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With Afternoons of Solitude, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra returns to Spain for his first documentary: a bloodsoaked portrait of celebrity bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and the procession of bulls he slays. Captured in tight framing, Serra’s camera conjures never-before-seen proximity to a frontier of bloodsport. Outside the bullring, Roca Rey floats through limousines and empty hotel rooms: a startlingly somber, almost gentle presence. Without a glimmer of exposition or polemical critique, Afternoons of Solitude builds from an innate curiosity about violence and the seemingly irrational conquests of its practitioners who launch headfirst into the brink of death, risking all for nothing. Though Serra refutes it as a “masculine” performance, bullfighting––with its traditional costuming and theatricality––reveals itself as a strange anachronism: a specter of old values and cultures haunting modern Spain.

I spoke with Serra at the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. We discussed the enigma of Roca Rey,...

The poetic title, Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de Soledad), might evoke tranquility and relaxation, maybe a few lazy hours in a hammock with a book. But don’t be deceived. Albert Serra’s transfixing portrait of 27-year-old Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and of the hotly contentious Spanish tradition in which he has emerged as a star, never downplays the visceral brutality of what’s essentially blood sport as performance art. Anyone with a low threshold for cruelty to animals will find this a harrowing watch, but for those with the stomach for it, the doc is a unique study of discipline, bravado, laser focus and showmanship.

Serra, known for stripped-down slow-cinema narratives that can be both seductive and distancing, had something of an international breakthrough with 2022’s Pacifiction. This nonfiction detour evinces many qualities familiar from his dramatic features, among them the atmospheric, quasi-dream state; the long takes, usually...

John Turturro, one of this year’s recipients of an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award for career achievement took time between his sold-out masterclass and presenting an open-air screening of “Barton Fink” to visit the Variety Lounge, presented by the Sarajevo Film Festival and Bh Telecom.

Turturro, who said he was making his first visit to the Bosnian capital, described visiting various mosques, the Jewish Museum, Grand Synagogue and Jewish cemetery along with other historical sites.

Turturro, who acted in two of the fall film festival’s most hotly anticipated titles, discussed playing the ex-boyfriend of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” He will be going to Toronto to support that film and Sean Ellis’s “The Cut.”

Turturro mentioned the advantages of having a long-term relationship with a filmmaker, noting that, “It’s a big advantage because you develop...

John Turturro is to receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival in Bosnia, which runs from Aug. 16 to 23. The award is in recognition of his contribution to the film industry and his talent as an actor, director and screenwriter.

Jovan Marjanović, director of Sarajevo Film Festival, said: “With a career spanning over four decades, he has delivered unforgettable performances in a diverse range of roles. His dedication to his craft, versatility, and ability to bring depth and authenticity to every character he embodies have made him a joy to look at every time he enters the scene.”

Turturro studied at Suny New Paltz and the Yale School of Drama. He has worked with a number of acclaimed filmmakers, appearing in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money,” Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show,” Francesco Rosi’s “La Tregua,...

Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan will be feted by the upcoming Locarno Film Festival with a career achievement award, celebrating his more than 100 credits across a multitude of genres.

The Bollywood star will receive the award in the festival’s Piazza Grande on August 10. He will then also participate in a public conversation the next day.

The festival will also screen 2002 hit costume drama Devdas, in which Khan plays a man whose life spirals out of control after his family forbids him from marrying his childhood sweetheart.

Previous winners of Locarno’s Pardo alla Carriera include Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Víctor Erice,, Jane Birkin, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, and, most recently in 2023, Tsai Ming-liang.

“To welcome a living legend like Shah Rukh Khan in Locarno is a dream come true. The wealth and breadth of his contribution to Indian cinema is unprecedented.

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan will be honoured by the Locarno Film Festival with its Honorary Leopard achievement award in recognition of his outstanding career in Indian cinema spanning more than 100 films “in a breathtaking multitude of genres,” it announced on Tuesday.

Khan, who is known in India as “King Khan,” will be making the trek to receive the award on Aug. 10 on the Swiss fest’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande open-air venue where his 2022 love triangle drama “Devdas” – in which Khan plays the titular character, a tragic romantic alcoholic – will screen, followed by an onstage conversation on Aug. 11. “Devdas,” which scored a BAFTA nomination and won numerous Indian awards, marked the first time many Western audience members were exposed to mainstream Bollywood.

