News

The Palm Spring International Film Awards Gala is always fun, and always Big with a capital ‘B’. This year’s 36th edition, the 20th hosted by indefatigable Mary Hart, who keeps it rolling along — no break for chat and dinner because once it starts you just eat while you applaud the many stars and equally starry presenters handing them their very, shall we say, unique statuettes.

The recipients are always, repeat always, plucked from the creme de la creme of Oscar hopefuls, and in fact as this season jumps into hyper gear with one ceremony after another, continuing with the Golden Globes tomorrow, every single one of Friday night’s Psiff Awards Gala honorees you will also see changing into formal attire and walking the red carpet at the Beverly Hilton on Sunday. This event was a warmup, a chance to try out heartfelt,...

Who said the French and British couldn’t get along? When they’re not lighting up the screen together in films like Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient, the 1992 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” and recently in “The Return,” based on the last chapters of Homer’s “Odyssey,” pals and collaborators Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes enjoy just getting to spend a little time with one another. And thankfully, Criterion gave them the chance to do just that.

Stepping into the Criterion Closet, Binoche and Fiennes pretended not to know one another, but soon became quite intimate, a not-so-unforeseen side effect of the tight quarters they found themselves in. Binoche led most of the selection efforts, with the “Conclave” star serving as the curious pupil, having heard of many films she pulled down, but not actually having seen them. After coming across Jim Jarmusch’s moody prison comedy “Down by Law,...

That should probably read: one of Federico Fellini's masterpieces. The fact that he followed La Dolce Vita merely a year later with 8 1/2 puts the Italian auteur in a rarefied group of filmmakers who have pulled off a one-two punch of films. 8 1/2 was an early title for the Criterion collection, and it's no wonder it's finally getting a 4K release to update for the physical media connoisseur. One of the best films about filmmaking, it's an arguably somewhat indulgent film, made by a person with a lot of privilege to put to screen his own therapy sessions - but that is a looking at it from a 60+ year distance, while still having almost nothing but respect for one of Europe's, and...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Another day, another guild award nomination for “The Substance.”

On Friday, the Costume Designers Guild announced its 2025 CDG Awards nominees, and “The Substance” costume designer Emmanuelle Youchnovski was among the artisans highlighted for recognition.

Youchnovski is the latest department head from the Coralie Fargeat horror satire nominated for a guild award this week, following editors Fargeat, Jérôme Eltabet, and Valentin Féron at the Ace Eddie Awards, and hair and makeup team Frédérique Arguello and Stéphanie Guillon at the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Awards.

The film’s strong guild show corresponds to an outpouring of support from the journalists who make up the Golden Globes Foundation and Critics Choice Association. “The Substance” landed major nominations at both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards this week, including best film nominations at each respective event and two Best Director bids for Fargeat.

“The Substance” wasn’t the only Best Picture...

The Costume Designers Guild unveiled the nominees for the 27th Cdga (Costume Designers Guild Awards) on December 13, showcasing a wide variety of work across film, TV, and short form.

Among the nominees for feature film are Oscar frontrunners “Nosferatu” (Linda Muir), “Wicked” (Paul Tazewell), “Conclave” (Lisy Christl), and “Emilia Pérez” (Virginie Montel). In TV, “Agatha All Along” (Daniel Selon), “Fallout” (Amy Westcott), and “Shōgun” (Carlos Rosario) scored noms.

“I am thrilled to congratulate all the nominees for this year’s Cdga. Your exceptional creativity and dedication continue to elevate the art of costume design. We look forward to celebrating your incredible achievements on this magical evening. Best wishes to each nominee,” Terry Gordon, President of the Costume Designers Guild, IATSE Local 892, said in a statement.

Winners in all nine categories will be announced at the Cdga ceremony Thursday, February 6, 2025, at The Ebell of Los Angeles. Western Costume returns as a...

The Costume Designers Guild on Friday unveiled nominations for the 27th CDGAs, with titles on the movie side ranging from blockbusters like Wicked, Gladiator II, Dune: Part Two and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to indie hits like Conclave, Emilia Pérez and The Substance.

The CDG Awards nominates films in three categories — Contemporary, Period and Sci-Fi/Fantasy — along with four TV categories and one category apiece in Short Form Design and Costume Illustration.

Among the TV nominees with multiple mentions this morning are Shōgun and Agatha All Along, with others with eye-popping looks in the mix including Bridgerton, Dancing With the Stars and The Masked Singer, and Emily In Paris.

