
- 2/2/2016
- by Matt Brennan
- Thompson on Hollywood
With just nine days to go before opening night, the Berlin International Film Festival is putting the final touches on their 66th edition. Organizers have announced the official seven-person jury, which will be presided over by previously-announced president Meryl Streep. The actress will be joined by Clive Owen, German actor Lars Eidinger, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, Polish director and Silver Bear winner Malgorzata Szumowska, U.K. film critic Nick James and French photographer Brigitte Lacombe. Read More: Jeff Nichols' 'Midnight Special' Leads 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Competition Lineup Additionally, the festival has announced three special screenings that will pay tribute to David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Ettore Scola. Bowie, who appeared at the Berlinale in documentaries like "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart" and "Scott Walker - 30 Century Man," will be honored with a showing of Nicolas Roeg's "The Main Who Fell to...
- 2/2/2016
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Festival to honour David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Ettore Scola through special screenings; security to be tightened.
Actors Clive Owen, Alba Rohrwacher and Lars Eidinger are to join Meryl Streep in the International Jury of this year’s Berlinale (Feb 11-21) which kicks off next week with the international premiere of the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar.
The seven-person jury deciding on the Bears, revealed this morning at a press conference in Berlin, also includes the UK film critic Nick James, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe and the Polish film director Malgorzata Szumowska whose last film Body won a Silver Bear for Best Direction at last year’s Berlinale.
Owen is no stranger to Berlin as he was in town and at Studio Babelsberg in 2008 for the shoot of Tom Tykwer’s The International which opened the Berlinale in 2009, while Eidinger is well known to Berlin theatre-goers as part of the Schaubühne ensemble as well as his film and...
Actors Clive Owen, Alba Rohrwacher and Lars Eidinger are to join Meryl Streep in the International Jury of this year’s Berlinale (Feb 11-21) which kicks off next week with the international premiere of the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar.
The seven-person jury deciding on the Bears, revealed this morning at a press conference in Berlin, also includes the UK film critic Nick James, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe and the Polish film director Malgorzata Szumowska whose last film Body won a Silver Bear for Best Direction at last year’s Berlinale.
Owen is no stranger to Berlin as he was in town and at Studio Babelsberg in 2008 for the shoot of Tom Tykwer’s The International which opened the Berlinale in 2009, while Eidinger is well known to Berlin theatre-goers as part of the Schaubühne ensemble as well as his film and...
- 2/2/2016
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Festival to honour David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Ettore Scola through special screenings; security to be tightened.
Actors Clive Owen, Alba Rohrwacher and Lars Eidinger are to join Meryl Streep in the International Jury of this year’s Berlinale (Feb 11-21) which kicks off next week with the international premiere of the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar.
The seven-person jury deciding on the Bears, revealed this morning at a press conference in Berlin, also includes the UK film critic Nick James, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe and the Polish film director Malgorzata Szumowska whose last film Body won a Silver Bear for Best Direction at last year’s Berlinale.
Owen is no stranger to Berlin as he was in town and at Studio Babelsberg in 2008 for the shoot of Tom Tykwer’s The International which opened the Berlinale in 2009, while Eidinger is well known to Berlin theatre-goers as part of the Schaubühne ensemble as well as his film and...
Actors Clive Owen, Alba Rohrwacher and Lars Eidinger are to join Meryl Streep in the International Jury of this year’s Berlinale (Feb 11-21) which kicks off next week with the international premiere of the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar.
The seven-person jury deciding on the Bears, revealed this morning at a press conference in Berlin, also includes the UK film critic Nick James, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe and the Polish film director Malgorzata Szumowska whose last film Body won a Silver Bear for Best Direction at last year’s Berlinale.
Owen is no stranger to Berlin as he was in town and at Studio Babelsberg in 2008 for the shoot of Tom Tykwer’s The International which opened the Berlinale in 2009, while Eidinger is well known to Berlin theatre-goers as part of the Schaubühne ensemble as well as his film and...
- 2/2/2016
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Film director who found international success with We All Loved Each Other So Much and A Special Day, starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni
Ettore Scola, who has died aged 84, was the last in the direct line of great Italian film directors who descended from the neo-realists of the 1940s. “The inequalities and corruption of Italian society have always been a rich source of inspiration for my cinema, which I inherited from the neo-realists,” remarked Scola, who generally used satire and farce to pour scorn on the Italian social-democratic regimes from the 1960s onwards. Many of his “Italian style” films, the majority of which had ambivalent main characters played by Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, take place against a background of historic events.
Typical was Scola’s first international success, We All Loved Each Other So Much (C’eravamo Tanto Amati, 1975), in which three men from different backgrounds...
Ettore Scola, who has died aged 84, was the last in the direct line of great Italian film directors who descended from the neo-realists of the 1940s. “The inequalities and corruption of Italian society have always been a rich source of inspiration for my cinema, which I inherited from the neo-realists,” remarked Scola, who generally used satire and farce to pour scorn on the Italian social-democratic regimes from the 1960s onwards. Many of his “Italian style” films, the majority of which had ambivalent main characters played by Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, take place against a background of historic events.
Typical was Scola’s first international success, We All Loved Each Other So Much (C’eravamo Tanto Amati, 1975), in which three men from different backgrounds...
- 1/26/2016
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Italian writer-director Ettore Scola died Tuesday in Rome at age 84. He was considered to be among the last of a generation of Italian greats, politically engaged and with a keen eye for the issues facing his country. A fixture in Cannes in the 1970s and ’80s, he directed four movies nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. His passing was not lost on filmmaker (and certainly film historian) Martin Scorsese, who released this statement today: “Ettore Scola was…...