“To welcome a living legend like Shah Rukh Kahn in Locarno is a dream come true!” said Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro in a statement.

Nazzaro went...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

One of the 2022’s most resonant films, Aftersun looks at the scratchy dynamics between a father and daughter while on vacation. It’s about memory, the finite nature of the relationships in our lives, and the difficulties of a parent’s diminishing mental health. Charlotte Wells knows where to put the camera in her debut—undeterred from taking risks, from placing her characters outside of the frame, from looking at shadows instead of the people themselves. Aftersun is a rare, tremendous first film, full of heart and focused melancholy; it breaks you down and fills you up simultaneously. The consistent inclusion of camcorder footage, and the fact that it enhances the story rather than becoming a distraction, further proclaims...

Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s Sophia Loren: La Signora Di Napoli

Edoardo Ponti’s The Life Ahead; Mario Mattoli’s Poverty And Nobility opposite Totò and Enzo Turco; Alessandro Blasetti’s Too Bad She’s Bad with Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio De Sica; Dino Risi’s The Sign Of Venus (Il Segno Di Venere) with Franca Valeri and Raf Vallone; Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Eleanora Brown, plus De Sica’s 1963 and Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio All’Italiana) with Mastroianni, and The Voyage (Il Viaggio) with Richard Burton; Stanley Donen’s Arabesque with Gregory Peck; Francesco Rosi’s More Than A Miracle (C’era Una Volta) with Omar Sharif; Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong with Marlon Brando; Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (Una......

Black Souls CinemaltaliaUK’s mini film festival returns to the Riverside Studios in London for its fourth edition this month. The festival - titled Donne di Mafia - focuses on the role and presence of women in the Italian mafia, and their portrayal in Italian cinema and runs on the weekend of March 16 to 17.

Among the films screening this year is Francesco Munzi's Black Souls, based on a true story and featuring Aurora Quattrocchi as an elderly matriarch and Pippo Mezzapesa's Burning Hearts, which charts the love story of a man and a woman from rival clans.

Nevia, directed by Nunzia De Stefano, about a girl who joins a circus, is also in the line-up along with Francesco Rosi's 1958 debut The Challenge. The screenings will be followed by Q&As, with guests inlcuding Munzi and Virginia Apicella, who stars in Nevia.

The event is sponsored by the University of Bath,...

Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, 1983’s gorgeously haunting Nostalghia, also marked new territory for the director. His first film made outside the Ussr, the Cannes Best Director winner (a prize he shared with Robert Bresson for L’Argent), was also a unique collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra, frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Francesco Rosi. Now restored in 4K in 2022 by Csc – Cinetecanazionale in collaboration with Rai Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and the original soundtrack preserved at Rai Cinema, the restoration will begin rolling out on February 21 at NYC’s Film Forum via Kino Lorber and we’re pleased to exclusively unveil the trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Andrei Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word ‘nostalghia’ conveys ‘the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.’ This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei,...

Michel Ciment, the esteemed French film critic, historian, author, radio producer and editor of the influential film magazine Positif, has died. He was 85.

His death was reported Monday by the French radio channel France Inter, the home of his culture program Le Masque et la Plume since 1970.

Ciment was “perhaps the freest and most encyclopedic mind that film criticism has ever produced,” Le Masque et la Plume producer Jérome Garcin in a statement. He made what would be his last appearance on the show in September.

The Paris native also produced Projection privée on France Culture radio from 1990-2016. He was “an immense critic and historian who devoted his entire life to passing on, in words and in writing, his erudition and his passion for the seventh art,” a statement from the channel said.

Ciment joined Positif after sending in a story about the Orson Welles film The Trial in 1963 and would become its editor,...

Marina Cicogna, a film producer and one of the first women to establish herself in the traditionally male cinema environment in Italy, died Saturday in Rome. She was 89.

Cicogna produced several important Italian films, including Metti, una Sera a Cena by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) by Elio Petri, with the latter winning the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1971. The New York Times called her “one of the most powerful women in European cinema.”

Her extraordinary experience and career were recounted in 2021 in the documentary film Marina Cicogna. Life and Everything Else by Andrea Bettinetti and in her autobiography, Ancora Spero, released this year by Marsilio Publishing.

Cicogna died with Benedetta Gardona, her companion of more than 30 years, by her side.