Winners will be revealed at the 27th annual CDG Awards on February 6 at The Ebell of Los Angeles.

Last year, the film winners included Barbie, Saltburn and eventual Costume Design Oscar winner Holly Waddingham for Poor Things.

Here’s the full list of...

Although the extent to which the iconically dark-shaded and silver-streaked Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) can truly be accepted as a Federico Fellini surrogate is a source of endlessly inconsequential debate, we tend to take the lightly fictive director at his word when he dismally claims that he had planned to make a truly honest and direct film this time around. 8½ represents the most unceremonious and abrupt transition in the development of Fellini’s cinema from putatively neorealist ideologies to unabashedly oneiric claptraps about the onus of an overly imaginative but waning masculinity—and it is, for all its Freudian bitchery and post-libidinous angst, one of the few personal statements in film utterly unhindered by stretches for social or cosmic relevance.

There are some aphoristic generalizations related to living the creative life, most of them articulated by Guidio’s lean script advisor and logos personification Daumier (Jean Rougeul)—“Destroying is better...

U.S. actor Omar Benson Miller who is known for roles in “8 Mile,” HBO’s Ballers, and Apple’s “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” stars in Italian immigration-themed drama “Naples to York” by Oscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores that is having its festival premiere at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival.

Interestingly, Federico Fellini co-wrote this tale of two Neapolitan kids who embark on a ship to New York to escape Italy’s early postwar poverty with his frequent collaborator Tullio Pinelli, a writer on the Italian maestro’s “La Dolce Vita” and “8 1/2,” as well as other titles.

In the film Benson Miller plays the ship’s cook who, during their travels, takes the kids under his wing.

He spoke to Variety about being back in Italy more than a decade after working in Tuscany with Spike Lee on “Miracle at St. Anna”; why this movie, conceived by Fellini,...

Is that a chill in the air? Perhaps your boots are starting to feel colder and damper with each passing day. Maybe your cheeks are turning pink every time you step outside. Whether we like it or not, winter is here, which means it’s the perfect time to avoid the cold and hurry to your nice, warm movie house. With the holidays right around the corner, repertory theaters are stocking up on Christmas classics and seasonal favorites. For those looking for something more traditional than Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” which release December 20 and December 25, respectively, cinemas in New York and Los Angeles have plenty of options for the whole family, as well as more festive adult fare for those looking to spice things up.

Selections this month come from the Metrograph located on the Lower East Side in New York City and Village East by Angelika,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Museum of the Moving Image

See It Big! Let It Snow brings 35mm prints of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, 1994’s Little Women, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Film at Lincoln Center

Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies shows on Saturday with an introduction from Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Film Forum

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Wages of Fear play in 4K restorations.

Metrograph

La Dolce Vita, Permanent Vacation, Death By Hanging, and The Art of the Steal show on 35mm and Lino Brocka’s Bona starts screening; Ed Lachman’s Report from Hollywood and Urban Ghosts begin while Absconded Art, The World Is a Stage, and Crush the Strong, Help the Weak continue.

IFC Center

It’s a Wonderful Life and a 4K restoration of Carrie plays daily; 2001, Spider Baby, Threads, and Alien show late.

Museum of Modern Art

A Robert Frank centennial continues.

Looking outside America this Oscar season, there are plenty of candidates for the Best International Feature award. You might gravitate to Latvia’s Cannes entry Flow, a dialogue-free animation in which a black cat, a bird and a ragtag band of other creatures fight for survival in a human-free world after a catastrophic flood. Or maybe you’ll fancy the chances of raucous Irish-language Sundance comedy Kneecap, a wildly stylized biopic of the English-baiting, all-male hip-hop trio from Belfast.

But these two are outliers; the international Oscar race this year is dominated by stories of women, from all over the world. For example, the U.K.’s Hindi-language drama Santosh, filmed in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, finds a policeman’s widow thrown into her late husband’s world, where she must battle police indifference and solve the murder of a low-caste local girl. From Bulgaria there is Triumph, a political...

In a year in which two of world cinema’s oldest industries, Japan and Italy, have signed a long-awaited co-production treaty, jury members at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) were talking up the importance of both film history and the theatrical experience on the first full day of the festival.

After praising TIFF for its selection of established and emerging Asian filmmakers, Hong Kong actor and jury president Tony Leung Chiu-wai also pointed to the festival’s in-depth programmes of classic movies observing that they play an important role in “introducing Italian directors like [Federico] Fellini and Japanese filmmakers like [Akira] Kurosawa to younger audiences.

