News

Minerva Pictures has boarded Agostino, the next film from Venice competition regular Andrea Pallaoro, as well as Stefano Sardo’s erotic thriller Close To Me and Taavi Vartia’s Finnish survival thriller I

Minerva is pre-selling Agostino,about a13 year-old boy who idolises his widowed mother, until a young local man becomes her lover.

Pallaoro’s2022 film Monica and 2017 feature Hannah both played in competition at Venice.

The Italy-us co-production between Minerva and Melograno Films, it is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia.

Close To Me is the second film by Stefano Sardo and centres on acouple living together during the Covid lockdown,...

Paris-based sales and production company Totem has boarded “Quasi a Casa,” directed by Carolina Pavone.

The film is produced by Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa for Vivo Film, and by Palme d’Or winner Nanni Moretti for Sacher Film. Fandango – behind festival favorites “Orlando, My Political Biography” and “The Survival of Kindness” – will handle Italian distribution.

Described as a “pop drama,” it follows Caterina. Now in her 20s, she wants to be a musician, but she’s paralyzed by fear and insecurity. One summer, she meets her idol, the French singer Mia and gets to know her. It’s the beginning of a complex relationship that will accompany Caterina over the years and finally allow her to find home. Almost.

The logline states: “There comes a time in everyone’s life, when we need to start figuring out what our place in the world is.”

Newcomer Maria Chiara Arrighini plays Caterina.

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......

It would be nearly impossible to underestimate the excitement triggered by Gina Lollobrigida during her many visits to the Venice Film Festival.

The legendary actress, who died Jan. 16 at 95, always created a stir. Journalist Oriana Fallaci, writing in L’Europeo magazine, described Lollobrigida’s arrival in 1956: “A roar rose up from the crowd. The metal barricades risked snapping like twigs, the 156 policemen trying to hold back all those bodies were on the verge of being overwhelmed by the crush. Gina alighted from a taxi. … The photographers rushed towards her. [Her] bodyguard enclosed her in a circle of arms. … All of this took place at 10 in the evening on … the day of the inauguration of the 17th Film Festival, also known as Lollo’s Festival, for the heroine of our time.”

In an interview with Eilidh Hargreaves of The Daily Telegraph, Lollobrigida recalled a similar scene in 1962: “Before we could...

The Venice Film Festival will pay tribute to late Italian icon Gina Lollobrigida, who died in January, with a pre-opening event featuring a double bill of freshly restored works in which she stars.

The Lido’s annual pre-opening event on Aug. 29 will feature a 27-minute short by Orson Welles titled “Portrait of Gina.” In 1968, Welles interviewed Lollobrigida in her villa on the Appian Way as the pilot for an ABC TV series — a U.S. version of “Around the World With Orson Welles”– that ABC rejected.

Welles’ portrait of the diva remained in the vaults until 1986, when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival one year after Orson Welles’ death. This piece has been defined by Welles as a “personal essay” on Lollobrigida. Interestingly, when Lollobrigida saw “Portrait of Gina” in Venice in 1986, she reportedly tried to have it banned. The short’s restoration was done by the Munich...

Influential Italian auteur Francesco “Citto” Maselli who worked with Lucia Bosé, Claudia Cardinale, Shelley Winters and Valeria Golino on films that combined his political passion with his bent for female-centered dramas, has died in Rome.

Maselli, who was known for making left-wing militant cinema, was 92.

The director’s death was announced to Italian news agency Ansa by Maurizio Acerbo, leader of Italy’s small Communist Refoundation Party, the group of die-hard Italian leftists that Maselli championed, and confirmed by the director’s wife. The exact cause of Maselli’s death was not revealed.

Born into a cultured family originally from Italy’s Southern Molise region and raised in an intellectually stimulating environment – his father was an art critic – Maselli participated at a very early age in Italy’s partisan Resistance movement against fascists and German occupiers and as a young man started asserting his belief in Communism.