Ahead of receiving the 2023 David Award for Lifetime Achievement this year, Cicogna...

If you're unfamiliar with the popular video game, it may have been a little jarring to suddenly hear the "Toreadors March" from the French opera "Carmen" blasting through the speakers of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza in the trailer for Universal and Blumhouse's film adaptation of "Five Nights at Freddy's." As seemingly random as the needle drop might seem to non-fans, this is actually a reference to the earliest non-original song played in the series. When the power goes out at night, a little music box-like rendition of the song is emitted from Freddy Fazbear's animatronic, turning the song into a terrifying omen of the dangers to come. The original game uses a sample from "1905 Regina Music Box: Classical Overture" from Hot Ideas Inc. The tune was the most used music box of the franchise and has become Freddy Fazbear's signature leitmotif.

While it's unknown how the "FNaF" movie will incorporate the song,...

Giuliano Montaldo, the prolific Italian director, actor and film industry executive, whose works comprise powerful political drama “Sacco and Vanzetti” about the Massachusetts trial and execution in 1927 of accused Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, has died at his home in Rome. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday by his family and reported by multiple Italian media outlets. No cause of death was revealed.

Born in 1930 in Genoa, Montaldo was still a Turin university student when, in 1950, director Carlo Lizzani gave him a role in the film “Achtung Banditi!.” Montaldo then moved to Rome in 1954, where he worked as a journalist for Italian newspaper Il Tempo and after a few years decided to pursue a filmmaking career.

Montaldo cut his teeth as a director working as an assistant to Lizzani and then to Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergio Leone, and Francesco Rosi, learning the ropes from some of the masters of Italian cinema.

Tarak Ben Ammar has big plans for Italy. The Franco-Tunisian film and TV mogul is already a major player in the Italian industry thanks to Eagle Pictures, the production and distribution group he acquired in 2007 that is now Italy’s largest independent distributor due to exclusive distribution deals with Paramount and Sony Pictures for the territory. Ben Ammar joined Tom Cruise on the Rome red carpet for the June 19 world premiere of Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and later introduced Cruise to new Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. “The meeting [between Cruise and Meloni] was very interesting. The prime minister knows a lot about cinema,” says Ben Ammar about the far-right leader.

Alongside Eagle’s distribution deals, the company has also partnered with Sony to co-produce six films together, including The Equalizer 3, the latest in Antoine Fuqua’s action franchise starring Denzel Washington that was shot entirely in Italy.

The Locarno Film Festival will fete Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård with its Honorary Career Leopard award at the upcoming edition, running August 2 to 12.

The award ceremony will take place August 4 at the Piazza Grande, followed by an audience Q&a at the Spazio Cinema on August 5, while the actor’s 1990 pic Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg by Kjell Grede, will screen on August 3.

Alongside his work with European filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, for whom he starred five times, including Breaking The Waves, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, Skarsgård is known for his roles in big Hollywood films such as Pirates of the Caribbean films, Mamma Mia!, Thor, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — the second part of which will be released this fall.

Also active in television, Skarsgård won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a miniseries in the HBO drama Chernobyl. He recently starred in...

Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, the arthouse darling known for works including Venice Golden Lion winner “Vive L’Amour” and “The River,” which scored the Berlin Silver Bear, will be celebrated by the Locarno Film Festival with its Honorary Leopard achievement award.

The iconoclastic auteur, who is a key figure in Taiwan’s so-called Second New Wave, will receive the prize from the Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema during an Aug. 6 ceremony held on its 8,000-seat outdoor Piazza Grande venue.

The tribute to Tsai Ming-liang will also involve an onstage conversation with the director on the future of cinema and a screening of the helmer’s 2020 film “Days” (Rizi), as well as an art gallery exhibition of his experimental works.

The Malaysian-born Tsai made his debut in the early 1990s, breaking out internationally with “Vive L’Amour” 1994, followed by “The River” in 1996 and “The Hole,” which bowed in Cannes in 1998. His “The Wayward Cloud...

The Locarno Film Festival will fete multi-award-winning Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang with an Honorary Career Leopard award at the upcoming edition running from August 2 to 12.

Regarded as a key figure in the Second New Wave of Taiwanese cinema, Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang made his debut in the early 1990s, breaking out internationally with Vive L’Amour, which won Venice’s Golden Lion in 1994.