“They are not only introducing what is current, but also the vast history of cinema, which is a wonderful opportunity for audiences to learn about the past,” the star of In The Mood For Love and Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings said.

“Marcello Mastroianni was known, all around the world, as the Latin lover, the Italian seducer, especially after he starred in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s masterpiece,” says Fabrizio Corallo, the director of the new documentary Ciao Marcello, Mastroianni l’antidivo. “Mastroianni did not like this image. He didn’t want to be seen as an icon, as a sex symbol. He didn’t care much about his public persona; what did matter to him was his personal life. So, I tried to build an intimate portrait of this unique actor.”

Corallo is a journalist and an expert on the history of Italian cinema. For state broadcaster Rai he has made a number of documentaries about the great personalities of Italian cinema: Dino Risi, Vittorio Gassman, Virna Lisi, Ennio Flaiano and Giuliano Montaldo, among others.

Ciao Marcello, which was co-written with Silvia Scola, the daughter of Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola,...

The Tokyo International Film Festival has selected the samurai action thriller 11 Rebels as the opening movie of its upcoming 37th edition. The film is directed by Shiraishi Kazuya from a decades-old screenplay by the late, great scriptwriter Kasahara Kazuo (Japanese Yakuza, Battles Without Honor and Humanity). The festival will close with a screening of the French-Italian comedy Marcello Mio, directed by Christophe Honoré and starring European screen royalty Chiara Mastroianni, also serving on Tokyo’s main competition jury this year.

Produced by Japanese studio heavyweight Toei, 11 Rebels has already secured theatrical distribution in North America, where it will look to tap into the resurgent interest in samurai action cinema following the smash success of FX’s Shogun. It stars popular local actors Takayuki Yamada and Taiga Nakano.

“We expect this powerful film to mark a spectacular opening to the festival,” the event’s organizers said in a statement released Thursday.

Each day during the 2024 Venice Film Festival, IndieWire will update this article with a review of the day’s screenings, activities, and buzz.

Pardon me for kicking things off with an esoteric complaint, but as someone who often has to go to a premiere in order to take the audience’s reaction into consideration for a film’s awards prospects, my 2024 Venice Film Festival experience has been uniquely stressful.

While attendees book tickets to screenings through a website, as is the case with most of the major film festivals now, many of the big premieres at Venice aren’t listed for press and industry passholders, so I’ve spent a good percentage of my last two days asking anyone who would hear me if they had a connect to get into the first public screening of Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”

I spent much of yesterday in a panic about getting...

September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.

Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSMy Life as a Dog.Amid concerns over new provisions for AI, IATSE members have voted to ratify their new three-year contract with AMPTP, which includes a historic 40 percent raise for television and theatrical costume designers.Meanwhile, Teamsters Local 399 “remain far apart” on terms after five weeks of bargaining, reporting that “this was the first week in which we saw the employers take this process seriously.” Their current contract will expire on July 31, after which the union could strike.The Swedish motion-picture industry is calling for a change to the state’s “first-come, first-served” funding process, which most recently distributed all available funds in one minute and seven seconds.Germany plans to nearly double its national film funding...

Yvonne Furneaux, the glamorous actress who had memorable performances in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, has died. She was 98.

Furneaux died July 5 at her home in North Hampton, New Hampshire, of complications from a stroke, her son, Nicholas Natteau, told The Hollywood Reporter.

She also was the female lead in the Hammer horror film The Mummy (1959), starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Though she considered the project less than ideal, she said she ultimately learned from those actors that “if you don’t take a film like The Mummy seriously and put your heart and soul into it, then you can bring it down,” she explained in Mark A. Miller’s 2010 book, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema.

She starred in Italian, French, German and Spanish films during her career.

In Le Amiche (1955), a hit at the...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSNo Other Land.The Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting Corporation (rbb), a state institution, has withdrawn funding for the €40,000 Berlinale Documentary Film Prize. The prize was most recently awarded to No Other Land (2024), which depicts the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli military. While accepting the award, co-directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham called for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation of Palestine, statements which were met with opprobrium by German state officials.After more than three months of contract negotiations, IATSE has reached a tentative agreement with AMPTP, including structured wage increases matching those won by SAG-AFTRA last year and new streaming residuals to address the union’s pension and health plan shortfall.