After graduating from...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSGush.The lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival has been announced. Before the festival begins in Park City on January 19, peruse the selection on Notebook—including new films from Ira Sachs, Deborah Stratman (The Illinois Parables), Mary Helena Clark (Figure Minus Fact), and Fox Maxy (F1ght1ng Looks Different 2 Me Now).Victor Erice has just wrapped production on a new film, Cerrar los Ojos, in Granada, Spain, ahead of a 2023 release. This will be his fourth feature, arriving 31 years after 1992’s Dream of Light.The legendary composer Angelo Badalamenti—one of David Lynch’s most important collaborators, and the architect of all of his atmospheres—has died at age 85. In addition to his music with Lynch, Badalamenti worked with artists like Nina Simone,...

Backstage at the Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2020 collection with Hannelore Knuts and creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli Photo: Archivio Fotografico Paolo Di Paolo

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Charlotte Rampling, Grace Kelly, Marcello Mastroianni, Rudolf Nureyev, Sophia Loren, Ezra Pound, Faye Dunaway, Monica Vitti, Giorgio de Chirico, Gina Lollobrigida, Tennessee Williams, Marlene Dietrich, Giulietta Masina, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Anita Ekberg, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Moravia, and many others were photographed by Bruce Weber’s muse and subject of his latest documentary The Treasure Of His Youth: The Photographs Of Paolo Di Paolo, which starts with an overture of images and film clips. After putting his camera away for decades we see di Paolo return to shoot Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2020 collection.

Paolo di Paolo with Silvia di Paolo and Anne-Katrin Titze on Tennessee Williams: “I...

In a decade of numerous masterpieces, one of the towering cinematic feats of the 1970s was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Alberto Moravia adaptation The Conformist. With jaw-dropping cinematography from Vittorio Storaro, stunning production design from Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and an iconic Georges Delerue score, the film will return in a new 4K restoration to kick off 2023. Ahead of a January 6 opening at Film Forum, we’re pleased to share the first look at the restoration––sourced from the original camera negative––with the exclusive trailer premiere, courtesy of Kino Lorber.

In Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode––and murder––joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli...

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Gianni Amelio’s chronicle of the persecution of Aldo Braibanti, Lord of the Ants (Il Signore delle Formiche), doesn’t avoid the propensity of many Italian period dramas for dense verbosity, with characters spouting great gobs of manicured prose. That’s perhaps especially the case since the protagonist was a poet, playwright and philosopher. But Amelio’s classical approach, and the dignified refusal of martyrdom in Luigi Lo Cascio’s lead performance, make this account of Braibanti’s controversial imprisonment for homosexuality in 1968 after a four-year trial a quietly stirring portrait of institutional intolerance.

The Braibanti case drew international attention in the wake of his conviction due to the number of influential public figures who spoke out against the travesty of justice — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Marco Bellocchio and Umberto Eco among them.

What’s striking now about the courtroom...

In “The Time of Indifference,” Italian filmmaker Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli adapts the 1929 novel by renowned author Alberto Moravia about a once wealthy family in decline but unable to give up the pretenses of appearance.

Transposed to modern-day Rome, the film retains the novel’s timeless story of a hapless widow whose devious and manipulative lover comes between her and her two increasingly wary children.

For Seràgnoli, the film was a return to the work of a writer he first read in high school. “I think since then Moravia has been with me throughout my life.”

Indeed, in his first film, “Last Summer,” Seràgnoli borrowed elements of Moravia’s 1945 novel “Agostino,” about a 13-year-old boy spending the summer at a seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. The film caught the attention of Carmen Llera, the late author’s wife. “She really loved my first film. She contacted me and said,...

Michel Piccoli in one of his most memorable roles in Nanni Moretti’s We Have A Pope which he made at the age of 85 Photo: Unifrance One of French cinema’s monumental acting talents Michel Piccoli, famed for his roles in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le Mépris), The Things Of Life (Les Choses De La Vie), by Claude Sautet, and more recently Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope (Hamemus papam), has died at the age of 94.

