Having sprinkled his films in the competition section twice before with Les chansons d’amour (2007) and Sorry Angel (2018), Christophe Honoré has also populated the fest with Un Certain Regard, Out of Comp and Directors’ Fortnight offerings. With Marcello Mio, the filmmaker reunites with his muse Chiara Mastroianni and they both honor who else but her famous actor dad and what is kinda meta level is that her mom Catherine Deneuve and other famous faces in Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud all play version of themselves.
Gist: This is the story of a woman named Chiara. She is an actress, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve.…...
Gist: This is the story of a woman named Chiara. She is an actress, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve.…...
- 5/22/2024
- by Eric Lavallée
- IONCINEMA.com
Sean Baker’s Anora has stormed to the top of Screen’s Cannes jury while Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope divided critics and Christophe Honoré’s Marcello Mio scored the lowest of this year’s festival so far.
Baker’s latest feature received a solid 3.3 - the first film this year to score an average above three stars, overtaking last year’s jury grid winner, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (3.2).
The US comedy-drama about a sex worker received six scores of four stars (excellent) and four marks of three stars (good). Critics Katja Nicodemus (Germany’s Die Zeit) and Anton Dolin (Meduza) were less convinced,...
Baker’s latest feature received a solid 3.3 - the first film this year to score an average above three stars, overtaking last year’s jury grid winner, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (3.2).
The US comedy-drama about a sex worker received six scores of four stars (excellent) and four marks of three stars (good). Critics Katja Nicodemus (Germany’s Die Zeit) and Anton Dolin (Meduza) were less convinced,...
- 5/22/2024
- ScreenDaily
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...
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...
- 5/22/2024
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
In the Name of the Father: Honore Pays Homage via Identity Crisis
“I only exist when I am working on a film,” Marcello Mastroianni once said, who is, of course, resurrected through the prism of his daughter Chiara Mastorianni in Marcello Mio, the latest feature from Christophe Honoré. Having passed away in 1996, well before the daughter he had with Catherine Deneuve found her own success as an actor, (thanks in part to being a muse for Honoré during the early part of his career in the 2000s), this approach provides a novel experience for the whole family to be together, in a sense.…...
“I only exist when I am working on a film,” Marcello Mastroianni once said, who is, of course, resurrected through the prism of his daughter Chiara Mastorianni in Marcello Mio, the latest feature from Christophe Honoré. Having passed away in 1996, well before the daughter he had with Catherine Deneuve found her own success as an actor, (thanks in part to being a muse for Honoré during the early part of his career in the 2000s), this approach provides a novel experience for the whole family to be together, in a sense.…...
- 5/22/2024
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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.
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.
- 5/21/2024
- by Nancy Tartaglione and Nada Aboul Kheir
- Deadline Film + TV
Celebrities: they’re not just like us, exactly, but they’re human just the same. Which is why some of the current discourse around “nepo babies” must be a little wounding for showbiz scions nursing their own insecurities about their talent, their reputation and their place in the world — even if the prudent thing to do, from a PR perspective, is to openly check your privilege and move on. Yet whatever degree of sympathy one might feel for actor Chiara Mastroianni — the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, a dazzling legacy to bear but perhaps not an easy one — largely evaporates by the end of “Marcello Mio,” a vastly indulgent but gossamer-weight bit of frippery from French writer-director Christophe Honoré, in which Mastroianni channels her late father to increasingly contrived comic effect.
So wink-wink it can barely see straight, so inside-baseball it’s practically buried under the pitcher’s mound,...
So wink-wink it can barely see straight, so inside-baseball it’s practically buried under the pitcher’s mound,...
- 5/21/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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.
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.
- 5/21/2024
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
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,...
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,...
- 5/21/2024
- by Ben Croll
- Indiewire
French director Christophe Honoré returns to Cannes Competition for a third time on Tuesday with comedy Mio Marcello, reuniting him with long time collaborator Chiara Mastroianni.
The comedy taps into the actress’ real-life complex reality of being the daughter of cinema icons Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni.
In a fantasy scenario, Mastroianni hits a crisis point in her life and decides to adopt the look and persona of her late father, much to the surprise of her family and friends, as well as those who knew the legendary actor when he was alive.
Mastroianni is joined in the cast by her mother Deneuve, former partners Benjamin Biolay and Mevil Poupaud as well as Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, UK actor Hugh Skinner and Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli, who famously starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the 1961 classic Divorce Italian Style.
Deadline talked to Honoré ahead of the world premiere.