Other award-winning titles include with The River, which won the Jury Award at Berlin in 1996, while in 2009, his work Visage (Face) became the first film to be included in the collection of the Louvre Museum’s “Le Louvre s’offre aux cineastes”.

Tsai’s connections with the art world have grown over the years and he has been invited to participate in various art exhibitions and festivals, while he developed aesthetic ideas such as “Hand-sculpted Cinema” and “The removal of industrial processes from art making”.

The festival’s celebration...

There's a scene in French choreographer-turned-director Benjamin Millepied's adaptation of Georges Bizet's 1875 opera "Carmen" (out now in theaters) in which Masilda (played by Spanish actress Rossy de Palma) tells Carmen (played by Mexican actress Melissa Barrera), "Dance. Dancing will heal."

In the 10-minute scene that takes place halfway through the film, there's dialogue, there's tears, there's shared laughs, there's joy, and there's, of course, dancing. If there's one scene in the film that really embodies both Millepied's genius in creating an entirely new genre out of this classic adaptation as well as Barrera's ability to transform herself into any role, it's this one. It plays out like visual poetry (carried by Nicholas Britell's brilliant score and songs by Mexican iconic singer Julieta Venegas), making it distinct from your typical musical or dance feature. Barrera flows between ballet, flamenco, and interpretative dance so seamlessly, she hardly needs dialogue...

Opera lovers flock to performances in order to be thrilled, aroused, overjoyed, moved to tears. Ditto disciples of dance, musical-theater fanatics, and — the worst, most masochistic, and unrepentant art-rush addicts of them all — moviegoers. Georges Bizet’s Carmen shocked audiences when it premiered in 1875 in Paris; eventually, his story of a Spanish soldier and a Roma traveler would become a staple of repertory companies and one of the best-known operas of all time. (Hum the opening notes of this, and at least one person will break into their best Beverly Sills impression.

This review originally ran May 25, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.

If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.

This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director, Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to Greek-French director Costa-Gavras with its Pardo alla carriera lifetime achievement award.

The longtime Paris-based master of politically engaged cinema will be on hand at the prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie filmmaking to receive the prize during a ceremony on its Piazza Grande square on Aug. 11 followed by an audience-led conversation the next day.

Locarno will also host screenings of two of Costa Gravras’ lesser known films: “Un homme de trop” (“Shock Troops”) from 1967, and “Compartiment tueurs” (“The Sleeping Car Murders”), which is his 1965 debut feature.

In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Costa-Gavras — which is short for Konstantinos Gavras — has become known for highly political works, such as 1969’s “Z,” about the military’s coup d’etat in Greece, which won the foreign film Oscar in 1969; and 1982’s “Missing,” which starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in a story inspired by the...

Producer and filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt has shot documentaries and five feature films in Sicily. Through his docs, he discovered that Bagheria-born Giuseppe Tornatore was highly influenced by the monsters of the Villa Palagonia, and that Francesco Rosi shot his movie “Salvatore Giuliano” on all original locations. Schmidt’s features shot in Sicily include 2021’s “Palermo. Gente,” of which he writes “I was filming the Sicilian way of life as it is represented in a small three-face statue: showing a girl, the devil and the death.”

His impressions of Sicily offer compelling pictures of the island’s locations:

You step out from your Agrigento hotel room to the terrace and there you are in front of the Greek temples. You walk down a little staircase to Palermo’s Catacombe dei Cappuccini, where the air-dried corpses of some hundred men and women hang on walls or lie in shelves and show faces...

Italian producer Massimo Cristaldi, who as a production manager worked with masters such as Federico Fellini and Francesco Rosi before setting up his own company and shepherding films including prizewinning drama “Sicilian Ghost Story,” has died. He was 66.

Cristaldi’s death was announced over the weekend by his Rome-based company Cristaldi Pictures in a statement that did not specify the cause.

Born in 1956, Massimo Cristaldi was the only son of prominent producer Franco Cristaldi, the triple Oscar-winner who made Pietro Germi’s “Divorce Italian Style,” Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso.”

In 1974 Massimo Cristaldi started cutting his teeth in the film business first as a production assistant and eventually, starting in the 1980s, becoming a line producer on many of his father’s productions, working with Fellini, Rosi, Tornatore, and many other Italian cinema greats.