Piccoli had acted in movies by practically every major French filmmaker, starting with Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Demy, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette and of course Godard, who cast him in Le Mépris (1963), adapted from Alberto Moravia's melancholy novel, opposite Brigitte Bardot.

He played in more than 60 theatre productions and 100 movies, yet Piccoli's beginnings were not auspicious. He started out in movies as an extra, to make money, and by the time he was discovered,...

Gli Indifferenti

It’s been well over a decade since a filmmaker has attempted an new adaptation of Italian author Alberto Moravia, whose novels provided the basis for such classics as De Sica’s Two Women (1960), Godard’s Contempt (1963) and Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), among many others. For his third feature, Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli remounts Moravia’s The Time of Indifference, assembling a formidable cast with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Giovanna Mezzorgiorno, Edoardo Pesce, Beatrice Granno and Vincenzo Crea. The title is produced by Marco Cohen, Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib and Daniel Campos Pavoncelli with Gian Filippo Corticelli (favored Dp of Ferzan Ozpetek) lensing.…...

The Italian-French co-production signed Scirocco Films and Rosebud is being shot between Puglia and Senegal and tells the story of two African boys in search of a better future. Two African children look up at the stars and dream of travelling to Italy: this image perfectly encapsulates Alessandro Valenti’s first work, Oltre il confine, which is now being filmed in Salento. Having previously written screenplays for numerous other movies – ranging from Edoardo Winspeare’s titles to Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli’s next film Gli indifferenti, based upon Alberto Moravia’s book of the same name – and having helmed several documentaries, short films and music videos, Valenti is now taking his first steps in the world of feature film. Following a few weeks in Puglia, travelling between Lecce, Otranto and Alessano, the crew led by Valenti will then head to Senegal where filming is set...

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi has been cast as a morally and economically bankrupt matron in Italian director Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli’s movie adaptation of “The Time of Indifference,” author Alberto Moravia’s scathing critique of the Fascist-era bourgeoisie.

Seràgnoli, a young helmer known for “Last Summer” and “Likemeback” – which bowed at the Rome and Locarno fests, respectively – has started shooting his contemporary take on the widely translated novel in Rome. First published in 1929, when Moravia was 21, “Gli Indifferenti” captured the middle-class malaise of its time and established Moravia as a world-class writer.

The story sees members of an upper-crust Rome family reacting to a financial crisis that is undermining their social status. Mariagrazia, played by Bruni Tedeschi, is a widow with an unscrupulous lover, Leo, played by Edoardo Pesce (“Dogman”). She has two children by her dead husband: Carla, whom Leo has the hots for, and Michele, who is aware that...

Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic “The Last Emperor” won nine Oscars and who influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris,” in which he explored politics and sexuality through personal storytelling and audacious camera work, has died. He was 77.

His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome at 7 a.m. Monday. He had been suffering from cancer.

Italy’s greatest auteur of his generation, Bertolucci managed to work both in Europe and Hollywood, though his relationship with the studios had its ups and downs. But even when he operated within the studio system, Bertolucci always managed to make films that were considered projections of his inner world.

“The Last Emperor,” an adaptation of the autobiography of China’s last imperial ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning every category in which it had been nominated, including best picture and best director.

When lauded Italian director Luchino Visconti first conceived of his big screen adaptation of Camillo Boito’s novella “Senso,” the “La Terra Trema” filmmaker aimed high: he wanted to cast no less than Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando in the film’s lead roles, a conspiring contessa and an Austrian deserter who woo amidst the dying embers of the Risorgimento. Both casting plans were waylaid by strange industry politics — Bergman’s then-husband Roberto Rossellini didn’t want the actress to work with other directors, while the film’s producers weren’t sold on the star power of Brando.

