News

Italy’s Taormina Film Festival will honor Sharon Stone with a Golden Cariddi for Lifetime Achievement at is upcoming 70th edition this month.

The actress will follow in the footsteps of previous honorees Jessica Lange, Robert De Niro, Tom Cruise, Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Richard Gere, Colin Firth, Isabelle Huppert, Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti.

Stone, who will receive the award on the closing night of the festival, will also participate in an on-stage conversation on her career as part of honor.

Since her big screen debut in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories in 1980, Stone has ratcheted up more than 150 film and TV credits, with highlights including Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Sliver and Casino, for which she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress and an Oscar nomination.

It will mark Stone’s first appearance in Taormina which hosted the Italian premiere for Basic Instinct...

Marina Cicogna, Italy’s first major female film producer who shepherded films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, including Petri’s Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” has died. She was 89.

Cicogna died on Nov. 4 in her Rome home after a long battle with an unspecified form of cancer, according to Italian news agency Ansa.

The Venice Biennale foundation is a statement, praised her as “the first female film producer in Europe” and noted that she was always deeply linked to the Venice Film Festival that was founded by her grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.

Born in Rome on May 29, 1934, to Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, Cicogna attended high school in Italy and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she struck up a friendship with Jack Warner’s daughter Barbara Warner and established a connection with Hollywood.

In...

Updated: Cecchi Gori, the movie company that once dominated Italy’s film industry and collapsed in the mid 1990s, is being revived by a group of Italian investors that are backing a partial relaunch of the storied brand behind Oscar winners “Life is Beautiful,” “Mediterraneo” and “Il Postino.”

Cecchi Gori Group was officially ruled bankrupt in 2006 by a Rome court after being awash in red ink for a decade after its owner, movie mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, branched out from film into television and acquired the A.C. Fiorentina soccer club in a bold expansion attempt that put him in competition with Silvio Berlusconi and went horribly wrong.

But even after the company’s various Italian sides went bust, its U.S. branches – Cecchi Gori U.S.A. and Cecchi Gori Pictures – continued to operate, headed by producer Niels Juul. Operating out of Los Angeles, Juul has been instrumental to...

Italian producer Domenico Procacci, after shepherding more than 100 movies and several TV series, including Netflix’s upcoming Elena Ferrante adaptation “The Lying Life of Adults,” via his Fandango shingle, is debuting as a director with six-part documentary series “The Team.” Variety speaks to Procacci exclusively about what prompted him to go behind the camera for what he says is just a one-off experience as a director, and debuts the English-language subtitled version of the trailer, above.

The project is a deeply researched reconstruction of the complex – and sometimes comical – dynamics behind the Italian tennis team that won the 1976 Davis Cup and reached the finals for this trophy three other times between 1976 and 1980.

In “The Team,” which is being presented as a work-in-progress at the Torino Film Festival, the protagonists are the team’s players, Adriano Panatta, Corrado Barazzutti, Paolo Bertolucci, Tonino Zugarelli, and its captain, Italian tennis legend Nicola Pietrangeli.

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled its official poster by Italian illustrator and author Lorenzo Mattotti, and announced that a film by Venice native Andrea Segre looking at how the fest navigated Covid-19 last year will screen as its pre-opening event.

Titled “La Biennale di Venezia: il cinema al tempo del Covid,” which translates to “The Venice Biennale: Cinema in the time of Covid,” the pre-opener will screen on Aug. 31. The project is a video diary chronicling how Venice pulled off last year’s edition as a physical event, becoming the only top-tier international film festival to do so. Pic is produced by the Venice Biennale, the arts foundation that oversees the Venice fest, with Italy’s Rai Cinema and Istituto Luce Cinecittà.

On its pre-opening night, Venice will also screen a freshly restored copy of 1971 Italian classic “Per grazia ricevuta” (Between Miracles), directed by and starring the late great actor-director Nino Manfredi,...

Luigi Comencini's oeuvre is just bulging with goodies, a cinematic Santa-sack encompassing multiple genres and tones, in a career running from the late forties to the early nineties. I recently sang the praises of his desperate gambling comedy The Scientific Card Player, but he also made films about Casanova's boyhood, virtual reality and, in Italian Secret Service (1968), the then-resurgent espionage genre, Italian and world politics, and the decline of Italian idealism since the war.Just as Pietro Germi's Divorce: Italian Style was about murder, and De Sica's Marriage: Italian Style took in adultery, betrayal and uncertain parentage, so Comencini's title contains a bitter joke: we know this intelligence service is going to be sordid, stupid and utterly lacking in the accustomed James Bond lifestyle.But we first meet our hero, dashing Nino Manfredi, in the happier times of WWII, saving an English commando (Clive Revill) from a fascist...

Now for something truly remarkable from the neglected Spanish cinema. Luis García Berlanga's wicked satire is a humanistic black comedy, free of cynicism. The borderline Kafkaesque situation of an everyman forced into a profession that horrifies him is funny and warm hearted - but with a ruthless logic that points to universal issues beyond Franco Fascism. The Executioner Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 840 1963 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / El Verdugo / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 25, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Nino Manfredi, Emma Penella, José Isbert . Cinematography Tonino Delli Colli Film Editor Afonso Santacana Original Music Miguel Asins Arbó Written by Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, Ennio Flaiano Produced by Nazario Belmar Directed by Luis García Berlanga

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Criterion brings us 1963's The Executioner (El Verdugo), a major discovery for film fans that thought Spanish cinema began and ended with Luis Buñuel. I've seen politically-charged Spanish films from...