After Franco Cristaldi’s death in 1992, he took over management of...

The Cineteca di Bologna, which runs Il Cinema Ritrovato – the other major European event dedicated to heritage film alongside the Lumière Fest in Lyon – has announced a slate of upcoming releases to mark the centenaries of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Francesco Rosi.

These include Pasolini’s .”Uccellacci et Uccellini.” and “.Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo”. and Francesco Rosi’s .”C’era una Volta”.. Other notable works aiming for a 2022 release in time for the Cannes, Bologna and Lumière festivals include Vittorio de Sica’s Oscar-winning .Sciuscià..

The centenary is generating huge interest in Pasolini and the incredible modernity of his work,. Cineteca chief Gian Luca Farinelli told Variety. .”His films still surprise us, they haven’t aged, they were avant-garde in the ’60s and they still are today. These poets and writers turned to cinema and invented a whole new language, a new vision .like the gaze of a Renaissance painter. It...

After a hiatus where New York’s theaters closed during the pandemic, we’re delighted to announce the return of NYC Weekend Watch, our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. While many theaters are still focused on a selection of new releases, a handful of worthwhile repertory screenings are taking place.

Bam

Rarely screened and fully restored, Jacques Rivette’s masterpieces Duelle and Noroît are now playing.

Roxy Cinema

A 35mm double-feature of Demonlover and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce is running this weekend.

Metrograph

“Get Crazy” includes Buñuel, Assayas, Visconti, and Minnelli, while a 4K restoration of Possession continues.

Film at Lincoln Center

A restoration of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song has begun running.

IFC Center

While the 4K restoration of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure continues and World of Wong Kar-wai keeps going, Arrebato, Crash, and Mulholland Dr. have showings.

Anthology Film Archives

Restorations of the experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller run this weekend.

After a hiatus where New York’s theaters closed during the pandemic, we’re delighted to announce the return of NYC Weekend Watch, our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. While many theaters are still focused on a selection of new releases, a handful of worthwhile repertory screenings are taking place.

Metrograph

“We Won’t Grow Old Together” includes The Brood and Carol on 35mm; a 4K restoration of Possession is running; two of Clint Eastwood’s greatest films, A Perfect World and White Hunter, Black Heart, screen this Saturday.

Film at Lincoln Center

NYFF’s Revivals winds down with new restorations of Assault on Precinct 13, Ratcatcher, and Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella.

IFC Center

In anticipation of Bergman Island, films by Mia Hansen-Løve screen side-by-side with Ingmar Bergman; while the 4K restoration of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure continues and World of Wong Kar-wai keeps going, Arrebato, Crash, and Mulholland Dr. have showings.

It’s yet another masterpiece from the Italian director Francesco Rosi, adapting a fiction novel about a political murder conspiracy that is altogether too much of a good fit for the troubled Italy of 1975. Crime star Lino Ventura is the incorruptible detective investigating a series of killings of high-level judges, who begins to intuit that his superiors want the murders to continue. Dark and moody, Rosi’s picture is impeccably directed for a kind of nagging, uneasy suspense, with frightening hints that Ventura is being drawn into a bigger, more sinister frame. With Charles Vanel, Max von Sydow and Fernando Rey, and music by Piero Piccioni. The insightful audio commentary is by Alex Cox. The original Italian title is even more blood-curdling: Cadaveri eccelenti.

Illustrious Corpses

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1976 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 121 min. / Cadaveri eccellenti; The Context / Street Date September 28, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Lino Ventura, Tino Carraro, Marcel Bozzuffi,...

The Criterion Channel has unveiled their lineup for next month and it’s another strong slate, featuring retrospectives of Carole Lombard, John Waters, Robert Downey Sr., Luis García Berlanga, Jane Russell, and Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman. Also in the lineup is new additions to their Queersighted series, notably Todd Haynes’ early film Poison (Safe is also premiering in a separate presentation), William Friedkin’s Cruising, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorama.

The new restorations of Manoel de Oliveira’s stunning Francisca and Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli will join the channel, alongside Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, Bong Joon Ho’s early short film Incoherence, and Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta.

See the lineup below and explore more on criterionchannel.com.