Deadline: What was...
The comedy taps into the actress’ real-life complex reality of being the daughter of cinema icons Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni.
In a fantasy scenario, Mastroianni hits a crisis point in her life and decides to adopt the look and persona of her late father, much to the surprise of her family and friends, as well as those who knew the legendary actor when he was alive.
Mastroianni is joined in the cast by her mother Deneuve, former partners Benjamin Biolay and Mevil Poupaud as well as Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, UK actor Hugh Skinner and Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli, who famously starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the 1961 classic Divorce Italian Style.
Deadline talked to Honoré ahead of the world premiere.
Deadline: What was...
- 5/21/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Late in the highly entertaining and enlightening new HBO Documentary Films movie on the life and career of Faye Dunaway we learn how much this iconic star just loves coming to the Cannes Film Festival. “Just about every year,” she says — not only for the world’s best films but also to immerse herself in all aspects of filmmaking. I have seen her many times just soaking it all up cinematically both here in Cannes and Telluride, to name two fests.
So it seems appropriate that the Cannes Classics section would be the place for the World Premiere Wednesday night — in the presence of Dunaway as the French like to call it — of this terrific new docu in which Dunaway pretty much tells it all straight about her life, loves, desires, ambitions, movies, co-stars, depression, controversies, family and hopes for the future in a profession she says she can’t imagine not working in.
So it seems appropriate that the Cannes Classics section would be the place for the World Premiere Wednesday night — in the presence of Dunaway as the French like to call it — of this terrific new docu in which Dunaway pretty much tells it all straight about her life, loves, desires, ambitions, movies, co-stars, depression, controversies, family and hopes for the future in a profession she says she can’t imagine not working in.
- 5/16/2024
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
These auteurs are ready for their close-up.
When Quentin Dupieux’s comedy about an ill-fated film set, “The Second Act,” opened the Cannes Film Festival May 14, it will be just one of several movies about filmmaking and filmmakers to touch down on the Croisette. After all, directors Christophe Honoré, Paul Schrader and Josh Mond are among the other prominent filmmakers who are ready to premiere semi-autobiographical stories.
Honoré’s in-competition comedy, “Marcello Mio,” casts Chiara Mastroianni as a version of herself who — after a director compares her to her late father, Marcello Mastroianni — dresses in drag and takes on his identity. Schrader’s in-competition drama, “Oh, Canada,” focuses on a documentary filmmaker (Richard Gere) telling his life story in a doc. Mond’s drama “It Doesn’t Matter” follows two friends chronicling their lives on video. Leos Carax’s 40-minute “C’est pas moi” is partly a self-portrait, with footage from his films and life.
When Quentin Dupieux’s comedy about an ill-fated film set, “The Second Act,” opened the Cannes Film Festival May 14, it will be just one of several movies about filmmaking and filmmakers to touch down on the Croisette. After all, directors Christophe Honoré, Paul Schrader and Josh Mond are among the other prominent filmmakers who are ready to premiere semi-autobiographical stories.
Honoré’s in-competition comedy, “Marcello Mio,” casts Chiara Mastroianni as a version of herself who — after a director compares her to her late father, Marcello Mastroianni — dresses in drag and takes on his identity. Schrader’s in-competition drama, “Oh, Canada,” focuses on a documentary filmmaker (Richard Gere) telling his life story in a doc. Mond’s drama “It Doesn’t Matter” follows two friends chronicling their lives on video. Leos Carax’s 40-minute “C’est pas moi” is partly a self-portrait, with footage from his films and life.
- 5/14/2024
- by Gregg Goldstein
- Variety Film + TV
Italian period drama “My Place Is Here” is being released in Italy by Adler Ent. on May 9, and is being sold at Cannes by Beta Cinema. Variety speaks to the film’s directors, Daniela Porto and Cristiano Bortone, and debuts its trailer (below).
“My Place Is Here” is set in the years following the end of World War II. Women have just been given the vote in Italy, but in Calabria, a conservative rural region in Southern Italy, men still rule the roost.
An unmarried single mother, Marta, who is deemed to have brought shame on her family, has been promised to an older farmer as his wife. While making preparations for the wedding, Marta meets Lorenzo, the village’s openly gay wedding planner. He encourages her to broaden her horizons and take typing lessons at the local Communist Party office as a means of finding work. Here she meets Communist activist Bianca,...
“My Place Is Here” is set in the years following the end of World War II. Women have just been given the vote in Italy, but in Calabria, a conservative rural region in Southern Italy, men still rule the roost.