We here at The CriterionCast wear our admiration for The Criterion Collection squarely on our sleeves. Not only is it in the very title of this website and the podcast from which it spawned, but it is in the very DNA of what we strive to do through both ventures. At their very best, The Criterion Collection doesn’t so much bring to light gloriously dense home video releases of beloved, crystal clear classics from the history of film, but instead highlights lesser known masterpieces from throughout the world and spanning the entirety of film’s history as an artform. Be it esoteric experimental works like that of director Jean Painleve to baroque world cinema classics like La Cienaga, Criterion’s greatest achievement is giving the world a new glimpse at world history through the lens of those directors commenting on it through their films.

And few films quite hit...

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?...

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...

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the 21 restored films – 18 features and 3 shorts - that will screen in its Classics section of restored films.

The section, introduced in 2012, features a selection of classic film restorations completed over the past year by film libraries, cultural institutions or production companies around the world.

Director Giuliano Montaldo will chair the jury of film students which will award the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film and for Best Documentary on Cinema.

The 2014 Venice Classics line up:

Features

Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses), dir François Truffaut (France, 1968, Colour) restored by : Mk2

Bez końca (No End), dir Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland, 1984, 108’, Colour) restored by: Studio Filmowe Tor with the support of the National Audiovisual Institute (the Multiannual Government Programme Culture +) and the Polish Film Institute

Gelin (Bride), dir Omer Lütfi Akad (Turkey, 1973, 92’, Colour) restored by: Erman Film

Guys and Dolls, dir Joseph L. Mankiewicz (USA, 1955, 150’, Colour) restored by: Warner Bros. Motion Pictures Imaging and [link...

‘The Congress,’ ‘Jasmine,’ ‘Pinocchio’: 2013 European Film Awards’ Best Animated Feature Film nominations (Robin Wright in ‘The Congress’) The European Film Academy has announced the three nominees in the 2013 European Film Awards’ Best Animated Feature Film category. They are the following: The Congress (Israel / Germany / Poland / Luxembourg / France / Belgium), written and directed by Ari Folman, from a novel by Stanislaw Lem. Animation by Yoni Goodman. Jasmine (France), directed by Alain Ughetto, from a screenplay by Ughetto — who also provided the animation — and Jacques Reboud, with the collaboration of Chloé Inguenaud. Pinocchio (Italy / Luxembourg / France / Belgium), directed by Enzo D’Alò, from a screenplay by D’Alò and Umberto Marino. Animation by Marco Zanoni. Best European Animated Feature Film nominees: ‘The Congress,’ ‘Jasmine,’ ‘Pinocchio’ Featuring Robin Wright (as herself), Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Paul Giamatti, Danny Huston, Michael Stahl-David, and Michael Landers, The Congress shows how actress Robin Wright,...

Italian writer, poet and film-maker who adapted and directed his own novels for the screen

The distinguished Italian novelist, poet and film-maker Alberto Bevilacqua has died aged 79. Bevilacqua was one of the most respected new Italian writers of the 1960s and won fame with two novels, both of which he adapted and directed successfully for the screen: La Califfa (The Lady Caliph), published in 1964 and filmed in 1970, and Questa Specie d'Amore (This Kind of Love), published in 1966 and filmed in 1972.

Bevilacqua was born in Parma and raised in a poor family. In his youth he wrote the novel Una Città in Amore (City of Love), which was reworked and published much later, about his adolescence in Parma and how he and his family took part in the Resistance movement. In 1955 he wrote a book of stories about local life in Parma, La Polvere sull'Erba (Dust in the grass), which was...

Rome — Armando Trovajoli, an Italian who composed music for some 300 films and whose lush and playful serenade to Rome is a much-requested romantic standby for tourists, has died at age 95.

The city's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, mourned Trovajoli's passing, saying in a statement that `'the voice of Rome has been extinguished." The Italian news agency Ansa said widow Maria Paola Trovajoli announced the death Saturday, saying her husband had died a few days before in Rome but declining to give the exact date.

Roman by birth, Trovajoli began his musical career as a pianist, playing jazz and dance music. He appeared with many jazz stars, among them Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Louis Armstrong, Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.

In the 1950s, his prolific relationship with the film world took flight. Travojoli composed for many of Italy's hit movies of the next decades, especially comedies.

He wrote the music for...

Producer of Pier Paolo Pasolini's early films

Though an enterprising film producer, often ahead of his times, Alfredo Bini, who has died aged 83, is best remembered for having given the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini the chance to make his debut as a film-maker with Accattone (1960), when no other film company was prepared to back it. Bini produced more than 40 films, including all the features made by Pasolini up until 1967, including Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964). Among his other films were many starring his wife, Rosanna Schiaffino.

Bini was born in Livorno, Tuscany, and, during the second world war, ran away from home to join the army. He was wounded and got a medal, but went back to finish his studies in biology. He soon gave up the idea of a scientific career and in 1945 moved to Rome, where, after taking on various jobs, he managed a theatre group.

Monday night, watched a 1959 movie called Venezia, la luna e tu (‘Venice, the Moon and You’), in which Alberto Sordi played a gondolier who – you’ve guessed it – gets involved with two silly foreign girls. With only Tonino Delli Colli’s colour photography to recommend it, the main surprise of the film was in seeing Sordi, Nino Manfredi, and director Dino Risi – all of whom, a year or so later, became leading figures in the commedia all’italiana movement which cast a critical eye on contemporary mores in a changing Italy – caught up in such an inconsequential piece of fluff.

Tuesday morning: As there was nothing kicking off on the Lido till the evening, I caught a vaporetto over to Dorsoduro and made my way to the church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, which Donald Sutherland worked so hard to restore in Don’t Look Now. Obviously, whoever took over...