#Blackmendream, Shikeith, 2014

12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet, 1957

About Tap, George T. Nierenberg, 1985

The AIDS Show, Peter Adair and Rob Epstein, 1986

The Assignation, Curtis Harrington, 1953

Aya of Yop City,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lina Wertmüller's The Basilisks is showing on Mubi starting January 2, 2021 in most countries in the series First Films First.In Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (2012) (“Everything in its right place and nothing in order”), the autobiography of Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich, the director recounts the fortuitous way her debut feature came to be. “It was 1961, I was going to visit Francesco Rosi on the set of Salvatore Giuliano with [Italian film critic] Tulio Kezich and on our way we decided to stop by Palazzo San Gervasio,” the director reminisced, “my father’s native village.” “For me,” Wertmüller continued, “it was the discovery of a world.” Struck by this corner of southern Italy seemingly untouched by the economic boom, where modernity was simultaneously coveted and repudiated, Wertmüller, exhorted by Kezich, wrote the screenplay for I basilischi in a week.

The Beloved Italian Movie Cinema Paradiso (1989) directed by Giuseppe Tornatore is now available on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD From Arrow Academy

A Celebration Of Youth, Friendship, And The Everlasting Magic Of The Movies

A winner of awards across the world including Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, 5 BAFTA Awards including Best Actor, Original Screenplay and Score, the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and many more.

Giuseppe Tornatore s loving homage to the cinema tells the story of Salvatore, a successful film director, returning home for the funeral of Alfredo, his old friend who was the projectionist at the local cinema throughout his childhood. Soon memories of his first love affair with the beautiful Elena and all the highs and lows that shaped his life come flooding back, as Salvatore reconnects with the community he left 30 years earlier.

The original award-winning theatrical version of Tornatore s...

Italy’s storied Titanus studio, producers of myriad golden era works from Cinema Italiano, has inked a global distribution deal with pubcaster Rai’s sales unit Rai Com for its entire library of roughly 400 titles.

The landmark agreement, besides distribution, entails a collaboration to restore and preserve the Titanus library, which is a treasure trove comprising early works by Italo masters such as Federico Fellini and Francesco Rosi, and Luchino Visconti classics, alongside plenty of genre fare including cult horror helmers Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

It’s a mix of classics and more rarely seen pics featuring a wide array of late and living Italo stars, comprising Alberto Sordi, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale (pictured).

Established in 1904 by Gustavo Lombardo, Titanus was a true Italian major, which during the 1960s forged a partnership with MGM. They slowed down considerably from the mid-1960s onwards after...

Italian actor and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, who played the prying journalist Gianna Brezzi in the Dario Argento cult classic “Deep Red”(Profondo Rosso), and was herself a cult figure, has died. She was 70.

The cause of her death, announced by her daughter Asia Argento and Italian news reports, was not disclosed.

Born in Florence in June 1950, Nicolodi made her acting debut in Italian master Francesco Rosi’s “Many Wars Ago” (Uomini Contro). She was working with helmer Elio Petri when in 1974 she met Dario Argento, with whom she had a longstanding romance, becoming his muse both on and off the screen. In 1975, Nicolodi gave birth to their daughter, Asia Argento, now an actor, director, singer and well-known media personality.

After “Deep Red’s” release in 1975, Nicolodi went on to perform in Dario Argento films “Inferno,”(1980), “Tenebre” (1982), “Phenomena” (1984) and “Opera” (1987).

She is also credited with conceiving the original idea and contributing...

The November 2020 lineup for The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, toplined by a Claire Denis retrospective, including the brand-new restoration of Beau travail, along with Chocolat, No Fear, No Die, Nenette and Boni, Towards Mathilde, 35 Shots of Rum, and White Material.

There will also be a series celebrating 30 years of The Film Foundation, featuring a new interview with Martin Scorsese by Ari Aster, as well as a number of their most essential restorations, including films by Jia Zhangke, Ritwik Ghatak, Luchino Visconti, Shirley Clarke, Med Hondo, and more.

There’s also David Lynch’s new restoration of The Elephant Man, retrospectives dedicated to Ngozi Onwurah, Nadav Lapid, and Terence Nance, a new edition of the series Queersighted titled Queer Fear, featuring a new conversation between series programmer Michael Koresky and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman, and much more.

See the lineup below and learn more on the official site.