Still, “Senso” managed to make it to the big screen with some serious talent behind it: prolific Italian actress Alida Valli snagged the lead role, while Hollywood heavy hitter Farley Granger came on as her jilted lover. Behind the scenes, Visconti lined up eventual directors Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi as his own assistants.

Fellini’s 8½ Screenings In Los Angeles with Barbara Steele In Person at Royal Screening

By Todd Garbarini

Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8½ (Otto e Mezzo) will be shown in special 55th anniversary screenings at three of Laemmle's theatres in Los Angeles. Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, and Barbara Steele, the film, lauded by Roger Ebert as the greatest film ever made about filmmaking and the winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar for that year, runs 138 minutes and is being showcased on the big screen in a rare opportunity.

The film will be shown at the following locations:

Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025

Phone: (310) 478-0401

Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Please Note: Actor and film historian Douglas Dunning, longtime friend of actress Barbara Steele, announces that Barbara Steele is scheduled to appear in person for a Q & A prior to the screening at the Royal theatre.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) is showing December 24, 2017 - January 23, 2018 in the United States as part of the retrospective For Ever Godard.One thing most commonly and justly admired in Contempt (1963) by the many who revere the film is its singular place on the dividing line in cinema between classicism and modernism. The 1960s, and most intensely in mid-decade, was a transitional time for these phases, one that of course should never be simplified because of the many instances in which classical directors looked ahead with modernist impulses or modern directors (like the New Wave coterie of which Jean-Luc Godard was a part) looked back with longing to what had gone before. Among so many movies that affirm this point, it’s enough to cite Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954), a touchstone for modern cinema, which it anticipated (though without...

Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Luc Godard is a difficult filmmaker to pin down because while his thematic concerns as an artist have remained more or less consistent over the last seven decades, his form is ever-shifting. His filmography is impossible to view in a vacuum, as his work strives to reflect on the constantly evolving cinema culture that surrounds it: Godard always works with the newest filmmaking technologies available, and his films have become increasingly abstracted and opaque as the wider culture of moving images has become increasingly fragmented. Rather than working to maintain an illusion of diegetic truth, Godard’s work as always foreground its status as a manufactured product—of technology, of an industry, of on-set conditions and of an individual’s imagination. Mubi’S Godard retrospective exemplifies the depth and range of Godard’s career as...

By strange and fortuitous coincidence, my meeting with Jack Garfein fell upon the nexus of several intersecting moments in history. It was Friday, January 27th — International Holocaust Remembrance Day. One week earlier, Donald J. Trump was sworn to office as forty-fifth President of the United States; and in the ensuing weekend, allegations of Trump’s unpunished sexual misconduct, callous attitudes toward women and courting of radical right-wing supporters helped bring about the Women’s March on Washington, one of the largest mass protests in the nation’s history. All around, people are anxiously reading the past with tenuous hopes and fears for the future. History, so often a thing defined after the fact, is currently in violent and furious motion.

Jack Garfein is living history, and he’s not shy about telling it. Born to Ukrainian Jews in 1930, Mr. Garfein personally witnessed as a child the rise of Nazi Germany...

Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted Italian urban life in all its beauty and brutality. Does a new English language version of The Street Kids, by Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed translator, do his work justice?

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s love affair with the city of Rome began in 1950, when he was in his late 20s. He had come there from Casarsa, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, after a scandal involving three boys in the small town of Ramuscello. His adored, and adoring, mother Susanna was, as always, with him. He lived for a year or so with a family named Castaldi at Piazza Costaguti while Susanna worked as a live-in maid for another family called Pediconi a few doors away.

During those first paradisiacal months he befriended Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani (who published one of his poems, an impassioned farewell to Friuli, in Friulian dialect, in the literary journal Botteghe Oscure, which...