The star of La Dolce Vita and A Man and a Woman, who has died aged 92, had a unique screen presence that was at once alluring and forbidding

The superbly aquiline beauty and patrician style of Anouk Aimée made her a 60s movie icon in France, Italy and everywhere else with a presence at once alluring and forbidding. She had something of the young Joan Crawford, or Marlene Dietrich, or her contemporary, the French model and actress Capucine. Aimée radiated an enigmatic sexual aura flavoured with melancholy, sophistication and worldly reserve. Hers was not a face that could simper or pout: it was the entranced men around her who were more likely to be doing that. Hirokazu Kore-eda once wrote an amusing line that all the great French movie actresses have surnames that begin with the same letter as their first names: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Brigitte Bardot … and of...

Anouk Aimée in The Best Years Of A Life with Jean-Louis Trintignant, reprising their characters 53 years on from A Man And A Woman. Director Claude Lelouch said: 'It was wonderful for us all to get together again. It was as though something had been left unfinished, and none of us wanted it to end.' Photo: UniFrance Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis and Anouk Aimée is Anne in A Man And A Woman One of the most revered icons of French cinema, Anouk Aimée who starred opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in one of the most successful French films of all time, A Man And A Woman, by Claude Lelouch, has died today at the age of 92. The news was revealed by her daughter Manuella Papatakis.

The poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert was so entranced with her that he gave her the name Anouk Aimée (she was born Françoise Sorya), and cast her...

Anouk Aimee, the French actress who received a best actress Oscar nomination in 1967 for A Man And A Woman, has died aged 92.

Aimee died at her home in Paris. Her death was confirmed by an Instagram post from her daughter Manuela Papatakis, which read, “With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have great sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée.”

Born Nicole Francoise Florence Dreyfus in Paris in 1932, she made her film debut aged 14 in the role of Anouk in Henri Calef’s The House Under The Sea. She kept the name for her career,...

Anouk Aimee, the French actress who received a best actress Oscar nomination in 1967 for A Man And A Woman, has died aged 92.

Aimee died at her home in Paris. Her death was confirmed by an Instagram post from her daughter Manuela Papatakis, which read, “With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have great sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée.”

Born Nicole Francoise Florence Dreyfus in Paris in 1932, she made her film debut aged 14 in the role of Anouk in Henri Calef’s The House Under The Sea. She kept the name for her career,...

The French actor was one of the key faces of the New Wave, starring in classics by directors including Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy and Claude Lelouch

• Peter Bradshaw on Anouk Aimée: an entrancing 60s movie icon with an air of glamorous unknowability

• Anouk Aimée – a life in pictures

Anouk Aimée, the French star of European New Wave classics including La Dolce Vita, A Man and a Woman and Lola, has died aged 92. Her daughter Manuela Papatakis announced the news on social media on Tuesday.

Papatakis said: “We have the immense sadness to announce the departure of my mother … I was close to her when she passed away this morning, at her home in Paris.”...

Anouk Aimée, the French actress known for her elegance and cool sophistication in films including Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman” (1966), Fellini classics “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8½” (1963) and Jacques Demy’s “Lola” (1961), died on Tuesday. She was 92.

Aimée’s daughter, Manuela Papatakis, confirmed her death in a post on Instagram.

“With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have great sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée,” she wrote. “I was right by her side when she passed away this morning at her home in Paris.”

Fairly described in one encyclopedia as an “an aloof but alluring presence on the screen,” Aimée was frequently described as ““regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic,” giving the actress, according to journalist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a...

Actress Anouk Aimée, the sophisticated French beauty who graced the films of Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy, Sidney Lumet, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Lelouch, has died. She was 92.

Aimee’s daughter said in an Instagram post on Tuesday that the star died at her home in Paris without providing further details.

Perhaps best known for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966) — for which she received an Oscar nomination for best actress and won a Golden Globe — Aimée also starred in such art house standouts as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Demy’s Lola (1961), Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981).

Her career kicked off in the late 1940s and lasted all the way through a reunion with Trintignant in The Best Years (Les Plus belles annees), Lelouch’s 2019 epilogue to A Man and a Woman.

With more than 80 feature credits,...

Cannes film festival

Playing themselves, film icons gaze into the looking-glass in this unconvincing and tiresome piece of cine-narcissism

A peculiar and tiresome piece of cine-narcissism here from Christophe Honoré, based on an insufferably twee kind of cinephilia – yet rescued, slightly, by the down-to-earth drollery of Catherine Deneuve, who is playing herself.