An unmarried single mother, Marta, who is deemed to have brought shame on her family, has been promised to an older farmer as his wife. While making preparations for the wedding, Marta meets Lorenzo, the village’s openly gay wedding planner. He encourages her to broaden her horizons and take typing lessons at the local Communist Party office as a means of finding work. Here she meets Communist activist Bianca,...
- 4/30/2024
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice, Anora, the latest from The Florida Project and Red Rocket director Sean Baker, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird, starring Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, are among the highlights of this year’s Cannes Film Festival competition.
Abbasi, the Iran-born, Sweden-based director, whose Holy Spider was a sensation of the 2022 Cannes festival, returns with his story of how a young Donald Trump and the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn built up Trump’s real estate business in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Sebastian Stan stars as Trump, Succession‘s Jeremy Strong plays Cohn and Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) is wife Ivana.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things follow-up Kinds of Kindness will also premiere in the Cannes competition. The film, featuring the Oscar-winning Poor Things star Emma Stone, will be high on every Cannes attendee’s must-see list. The Greek auteur has again...
Abbasi, the Iran-born, Sweden-based director, whose Holy Spider was a sensation of the 2022 Cannes festival, returns with his story of how a young Donald Trump and the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn built up Trump’s real estate business in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Sebastian Stan stars as Trump, Succession‘s Jeremy Strong plays Cohn and Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) is wife Ivana.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things follow-up Kinds of Kindness will also premiere in the Cannes competition. The film, featuring the Oscar-winning Poor Things star Emma Stone, will be high on every Cannes attendee’s must-see list. The Greek auteur has again...
- 4/11/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Roll up, roll up for Part 2 of our Cannes Film Festival preview, this time with a focus on international, mainly non-English-language fare. If you didn’t catch Andreas’ English-language-focused Part 1, check it out.
As the fest basks in the warm glow of the Oscar wins for 2023 Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and Grand Jury Prize winner The Zone of Interest, delegate general Thierry Frémaux and his team are furiously tying up the 2024 Official Selection.
With less than four weeks to go until the bulk of the 77th edition (running May 14-25) is revealed at the press conference in Paris on April 11, we’ve rounded up a host of the titles ready and in the running for a splash in either Official Selection or the main parallel sections of Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week.
The registration deadline was March 15, with March 22 the official cut-off for submissions to arrive...
As the fest basks in the warm glow of the Oscar wins for 2023 Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and Grand Jury Prize winner The Zone of Interest, delegate general Thierry Frémaux and his team are furiously tying up the 2024 Official Selection.
With less than four weeks to go until the bulk of the 77th edition (running May 14-25) is revealed at the press conference in Paris on April 11, we’ve rounded up a host of the titles ready and in the running for a splash in either Official Selection or the main parallel sections of Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week.
The registration deadline was March 15, with March 22 the official cut-off for submissions to arrive...
- 3/18/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
The Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss, the songwriter and perennial Oscar bridesmaid Diane Warren and Matteo Garrone, the director of this year’s best international feature Oscar-nominated Italian film Io Capitano, will all be honored on Sunday night during the opening ceremony of the 19th Los Angeles, Italia Film, Fashion and Art Festival at Hollywood’s Tcl Chinese Theatres, exactly one week before the 96th Academy Awards take place just down the street.
The festival, which is backed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, will run through Saturday, March 9, and feature 112 film screenings (47 in movie theaters and 65 on the online platform eventive.org). This year’s edition will be hosted by one Italian screen legend, Franco Nero (as well as Italian actress/model Antonella Salvucci), and is dedicated to another, the late Marcello Mastroianni, whose centenary it coincides with, as well as the late Italian playwright Eduardo de Filippo.
Notable guests...
The festival, which is backed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, will run through Saturday, March 9, and feature 112 film screenings (47 in movie theaters and 65 on the online platform eventive.org). This year’s edition will be hosted by one Italian screen legend, Franco Nero (as well as Italian actress/model Antonella Salvucci), and is dedicated to another, the late Marcello Mastroianni, whose centenary it coincides with, as well as the late Italian playwright Eduardo de Filippo.
Notable guests...
- 3/3/2024
- by Scott Feinberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Locarno Film Festival is leading the tributes to Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani, who has died aged 92.
Alongside his brother Vittorio (who died aged 88 in 2018), the duo created numerous notable titles, including Sardinian countryside drama Padre Padrone, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in1977, and the Berlin 2012 Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die.