★★★★★ Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 classic Le Mépris deserves to be seen on the big screen. There, it can ravish the senses and connect with the viewer in a way that's utterly lost on a television set. Godard's film must surely rank as one of the best movie experiences of all time. It is that special. Based on source material derived from Italian author Alberto Moravia, Le Mépris is the story of a martial breakdown and a writer hooking himself creatively to make a few bucks. As a man and wife become estranged from each other, Godard enriches the plot with another battle: between a revered filmmaker (Fritz Lang) and a boorish American producer (played with reptilian gusto by Jack Palance).

The famously perverse French New Wave director set himself up for a fall – then made one of his most exquisite and approachable movies

The title of Jean-Luc Godard’s first movie in colour is not misbegotten. Contempt (Le Mépris in French) was the one thing not in short supply when the film-maker decamped to Cinecitta Studios in Rome to make a film of an Alberto Moravia novel (for which he had equal contempt) about the making of a film of Homer’s Odyssey. Godard hated his overbearing and cartoonish big-money producers Joseph E Levine and Carlo Ponti – he called them “King Kong” and “Mussolini” respectively – and stirred elements of their personalities into that of his on-screen producer, the boorish, money-driven philistine Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). The exasperated Palance’s contempt for Godard’s working methods was also worked into the film itself.

Related: The essential Godard: five key films from...

Miracolo!: Monicelli’s Exuberant, Digitally Restored Classic

There hasn’t been a performer that’s come close to equaling the vibrant energy of Italian actress Anna Magnani, that furious powerhouse that graced some of the best works of Rossellini, Visconti, Pasolini, and Renoir and swept her way through English language cinema, winning an Oscar for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo. It’s with great pleasure to discover that Mario Monicelli’s forgotten classic The Passionate Thief was digitally restored last year, playing at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival before being treated to a limited theatrical run this Spring at select theaters. Starring Magnani with her frequent stage collaborator, famed comedian Toto, and a nubile Ben Gazzara, the trio wanders through Rome’s streets one lackluster New Year’s Eve as they stumble through a series of escapades.

Based on short stories by famed author Alberto Moravia (The Conformist; Two Women; Contempt...

The Conformist

Written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Italy, 1970

When first introduced to the improved quality of Blu-ray technology, there were about a dozen films I couldn’t wait to see in the format. These were movies of extraordinary beauty that I knew would surely benefit from the enhanced visual resolution. Now, with the arrival of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist on a stunning new Raro Video edition, another one of those titles can be scratched off the list. What makes this an exciting release, however, goes beyond the look of the picture (though that is paramount). This is, in every regard, one of the greatest films ever made.

The Conformist is a complex chronicle of the tormented, ruthless, and devious Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a rising-through-the-ranks Fascist enforcer. The film is a fascinating look at the extent to which one will go to escape the past, fit in with the present,...

(Federico Fellini, 1963; Argent Films, 15)

With La Dolce Vita, Fellini created a new, fantastical, personal, expressive style of film-making to succeed the fading neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema since the second world war. With Otto e Mezzo, he went even further. He made the most avant-garde movie ever to become a major international success, a film where dream, nightmare, memory and reality intermingle in the story of Guido Anselmi (Fellini's handsome cinematic alter ego), a successful director suffering a serious crisis. Guido has embarked on an expensive production, a science-fiction film with an enormous set already built of a spaceship launch pad. Unfortunately, he's suffering from the equivalent of a writer's block. Surrounded by a variety of people dependent on him – a beautiful, resentful wife (Anouk Aimée), a demanding mistress (Sandra Milo), numerous actors, increasingly anxious producers – he has no idea how to complete his ambitious, determinedly honest picture.

Books and films have been joined at the hip ever since the earliest days of cinema, and adaptations of novels have regularly provided audiences with the classier end of the film spectrum. Here, the Guardian and Observer's critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 family movies

• Top 10 war movies

• Top 10 teen movies

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• Top 10 documentaries

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Planet of the Apes

Although the source novel, La Planète des Singes, was written by Frenchman Pierre Boule and originally reached its futureshock climax in Paris, this enduring sci-fi fantasy is profoundly American, putting Charlton Heston's steel-jawed patriotism to incredible use. It also holds up surprisingly well as a jarring allegory for the population's fears over escalating cold war tensions.