Chiara Mastroianni, the Franco-Italian actor and Deneuve’s daughter, is of course very well known for her startling likeness to her father: the film icon Marcello Mastroianni. We see her here also playing herself and acting in what is evidently supposed to be a homage to Anita Ekberg’s Trevi fountain scene from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, in which Marcello famously starred. She feels haunted by her father and has a dream in which her face turns into Marcello’s in the bathroom mirror; actually, it is not much of a change. She confesses how unhappy she...

Now a Cannes veteran, French filmmaker Christophe Honoré has returned to the Competition with the world premiere of Marcello Mio, his French-Italian comedy that stars longtime collaborator Chiara Mastroianni — who, in the film, adopts the persona and appearance of her late father, Marcello Mastroianni. The movie received applause that lasted a touch over eight minutes during its unveiling this evening.

Marcello Mio taps into the younger Mastroianni’s complex reality of being the daughter of cinema icons Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve.

In a fantasy scenario, Chiara hits a crisis point and begins to dress, speak and breathe like her late father, the legendary star of such films as La Dolce Vita, 81/2 and Marriage Italian Style. Those around her, including Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Melvil Poupaud, Benjamin Biolay, Nicole Garica and Hugh Skinner, who also play part-real, part-fictionalized versions of themselves in Marcello Mio, begin to believe it and start to call her “Marcello.

Talk about an identity crisis!

In a wonderfully funny and completely original comedy, French star Chiara Mastroianni in a bit of an existential crisis mode decides one day to morph into her very famous father, the late great Marcello Mastroianni. In a search for her own identity she discovers more about herself, her father, even her equally famous mother Catherine Deneuve who surprisingly consented to play herself and discover truths about her relationship with her ex-finacé (he died in 1996) that had never been made public.

Playing tonight in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, where the entire family has appeared many times as fictional characters, this time it hits close to home, but always with a light touch as Chiara drops her own persona and hits the town as if it were Marcello Mastroianni back in Fellini’s 8 1/2. Black suit, hat, moustache, large glasses — she’s all in.

Of all the actors with claims to nepo baby aristocracy, few, if any, have the same pedigree as Chiara Mastroianni. An accomplished performer and winning star all on her own, the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni has that rare distinction of seeing both of her parents grace Cannes Film Festival posters, leaving a project that playfully interrogates that very heritage a near shoo-in for the festival spotlight. But that vaunted competition slot does little favors for Christophe Honoré’s slight and sketch-like “Marcello Mio,” which plays as an incisive photo-shoot concept in search of wider justification.

This fashion shoot concept isn’t hypothetical, as Honoré’s meta-movie doodle opens on the very same, finding Mastroianni decked out in full Anita Ekberg garb as she saunters into a pool before Paris’ Saint-Sulpice church reformatted as an ersatz Trevi Fountain. The visual folds in several layers, taking Marcello’s iconic turn in “La Dolce Vita,...

THR puts the spotlight on the best films from the festival circuit that have yet to land a U.S. distribution deal.

La Cocina

Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios

Sales WME Independent, Fifth Season

From Anthony Bourdain giving American readers an inside look at the rock ’n’ roll restaurant industry in Kitchen Confidential to Nancy Meyers’ citrus-dotted white marble countertops in enviable home kitchens, modern American audiences have had an infatuation with cookery. Though previously largely reserved for the nonfiction space with entries like Bourdain’s No Reservations and Netflix’s operatic Chef’s Table, the narrative possibilities of the dark underbelly of back-of-house restaurant staff have began to emerge lately. The Bear, the anxiety-inducing FX series about a Chicago Italian beef joint, swept the Emmys in January and is poised to do the same this go-around. Enter director Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina. “Think The Bear on cocaine with a Red Bull chaser...

Dubbed ‘The Sex Symbol of the silver screen’, Anita Ekberg, renowned for her iconic frolicking in the Trevi Fountain in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita,’ delivers an amazingly unique barn-storming performance in ‘The Killer Nun.’ In an interview exclusive to this edition, Ekberg reveals her frustration with the ‘bombshell’ typecasting that followed, expressing a preference for working on films like ‘Killer Nun’ and she boldly declares, ‘This is the kind of film I like!‘

Originally banned as a Video Nasty, ‘Killer Nun’ is a true ‘Nunsploitation’ great, which uniquely crosses into the Giallo genre. Presented here uncut and pristinely restored from a 2K scan of the camera negative, this release finally does justice to the uninhibited and frenzied vision of its creator. With impressive high-style photography and vivid, deliciously surreal murders, it is superbly enhanced by the dreamy yet dystopian score of Alessandro Alessandroni (immortalised by his twangy guitar and...