It feels like some lost Italian masterpiece from the 1970s. unearthed from a locked vault after decades of gathering dust and slotted into the middle of a late De Sica/ mid-period Francesco Rosi triple feature. The score borrows bits of classical music, Sixties Euro-pop and Eighties Italo-disco — perfect for a period piece rife with both vintage signifiers and modern anachronisms. All the talk of socialism vs. staunch individualism could have come straight from a beer hall in 1920 or a presidential town hall in 2020. It’s a last-century tale whose preoccupations with ambition,...

Chances are, if you’ve seen many of the late films of Theodoros Angelopoulos, Michelangelo Antonioni (everything since L’avventura), Marco Bellocchio, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini (almost everything since Amarcord), Mario Monicelli, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia), the Taviani brothers, and/or Luchino Visconti, and paid much attention to their script credits, you know who Tonino Guerra (1920–2012) was and is—a ubiquitous presence in modernist European cinema, especially its Italian branches. Petri was his first cinematic employer, after Guerra started out as a schoolteacher and poet whose parents were illiterate; later on, he became a visual artist as well as a screenwriter with over a hundred credits.Even after one acknowledges the exceptionally collaborative role played by multiple writers on Italian films, it seems that no one else was considered quite as essential by so many important directors. In Nicola Tranquillino’s documentary about Tonino (visible on YouTube...

It’s a perfect movie for a dark time: Carlo Levi’s famed novel about a political undesirable became a major Italian miniseries by the great Francesco Rosi, starring the now-legendary Gian Maria Volontè. In Mussolini’s most popular years of make-Italy-great-again Fascism, a dissident is given an indefinite ‘time out,’ an exile to a small town in a corner of the country so remote and primitive that not even Christianity could fully change it. He expects nothing but receives revelations about his country, his life and one’s place in society. It’s meditative, it’s illuminating, it’s like a book one can’t put down. It’s also uncut, as opposed to the theatrical version that made a splash here in 1980, as simply Eboli.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1043

1979 / Color / 1:33 flat / 220 150, 120 min. / Cristo si è fermato a Eboli / available through The Criterion Collection...

When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]...

When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]...

Will there even be an Olympics in our foreseeable future? Kon Ichikawa’s 1964 masterpiece is still the most spectacular/intimate film about human athletics ever, a celebration of the human body and its abilities. An epic for people that don’t necessarily like sports, it’s less a documentary of the event than a collection of moving impressions. Who knew that sports could be so emotional? Criterion’s 4K restoration disc is a beauty.

Tokyo Olympiad

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 155

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 168 min. / Tokyo orinpikku / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 23, 2020 / 39.95

Cinematography: Shigeo Hayashida, Kazuo Miyagawa, Shigeichi Nagano, Kenichi Nakamura, Tadashi Tanaka

Art direction: Yusaku Kamekura

Original Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

Written by Kon Ichikawa, Yoshio Shirasaka, Shuntaro Tanikawa and Natto Wada

Produced by Suketaru Taguchi

Directed by Kon Ichikawa

Japan made preparations for years to host its proud 1964 Olympics. As I just reported last week, an outer...

The September 2020 lineup of The Criterion Collection has been unveiled, and it’s a packed one. Leading the list is Claire Denis’s masterpiece Beau travail, which has finally received a new 4K digital restoration and features a conversation between the director and Barry Jenkins, and much more.

The third edition of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project is also getting a release, featuring films from Brazil (Pixote), Cuba (Lucía), Indonesia (After the Curfew), Iran (Downpour), Mauritania (Soleil Ô), and Mexico (Dos monjes). David Lynch’s second feature The Elephant Man will get the Criterion treatment as well with a new 4K restoration, plus a special feature lineup featuring Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading from their book Room to Dream.

The full-length, four-hour restored cut of Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli will also be arriving in September. Lastly, a pair of crime drama classics from Jules Dassin...

While the Venice Film Festival is poised to lead the way among top-tier film events a trio of smaller Italian summer fests with international standing is now also set to hold physical editions prior to September when the Lido plans to take its post-pandemic plunge.

Restrictions are rapidly lifting in Italy, where the coronavirus curve is finally flattening after the longest lockdown in Europe. Starting Wednesday Italy is allowing travelers from the 25 other members of the Schengen visa-free travel area that covers much of Europe to enter the country with no restrictions.

And, along with Venice topper Alberto Barbera, several other Italian fest chiefs are busy trying to rise to the challenge of not cancelling their events or making them go entirely digital.