Beginning with a spaceship crash-landing on an unknown planet after years of cryogenic sleep, Franklin J Schaffner's film soon gets into gear as Heston's upstanding...

San Francisco — The San Francisco Opera will present the world premiere of Tobias Picker's "Dolores Claiborne" on Sept. 18 next year.

The company said Monday that the opera, with a libretto by J.D. McClatchy, will be based on Stephen King's 1992 novel about a character who denies killing her employer but admits murdering her husband almost three decades earlier after learning he sexually molested their 14-year-old daughter.

Mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick will sing the title character, soprano Elizabeth Futral will perform the elderly employer Vera Donovan, Susannah Biller the daughter Selena St. George, Wayne Tigges the husband Joe St. George, and Greg Fedderly will be Detective Thibodeau.

George Manahan conducts and James Robinson directs. There will be six performances through Oct. 4 of the staging, a co-production with the Opera Company of St. Louis.

This will be the fifth opera for Picker following "Emmeline" (1996), "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (1998), "Therese Raquin" (2001) and "An American Tragedy...

Tuscany's best-loved film star Laura Morante draws on Freud, romcom and the Peanuts cartoon in her movie debut as a director and writer

Amid the seedy showbiz excesses of the Silvio Berlusconi era in Italy over the past two decades, Laura Morante was often seen as a symbol of another, more dignified version of Italian culture.

One of the country's most famous actresses, Morante, who could be described as a kind of Italian Catherine Deneuve, is as well known for her intense roles, and the calibre of films she has starred in, as for her remarkable beauty.

Now she is hoping to exploit the changing times in her country by playing her own part in promoting a different, more powerful role for women in cinema.

For the first time, the actress is stepping into the director's role for a film in which she also stars and takes a co-writing credit.

(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970, Arrow Academy, 15)

The son of a poet and film critic, Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian enfant terrible, did his best work in the 1960s and 70s, directing his first film, The Grim Reaper (a Rashomon-style thriller) in 1962, aged 22; his first minor masterpiece, Before the Revolution, three years later; and his finest film, The Conformist, in 1970. Based on Alberto Moravia's novel and set in 1938, The Conformist has an edgily sinuous performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant as a tormented middle-class Italian intellectual marrying a mindless beauty and setting out to be the perfect fascist – to assuage the guilt arising from his latent homosexuality and his father's insanity. Volunteering as an assassin for Mussolini's secret police, he's dispatched to Paris to kill a liberal professor. Fashionably for its time, the film attempts to reconcile Marx and Freud. But its real strength resides in the use of modern architecture and art deco to create the Italy of the 1930s,...

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis were both released in 1970, both based on novels (by Alberto Moravia and Giorgio Bassani, respectively) and both set during World War II. De Sica’s film covers the beginning of Fascist atrocities, while Bertolucci’s film covers the end. The two films are also complementary in terms of their central characters: while the eponymous conformist joins up as a Fascist hitman, the Finzi-Continis are potential victims of the regime. Perhaps it is for this reason that De Sica’s film so easily carries the director’s gentle and engaging mark, while much of Bertolucci’s feature is as cold and charmless as Fascist architecture.

Fans of De Sica will find in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis both beloved characteristics of the director’s famed neo-realist approach, and stimulating new additions such as warm colour photography,...

More Dickens and even more Shakespeare, but also new novels from Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, plus exciting new voices – 2012's literary highlights

January

10 Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, starring Matthew Rhys and Tamzin Merchant, begins – and, unlike the book, ends – on BBC2.

13 Michael Morpurgo's much-loved children's novel War Horse, a long-running favourite at the National and on Broadway, gets the Hollywood treatment. A tearjerking saga about a young soldier and his horse – it was only a matter of time before it was Spielberged.