- 1/22/2016
- Deadline
Huffpo The story of the first trans Oscar nominee, Angela Morley in the 1970s
Gothamist This will be such a sad day in Manhattan. The last remaining gala premiere type single screen movie theater in Manhattan is closing in a couple of weeks for good. Goodbye Ziegfeld Theater where I first saw Michelle Pfeiffer in the pflesh, where I first laid eyes on Moulin Rouge!, where so many filmmakers and actors premiered their films.
The Film Stage Taylor Sheridan who wrote Sicario is looking to make his directorial debut with his new screenplay Wind River
Variety Ettore Scola, the Italian director has died at 84 years of age. Among his best known films were three Foreign Language Film Oscar nominees: A Special Day (1977), The Family (1987) and Le Bal (1983)
Coming Soon Jennifer Lawrence will star in Marita about Fidel Castro's young lover who became involved in an assassination attempt on his life.
Gothamist This will be such a sad day in Manhattan. The last remaining gala premiere type single screen movie theater in Manhattan is closing in a couple of weeks for good. Goodbye Ziegfeld Theater where I first saw Michelle Pfeiffer in the pflesh, where I first laid eyes on Moulin Rouge!, where so many filmmakers and actors premiered their films.
The Film Stage Taylor Sheridan who wrote Sicario is looking to make his directorial debut with his new screenplay Wind River
Variety Ettore Scola, the Italian director has died at 84 years of age. Among his best known films were three Foreign Language Film Oscar nominees: A Special Day (1977), The Family (1987) and Le Bal (1983)
Coming Soon Jennifer Lawrence will star in Marita about Fidel Castro's young lover who became involved in an assassination attempt on his life.
- 1/21/2016
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
This month on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by Aaron West, Mark Hurne and David Blakeslee to discuss the April 2016 Criterion Collection line-up, update a few theories on the wacky New Year’s drawing, as well as discuss the latest in Criterion rumors, news, packaging, and more.
Subscribe to The Newsstand in iTunes or via RSS
Contact us with any feedback.
Shownotes Topics Wacky New Year’s Drawing Follow-up The April 2016 Criterion Collection Line-up Teases: Kurosawa’s Dreams, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, Antoine Doinel Phantom Pages: King Hu, some names related to Tampopo Chimes at Midnight poster Artificial Eye announces Tarkovsky titles. Maybe an end to the Andrei Rublev drum? Arrow splits up Fassbinder set, releasing The Marriage of Maria Braun. Janus Films’ new homepage Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Story of Last Chrysanthemums on Janus new page. Ettore Scola passes away at 84. Episode Links Help Send...
Subscribe to The Newsstand in iTunes or via RSS
Contact us with any feedback.
Shownotes Topics Wacky New Year’s Drawing Follow-up The April 2016 Criterion Collection Line-up Teases: Kurosawa’s Dreams, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, Antoine Doinel Phantom Pages: King Hu, some names related to Tampopo Chimes at Midnight poster Artificial Eye announces Tarkovsky titles. Maybe an end to the Andrei Rublev drum? Arrow splits up Fassbinder set, releasing The Marriage of Maria Braun. Janus Films’ new homepage Dragon Inn, A Touch of Zen, The Story of Last Chrysanthemums on Janus new page. Ettore Scola passes away at 84. Episode Links Help Send...
- 1/21/2016
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
Revered Italian director and screenwriter behind A Special Day has died in Rome.
Ettore Scola, the Italian director and screenwriter, has died in Rome aged 84.
During a career that lasted more than three decades and garnered a slew of festival accolades Scola will be remembered for titles including Ugly, Dirty And Bad, which won him best director at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, as well as 1987’s The Family, 1977’s Viva Italia!, and 1983’s Le Bal, all of which were nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars.
A Special Day, the 1977 Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni drama, was nominated for two Academy Awards and won three Golden Globes.
After entering the film industry as a screenwriter in 1953, Scola made his debut as a director in 1964 on Let’s Talk About Women, in which Vittorio Gassman plays different characters who seduce women.
Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi paid tribute to Scola on Twitter, saying he was...
Ettore Scola, the Italian director and screenwriter, has died in Rome aged 84.
During a career that lasted more than three decades and garnered a slew of festival accolades Scola will be remembered for titles including Ugly, Dirty And Bad, which won him best director at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, as well as 1987’s The Family, 1977’s Viva Italia!, and 1983’s Le Bal, all of which were nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars.
A Special Day, the 1977 Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni drama, was nominated for two Academy Awards and won three Golden Globes.
After entering the film industry as a screenwriter in 1953, Scola made his debut as a director in 1964 on Let’s Talk About Women, in which Vittorio Gassman plays different characters who seduce women.
Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi paid tribute to Scola on Twitter, saying he was...
- 1/20/2016
- ScreenDaily
Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSThe deaths seem to just keep coming these days, and we've had two more big losses over the last week: actor Alan Rickman, 1946 - 2016, beloved for his villain in Die Hard and his work in the Harry Potter films, but this hardly describes his full career; and Italian director Ettore Scola, 1931 - 2016, who made We All Love Each Other So Much (1974) and A Special Day (1977), which was nominated for an Oscar.Speaking of Oscars, the nominations have been announced for the 88th Academy Awards, with Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant and George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road sweeping up, and with many notable absences, particularly actors, crew and films of color, as well as Todd Haynes' Carol.Huge news for U.S. publications: the satiric periodical The Onion,...
- 1/20/2016
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Veteran Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola passed away Tuesday in Rome. Local media reported he had been in a coma since Sunday. He was 84. A director and screenwriter, Scola was considered to be among the last of a generation of Italian greats; politically engaged and with a keen eye for the issues facing his country. He was a fixture in Cannes in the 70s and 80s and four movies he directed were nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Scola began his career as a…...
- 1/20/2016
- Deadline
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