In a statement, Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said: “The story of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is also that of Italian cinema after the end of the Second World War. Their work, which marked a crucial moment in cinematic modernity, was paid tribute to...
Alongside his brother Vittorio (who died aged 88 in 2018), the duo created numerous notable titles, including Sardinian countryside drama Padre Padrone, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in1977, and the Berlin 2012 Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die.
In a statement, Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said: “The story of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is also that of Italian cinema after the end of the Second World War. Their work, which marked a crucial moment in cinematic modernity, was paid tribute to...
- 3/1/2024
- ScreenDaily
One may resist celebrity culture, but most people have at least a few actors from pop culture history that mean something to them, whether they're from the silver screen or the flickering box.
Actors know how to spark our emotions and suspend our disbelief. They embody our favorite stories and the visions of our favorite filmmakers. The stars of film and television have the privilege of immortalizing themselves in certain times and places. But it is not just themselves that they immortalize. In their best projects, they capture many complexities of emotion and culture that are relevant to millions. Steve McQueen and his Mustang in "Bullet," Warren Beatty and his freewheeling libido in "Shampoo," Anthony Hopkins and his empathetic presidential turn in "Nixon" -- for better or worse, actors color our memories of the past in both trivial and important ways.
It can be wistful, therefore, when an old favorite passes,...
Actors know how to spark our emotions and suspend our disbelief. They embody our favorite stories and the visions of our favorite filmmakers. The stars of film and television have the privilege of immortalizing themselves in certain times and places. But it is not just themselves that they immortalize. In their best projects, they capture many complexities of emotion and culture that are relevant to millions. Steve McQueen and his Mustang in "Bullet," Warren Beatty and his freewheeling libido in "Shampoo," Anthony Hopkins and his empathetic presidential turn in "Nixon" -- for better or worse, actors color our memories of the past in both trivial and important ways.
It can be wistful, therefore, when an old favorite passes,...
- 2/11/2024
- by Jack Hawkins
- Slash Film
Italian actress Sandra Milo, who was best known for her supporting roles in Federico Fellini’s Oscar winner 8 ½ and Golden Globe winner Juliet of the Spirits, has died at the age of 90.
Born in Tunisia to Italian parents in 1933, Milo grew up in Tuscany.
She got her first big screen break in 1955 opposite Alberto Sordi in Antonio Pietrangeli’s comedy The Bachelor.
Milo’s career quickly took off with roles in Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere, Pietrangeli’s Hungry for Love, Edouard Molinaro’s Witness in the City and Claude Sautet’s The Big Risk over the course of the late 1950s.
It briefly hit the buffers in 1961 when her performance in Rosselini’s Stendhal adaptation Vanina Vanni was brutally panned by critics at the Venice Film Festival, but Milo returned to the set and went on to rack up more than 80 credits across her 70-year career.
Internationally, Milo...
Born in Tunisia to Italian parents in 1933, Milo grew up in Tuscany.
She got her first big screen break in 1955 opposite Alberto Sordi in Antonio Pietrangeli’s comedy The Bachelor.
Milo’s career quickly took off with roles in Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere, Pietrangeli’s Hungry for Love, Edouard Molinaro’s Witness in the City and Claude Sautet’s The Big Risk over the course of the late 1950s.
It briefly hit the buffers in 1961 when her performance in Rosselini’s Stendhal adaptation Vanina Vanni was brutally panned by critics at the Venice Film Festival, but Milo returned to the set and went on to rack up more than 80 credits across her 70-year career.
Internationally, Milo...
- 1/29/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Veteran Italian actress Sandra Milo, best known for her roles in Federico Fellini‘s 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits, has died. She was 90. According to Variety, Milo’s passing was confirmed on social media by her daughters, Debora and Azzura, and son Ciro, who revealed she died in her sleep on Monday (January 29) morning at her home in Rome. Born Salvatrice Elena Greco on March 11, 1933, in Tunis, French Tunisia, Milo made her on-screen film debut in 1955’s The Bachelor. From there, she landed her first major role in Roberto Rossellini‘s 1959 drama film General Della Rovere; she also starred in Rossellini’s 1961 drama Vanina Vanini. Milo briefly retired from acting after her first marriage but was convinced to return by Fellini to star opposite Marcello Mastroianni in his 1963 avant-garde classic 8½, which is available to stream on Prime Video and Apple TV. She also starred in Fellini’s 1965 comedy-drama Juliet of the Spirits.