Italy’s first post-lockdown shindig, barring complications, will be the annual Ischia Global Film and Music Fest, renamed “Ischia Smart 2020” this year, and set to be held...

The David di Donatello Awards, which are modeled on the Oscars, were established in the 1950s as Italy’s film industry started thriving amid the country’s postwar reconstruction effort.

Below are some milestones that provide a partial mini-history of postwar Italian cinema.

1956: The first David di Donatello awards ceremony takes place at Rome’s Cinema Fiamma. The gold statuette, which is a replica of Michelangelo’s David, is made by Bulgari. Vittorio De Sica, Walt Disney, and Gina Lollobrigida are among the year’s prizewinners.

1957: The Davids ceremony moves to Taormina’s Ancient Greek Theater, which will host the ceremony for many more years to come. Federico Fellini wins the best director prize for “Nights of Cabiria.”

1958: Anna Magnani wins best actress for George Cukor’s “Wild Is the Wind.” Marilyn Monroe is feted for her role in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” directed by Laurence Olivier.

Greta Gerwig named best director for Little Women.

Bong Joon Ho’s impressive awards season continued on Saturday night (January 4) as Parasite was named best picture of the year in the National Society Of Film Critics’ 54th annual vote.

The South Korean dark comedy, which is in the running for best foreign language film in Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, earned 44 votes under the Society’s weighted ballot system, finishing ahead of Little Women on 27 and Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood on 22.

Greta Gerwig was named best director for Little Women, edging out Bong with 39 votes against 36, while Martin Scorsese...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSPaul Thomas Anderson on set of Punch-Drunk LovePaul Thomas Anderson is set to return to his hometown of San Fernando Valley—last seen in his 2002 Punch-Drunk Love—with a 1970s-set high school movie, which will follow a student who is also a successful child actor. Recommended VIEWINGCult director Richard Stanley returns from his 25-year hiatus from directing narrative films with this his Nicolas Cage-led H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space, which now has a rapturous trailer. Stanley is also currently in the early stages of developing an adaptation of Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror. We are very fond of Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe’s oneiric cinema, thus we are completely taken by the trailer for his forthcoming Fire Will Come, which premiered in Cannes. An entirely engrossing trailer for Blumhouse’s reinvention of H.G. Wells The Invisible Man,...

Jones has also run the Cambidge Film Festival since 1981.

Tony Jones, co-founder of the Picturehouse cinema chain, is to receive the Exhibition Achievement Award at the 2019 Screen Awards.

He will receive the prize, sponsored by the UK Cinema Association (Ukca), at the ceremony on November 28 at The Ballroom Southbank in London.

The rest of this year’s Screen Awards nominees have been announced here.

Jones’ first major role was as co-founder of legendary Birmingham venue the Arts Lab in 1968. Jones ran the cinema programme (alongside the late Pete Walsh), kicking off with the first ever screening of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool in the UK,...

Actor, journalist, film writer and critic who was an expert on Italian cinema

The British journalist John Francis Lane, who has died aged 89, provided a vivid running commentary on Italian cinema for more than half a century, from the last great years of neorealism up to the present. He came to know many of the leading directors and stars and worked for a time as a publicist in Cinecittà, Hollywood-on-the-Tiber as it was called, and also as an actor, playing cameo parts in many films made there.

He lost count of the precise number – the IMDb database lists 29 movie and TV appearances – but he thought the actual figure was much higher. Some of them, for Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi and others, became classics. The experience greatly enriched his insight into, as he put it, the “often bizarre methods of film-making in Italy” as well as...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

“See It Big! Action,” one of the finest genre retrospectives in recent memory, continues with screenings of The French Connection, Fury Road, and Bullitt.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit plays throughout the weekend as part of an Earth Day celebration.

A series on 21st-century Latin American cinema continues with Third World this Sunday.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

“See It Big! Action,” one of the finest genre retrospectives in recent memory, is underway with screenings such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Seven Samurai.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit plays throughout the weekend as part of an Earth Day celebration.

Once undistributed for fear it would “incite racial tension,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Bam

A series on Czech titan Věra Chytilová has commenced.

Metrograph

King Hu’s The Fate of Lee Khan has been restored.

Films about Thelonious Monk play back-to-back.

Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant and a print of Cronenberg’s Spider can be seen.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on Latin America’s recent sci-fi...