16 Ts Eliot prize. Despite withdrawals from the shortlist over objections to a hedge fund's sponsorship of the prize, the Eliot remains the UK's premier poetry award, and its eve-of-event reading is always a treat. This year's shortlist includes Daljit Nagra, Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside.

20 Release of film of Coriolanus, an Orson Wellesian effort directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes,...

The retrospective at this year's Venice film festival is dedicated to Italian experimental cinema of the 1960s and 70s.

Designed by Enrico Magrelli and his team (Domenico Monetti, Luca Pallanch) from a commission and idea of Mostra director Marco Muller, it has been conceived in full consistency with the Mostra's Orizzonti section, which is dedicated every year to showing short medium and feature length films showcasing new trends of world cinema. Research, experimentation, new languages, "non mainstream" and cross-discipline works are therefore represented both in the premieres of Orizzonti and in the Retrospective section. No doubt many will also make a connection with this year's presentation of an impressive restoration of Nick Ray's We Can’t Go Home Again.

The retrospective includes many films that were never (or seldom) shown outside of Italy, among which a great number of absolute discoveries, as well as the long-awaited true restoration of...

Jan 25, 2011

Le Mépris is the closest Jean-Luc Godard has ever come to making a Hollywood-style film: international stars, relatively big budget, script based upon a "prestige" novel, glamorous locations shot in color and 'scope. Of course, it is subversive toward all of the above, and is, among other things, about the absurdities of making a Hollywood-style film. Received with a good deal of puzzlement during its initial release, it was greeted with huge critical acclaim upon its rerelease in 1997.

Freely adapting Alberto Moravia's Il disprezzo (Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki's book on Godard supplies ...Read more at MovieRetriever.com...

Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

A repressed upper-class intellectual is hired by Mussolini's fascist goons to go to Paris and kill a leading dissident who was once his philosophy tutor. Such is the premise for one of the most poetic and influential films ever made. Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg all cite this adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel as a profound influence on their films. Coppola even lured Bertolucci's director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, to the Philippines to bring his talents to bear on Apocalypse Now.

What wowed them? The symbolic colour-coded photography, the virtuosic flashback structure, and, no doubt, the idea that you could explore something as seemingly unfilmable as the psychopathology of fascism in that paradoxical object, an art film filled with car chases, sex and violence.

Jean-Louis Trintignant was never more sinister than here, as Marcello Clerici – particularly when he gazes icily at his doomed lover through the window of...

One of the more fascinating moments in many auteur filmographies is the moment when he or she tackles their first big studio project. Stepping (at least financially) into the Hollywood big leagues can be both wonderful and disastrous (and sometimes both).

Contempt was a film that, for Jean-Luc Godard, stands out as such a creative oddity; a studio-fueled adaptation of a 1954 novel (by Alberto Moravia, also known for the source material of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist) with big name stars like Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot and (playing himself) Fritz Lang. More after the jump:

Michel Piccoli plays Paul Javal, an American novelist who has been hired by a producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Palance) to rewrite a film version of Homer’s Odyssey for Lang to direct. Traveling with his wife (Bardot), Javal is torn between his own creative wants and needs and the desires of Prokosch. Paralleling this is an...

• Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (interview with filmmaker with an upcoming theatrical release), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of all time favorite films. This month, Sophie Barthes (the filmmaker behind Cold Souls - Samuel Goldwyn Films 08/07/2009) gave her top ten as of July 2009. Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda)"Watching Cléo from 5 to 7 is like strolling for a day in Paris in the summer. This film is so charming in its simplicity and it’s beautifully shot. It goes from light and frivolous moments to extremely moving sequences. Another poetic and powerful insight in the feminine psyche." The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)"I love the story and its execution. It’s a fascinating character study. The production design and locations are incredible. A happy marriage between cinema and architecture.

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