- 1/29/2024
- TV Insider
Italian actor Sandra Milo, known for memorable roles in Federico Fellini’s “8½” and “Juliet of the Spirits” as well as her work with Roberto Rossellini, died on Monday at her Rome home. She was 90.
News of Milo’s death was announced on social media by her daughters, Debora and Azzurra, and son Ciro, who said Milo died in her sleep on Monday morning.
Italian deputy culture minister Lucia Borgonzoni mourned the passing of Milo as the loss of a “protagonist of Italian cinema … a great, talented artist with an overwhelming charisma” and “the muse of great directors such as Federico Fellini who won the hearts of millions of Italians.”
Milo, whose work spanned several genres, made her big screen debut in 1955 alongside popular comic actor Alberto Sordi in Antonio Pietrangeli’s “Lo Scapolo” (“The Bachelor”). Other comedies followed such as “Totò in the Moon” (“Totò Nella Luna”), one of...
News of Milo’s death was announced on social media by her daughters, Debora and Azzurra, and son Ciro, who said Milo died in her sleep on Monday morning.
Italian deputy culture minister Lucia Borgonzoni mourned the passing of Milo as the loss of a “protagonist of Italian cinema … a great, talented artist with an overwhelming charisma” and “the muse of great directors such as Federico Fellini who won the hearts of millions of Italians.”
Milo, whose work spanned several genres, made her big screen debut in 1955 alongside popular comic actor Alberto Sordi in Antonio Pietrangeli’s “Lo Scapolo” (“The Bachelor”). Other comedies followed such as “Totò in the Moon” (“Totò Nella Luna”), one of...
- 1/29/2024
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
In 2012, the world’s film critics considered Federico Fellini’s 1963 Oscar-winning “8 ½” one of the 10 greatest films of all time. By 2022, Fellini’s landmark film had fallen out of the top 30.
Once upon a time, director/screenwriter/producer Martin Scorsese had reportedly cited it as his favorite film of all time. More recently it’s come in second for Scorsese, tucked behind Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Endlessly copied, cribbed from (both consciously and unconsciously) and parodied, it inspired Paul Mazursky’s 1970 film “Alex in Wonderland” (which includes a cameo by Fellini) and was the source material for the Tony-winning musical “Nine.”
Variety’s critic Bob Hawkins was effusive about the film straight out of the gate, reviewing it after its Rome premiere. He noted that it was “an exciting, stimulating monumental creation” and an example of what Hawkins’ deemed “the author-director picture par excellence.”
While Hawkins colorfully described...
Once upon a time, director/screenwriter/producer Martin Scorsese had reportedly cited it as his favorite film of all time. More recently it’s come in second for Scorsese, tucked behind Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Endlessly copied, cribbed from (both consciously and unconsciously) and parodied, it inspired Paul Mazursky’s 1970 film “Alex in Wonderland” (which includes a cameo by Fellini) and was the source material for the Tony-winning musical “Nine.”
Variety’s critic Bob Hawkins was effusive about the film straight out of the gate, reviewing it after its Rome premiere. He noted that it was “an exciting, stimulating monumental creation” and an example of what Hawkins’ deemed “the author-director picture par excellence.”
While Hawkins colorfully described...
- 1/9/2024
- by Steven Gaydos
- Variety Film + TV
Two American actor/filmmakers who have enjoyed career-best years at the movies will be celebrated from afar — specifically, in Italy — over the holiday break.
Italy’s Capri, Hollywood International Film Festival will fete Maestro co-writer/director/lead actor Bradley Cooper will its annual Visionary Award and Barbie co-writer/director Greta Gerwig with its inaugural Lina Wertmüller Award, fest director Pascal Vicedomini announced Monday.
The Italian filmmaker Micaela Ramazzotti will also receive the Wertmüller Award, which is named after the trailblazing Italian filmmaker who died in 2012, and which was created to celebrate outstanding female filmmakers.
The 28th edition of Capri, Hollywood will run Dec. 27 through Jan. 1. Dedicated to the memory of Marcello Mastroianni, it is being chaired by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Bobby Moresco and will open with a screening of All of Us Strangers. Maestro will screen Dec. 30.
The fest previously announced that filmmaker Matteo Garrone and actors Seydou Sarr and...
Italy’s Capri, Hollywood International Film Festival will fete Maestro co-writer/director/lead actor Bradley Cooper will its annual Visionary Award and Barbie co-writer/director Greta Gerwig with its inaugural Lina Wertmüller Award, fest director Pascal Vicedomini announced Monday.