One of the pleasures of the Cannes Film Festival is seeing what films and what directors break out. Sure, in the current crop of films premiering at the 77th festival this May, there are some big names everybody knows; you don’t need an explainer to know that Francis Ford Coppola and “Megalopolis” are a big deal. But Cannes is also where filmmakers such as Julia Ducournau and Justine Triet gained wide exposure and became international known quantities, thanks to the prestige granted by nabbing the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

Introduced a full decade into the festival’s existence, the Palme d’Or has a strong pedigree associated with it; several of the films that received the prize — “La Dolce Vita,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Taxi Driver,” “Paris, Texas,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Tree of Life,” “Parasite,” and way too many others to properly list — have claim...

It’s a Saturday afternoon in February and Spike Lee and Giancarlo Esposito are sitting side-by-side in a golf cart on a studio lot in Los Angeles. The two, friends for 40 years, have worked together many times over the years on such Lee joints as 1988’s School Daze, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues and 1992’s Malcolm X. They are back together and collaborating once again, this time for Fiat on behalf of the Italian automaker’s brand new, all-electric Fiat 500e.

Lee directs and stars in the “Italy in America” spot opposite his Emmy-nominated friend in what marks their first national advertising campaign together. As the story goes, Esposito helps Lee find his inner Italian as they discover how their urban commute becomes more “dolce” in the 2024 Fiat 500e. “The all-electric Fiat 500e captures the essence of the Italian lifestyle. This new campaign brings together an iconic duo of diverse heritage,...

Fellini's film 8 ½ expertly captures the feeling and intensity of nightmares, earning a perfect score from a dream expert. The dream sequence in 8 ½ creates a sense of claustrophobia, uncertainty, and fear, accurately depicting how nightmares affect us. Filmmakers like David Lynch and Martin Scorsese have been inspired by Fellini's ability to capture the dream-like quality of cinema.

A dream sequence from a legendary 1960s art film gets a perfect accuracy score from an expert. Famed Italian director Federico Fellini was suffering from a severe case of creative block after a run of acclaimed films, including the classics Nights of Cabiria, La Strada and La Dolce Vita. In a stroke of genius, Fellini decided to make a movie all about the block he was experiencing, and the result was one of his greatest masterpieces, a film that went on to be nominated for five Oscars, winning two.

A phantasmagoric comedy-drama...

Sydney, Paris, now Rome: Luca Guadagnino’s match moved to the Italian capital on Monday as the highly anticipated Warner Bros. film Challengers continued its world tour.

A film about love, relationships and tennis starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, the feature is the eighth film from the director of Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All. It was presented for its Roman premiere in the setting of Piazza Barberini, behind the Via Veneto that gave birth to La Dolce Vita.

Challengers follows the story of the young tennis hopeful Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) at the center a love triangle with two friends and fellow athletes, Art (Faist) and Patrick (O’Connor). Due to a serious knee injury, Tashi has to give up her career and become Art’s coach, and the pair have since gotten married. After a series of winning matches, she wants to enroll Art in the Challenger Tour,...

Sophia Loren is coming to Hong Kong. Well, a restaurant dedicated to the Italian icon is coming to Hong Kong, rather.

Opening in mid-April in the Wanchai district of Hong Kong is Sophia Loren House, the first international outpost of the actress’ burgeoning restaurant empire.

Sophia Loren House has taken over the four-story Woo Cheong Pawn Shop, a Hong Kong heritage building that was formerly the location of The Pawn restaurant. The venue pays homage to Italy of the 1960s and 1970s, the era of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and also Loren’s heyday as a screen siren. The restaurant is designed by Italian architect Ivo Maria Redaelli, who also designed the four Sophia Loren Restaurants in Italy, and features a great deal of Loren themed art work.

Sophia Loren House Hong Kong

As for the food, the Sophia Loren House has four dining concepts across its four floors.

Italian cinema offers a diverse array of genres, from giallo to spaghetti westerns, with masterpieces that have influenced filmmakers across the globe. Rocco And His Brothers, Blood And Black Lace, and The Battle Of Algiers showcase the depth and impact of Italian films on world cinema. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly exemplifies the operatic grandeur and satirical nature of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western classics.

From La Dolce Vita to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there are a ton of must-see movies from the storied history of Italian cinema. From Federico Fellini to Michelangelo Antonioni, some of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived have come from Italy. Italian cinema has delivered lavish Telefoni Bianchi comedies and complex and expressionistic Calligrafismo dramas. The end of World War II saw the rise of the Italian neorealism movement, which went on to influence filmmakers from around the globe, including Martin Scorsese,...

Not since the days of Ben-Hur, Cleopatra and Fellini classics like La Dolce Vita has Rome enjoyed the boom in film production it’s experiencing at the moment. From Tom Cruise racing through the eternal city’s narrow streets in Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, to Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated immigrant drama Lo Capitano, the Italian capital is in the midst of a resurgence that harkens back to its “Hollywood on the Tiber” heyday.

At the center of all this activity is Cinecitta, the famed studio facility that now, after years of dormancy, is operating at 100 percent capacity thanks to a number of technical upgrades, increased studio space and a tax incentive that offers producers a 40 percent rebate on production expenditures. The studio has recently hosted a number of high-profile productions, including Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name and starring Daniel Craig,...

Goodbye, Christmas and New Year’s. Hello, awards season!

The Golden Globes are upon us, and that means the festivities kick off with W Magazine’s annual Friday night soiree toasting its Best Performances Issue. Expect to see well-heeled, A-List celebrities mix and mingle elbow-to-elbow in the penthouse suite of the Chateau Marmont.

That same evening, Jon Hamm, Willem Dafoe and Wilmer Valderrama will be among the celebs at the Golden Globes Foundation Dinner helping to present $5 million in grant awards to 96 non-profits.

In the past, studios and networks threw lavish affairs in separate ballrooms at the Beverly Hilton immediately following the Globes, but things have slowed down in recent years due to the Covid pandemic and controversies that rocked the HFPA. Instead, there are smaller affairs being thrown at venues throughout Los Angeles in the nights leading up to the Globes and immediately following the big show.

Check out...

One of my moments of dread is the threat of random violence. The moment in the original Terminator when the machine shows up at people’s homes, knocks on their door and asks if they are Sarah Connor then promptly shoots them when they answer yes is still chilling. Drawing inspiration for me from the classically brutal Martyrs (2008) and the odd cheapy eye transplant film Mansion Of The Doomed (1976) is this lovely gripping Italian horror thriller The Goldsmith (aka L’orafo) (2022)

The film opens on a chase scene in broad daylight over urban dirt fields, three children who turn out to be younger versions of the people in the film are fleeing from an older man. Arianna (Valentina Carbone), Stefano (Matthias Cavallo) and Roberto (Federico Graziani). During the chase, the girl drops a gold cross. The old man catches up to them and reaches down for the cross. The male children charge to stop him.

In a glittering event at Madrid’s Florida Park, Spain’s Secuoya Studios brought out its big guns, led by its president James Costos and Secuoya Content Group CEO Raúl Berdonés, to tout the fast-growing company’s slate, led by its 10-episode series “Zorro,” its most ambitious production.

The series pilot will be unveiled at Mipcom in a special screening on Oct. 15, noted Berdonés, who added that the two-year-old company has made a strong commitment to sustainable production.

“Zorro,” starring Miguel Bernardeau and Renata Notni, will be exclusively available on Prime Video in Latin America, the U.S., Spain, Andorra, and Portugal in the first half of 2024, followed by its broadcast on Spain’s Tve. Mediawan handles international distribution.

Attendees of the 3rd Iberseries & Platino Industria were treated to a sneak peek two days before.

Speaking of the company’s slate, Berdonés remarked: “This ambitious, innovative, distinctive, and diverse content...

Kim Kardashian’s performance on the current season of “American Horror Story,” two episodes in, could be described as thrillingly competent. As Siobhan (sure!), a power publicist who is determined to get her actor client, played by Emma Roberts, everything she wants, Kardashian leverages her rapacious ambition. She directs it outward, determined to get for someone else all the fame that the real-life Kardashian has found for herself.

Siobhan’s steeliness and her capability for cutting wit come through in jagged-edge one-liners, to which Kardashian’s affect and her presence lend a bit of topspin. “You on a bad day,” she tells her client, a would-be star who is struggling to convey her personality despite a botched talk-show appearance, “is like Hilary Swank on a great one.” (Ouch.) The second episode featured a slightly brutal Jamie Lee Curtis read, rendered into Hollywoodese by Kardashian — a performer who could have fit...

Horace Ové, director of “Pressure” (1976), the first full-length Black British film, died on Sept. 16. He was 86.

Ové’s son Zak posted on Facebook: “Our loving father Horace, took his last breath at 4.30 this morning, while sleeping peacefully. I hope his spirit is free now after many years of suffering with Alzheimer’s. You are forever missed, and forever loved. Rest in Peace Pops, and thank you for everything.”

Born in Trinidad in 1936, Ové’s moved to London in 1960 to study interior design. A stint in Rome, during which he worked as a film extra including on Joseph Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra” (1963), he was exposed to the work of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica, who would become infuences. He returned to Britain in 1965 and covered social and political events in the country while being a student at the London Film School. During the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the...

Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray in Lost In Translation Image: Kino Lorber Reciting lines for a Japanese whisky commercial, Bill Murray looks deep into the camera with straight-faced irony and says, “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.” An increasingly agitated director gives him lengthy instructions that are translated, hilariously, with improbable brevity.

Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson in Lost In TranslationImage: Kino Lorber

Reciting lines for a Japanese whisky commercial, Bill Murray looks deep into the camera with straight-faced irony and says, “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.” An increasingly agitated director gives him lengthy instructions that are translated, hilariously, with improbable brevity.

Sony’s “The Equalizer 3” has finally toppled the six-week reign of “Barbie” atop the U.K. and Ireland box office.

Antoine Fuqua’s action thriller, headlined by Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning, debuted with £2.7 million ($3.4 million), per numbers from Comscore.

In its seventh weekend, Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” slid down to second place with £1.6 million for a mighty total of £92.5 million. It is the highest grossing film of 2023 and occupies seventh position on the all-time charts for the territory behind “Spectre,” which has £95.2 million.

Also in its seventh weekend, Universal’s “Oppenheimer” slid down a spot to third with £960,504. With £55.4 million, it is the second highest grossing film of 2023 and is level with “Bohemian Rhapsody” at No. 34 on the all-time chart.

Angel’s “Sound of Freedom,” a massive success Stateside, debuted in fourth place with £760,060. Rounding off the top five was Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” which...

The work of pioneering Black British filmmaker Horace Ové will be celebrated this fall with a BFI Southbank retrospective season titled Power to the People: Horace Ové’s Radical Vision.

A 4K restored version of “Pressure” (1976), the first full-length Black British film, which is an exploration of the concerns faced by emerging second-generation West Indians in Britain, will receive a joint restoration world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and the New York Film Festival on Oct. 11. This precedes the film’s U.K.-wide cinema release by BFI Distribution and on BFI Player on Nov. 3.

The restoration, funded by the BFI Production Board and conducted by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, was made possible with contributions from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and the BFI philanthropy Pioneers of Black British Filmmaking consortium. It was accomplished in collaboration with the Ové family and producer Robert Buckler,...

As Hollywood commemorates the life and career of the late William Friedkin, fans are sharing clips and memories of the “Exorcist” director’s famously unfiltered and foul-mouthed takes on cinema… including an expletive-laden strike at the DC film “Batman v. Superman.”

One clip that has gone viral on social media since news of Friedkin’s death broke came from a 2018 documentary “Friedkin Uncut,” a retrospective of the filmmaker’s career as told through his words and those of his collaborators and peers.

At the end of the documentary, Friedkin discusses his then-recent visit to the Venice Film Festival, where he premiered “The Devil & Father Amorth,” a documentary about Catholic priest and exorcist Gabriele Amorth.

While Friedkin loves traveling to Venice and presenting his films there, he says in the documentary that he does not like screening them in competition. While some of his films have been entered into competition at Venice,...

Sprawling Cinecittà complex is in demand again thanks to tax breaks and boom in film and TV production

Walk through the 1930s-built, dusty pink gates of Cinecittà, the legendary film studios in Rome, and the magic of its golden era is immediately palpable. This is where Charlton Heston rode to victory in his chariot race in Ben Hur, which went on to win 11 Oscars. It is where the real-life love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton played out on the set of Cleopatra, and where Federico Fellini produced classics including La Dolce Vita and Amarcord.

The sprawling Cinecittà was opened with great pomp by Benito Mussolini in 1937, in part to make films promoting the dictator’s fascist propaganda. During the second world war it was first occupied by the Nazis and later became a refuge to the thousands made homeless by the allied bombing of the Italian capital.

Continue reading.