The Italian filmmaker Micaela Ramazzotti will also receive the Wertmüller Award, which is named after the trailblazing Italian filmmaker who died in 2012, and which was created to celebrate outstanding female filmmakers.
The 28th edition of Capri, Hollywood will run Dec. 27 through Jan. 1. Dedicated to the memory of Marcello Mastroianni, it is being chaired by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Bobby Moresco and will open with a screening of All of Us Strangers. Maestro will screen Dec. 30.
The fest previously announced that filmmaker Matteo Garrone and actors Seydou Sarr and...
- 12/19/2023
- by Scott Feinberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Mysteries of Lisbon.Flicking through my notes on my way home from Vienna, I stumbled on a quote whose source I couldn’t quite locate: I have a long story to tell you, and I have never told it to anyone. I knew the words belonged to one of the Raúl Ruiz films I’d binged in town, courtesy of a stellar retrospective held at this year’s Viennale. But I couldn’t recall which. Sounds and images from a week’s worth of journeys into the Chilean filmmaker’s oeuvre had coalesced into a shapeshifting amalgam that made my own recollections hazy, and the films themselves porous. Was this one of the stories that Marcello Mastroianni saunters into in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996)? Did the words ricochet in Love Torn in a Dream (2000), where nine storylines combine to spawn a myriad of others? Or was it one...
- 12/15/2023
- MUBI
Italy has been a regular contender for the international feature Oscar since the 1940s, having won the award 14 times — the most of any country. Four of those winners were directed by Vittorio De Sica, whose 1946 film, Shoeshine, was the first foreign film to be recognized by the Academy with an honorary Oscar. Four years later, his Bicycle Thieves earned the honor. And in 1963, he collaborated with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni on what would become Italy’s third international feature Oscar winner: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
The film is a comedy anthology divided into three parts, following a triad of Italian couples across three regions of Italy: “Adelina” tells of a wife (Loren) who supports her unemployed husband (Mastroianni) and family by selling black market cigarettes in Naples as she tries to stave off being incarcerated for her illegal activity by staying continuously pregnant. In “Anna,” Loren plays the wife...
The film is a comedy anthology divided into three parts, following a triad of Italian couples across three regions of Italy: “Adelina” tells of a wife (Loren) who supports her unemployed husband (Mastroianni) and family by selling black market cigarettes in Naples as she tries to stave off being incarcerated for her illegal activity by staying continuously pregnant. In “Anna,” Loren plays the wife...
- 11/30/2023
- by Hilton Dresden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Exclusive: Miramax’s high-profile TV series remake of Robert Altmann’s Prêt-à-Porter has shifted development from Paramount+ to the BBC.
Deadline understands the project from The Great writer Ava Pickett is now in early-stage development with the British public broadcaster and Paramount+ is no longer involved. The BBC project is in its early stages and hasn’t yet set cast.
Titled Ready to Wear in the U.S., Altmann’s Prêt-à-Porter celebrates its 30th anniversary next year and the movie featured an ensemble cast including Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Forest Whitaker, Katarzyna Figura, Anouk Aimée, François Cluzet, Marcello Mastroianni and Tracey Ullman. The Miramax-distributed film chronicled the interconnected lives of a group of people in the lead-up to the Paris Fashion Week, where models, designers, reporters and fashion editors gather to present next year’s trends.
The BBC version is understood to be seeking...
Deadline understands the project from The Great writer Ava Pickett is now in early-stage development with the British public broadcaster and Paramount+ is no longer involved. The BBC project is in its early stages and hasn’t yet set cast.
Titled Ready to Wear in the U.S., Altmann’s Prêt-à-Porter celebrates its 30th anniversary next year and the movie featured an ensemble cast including Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Forest Whitaker, Katarzyna Figura, Anouk Aimée, François Cluzet, Marcello Mastroianni and Tracey Ullman. The Miramax-distributed film chronicled the interconnected lives of a group of people in the lead-up to the Paris Fashion Week, where models, designers, reporters and fashion editors gather to present next year’s trends.
The BBC version is understood to be seeking...
- 10/23/2023
- by Max Goldbart
- Deadline Film + TV
Ahead of her 88th birthday, we look back at the actor’s best roles, from a down-on-her-luck dame to everyones favourite umbrella-flying nanny
Not every moment of Andrews’ career has been brilliant. Ronald Harwood co-wrote this hypnotically shoddy romcom starring Marcello Mastroianni as Cesareo, an Italian, living in Paris, whose much-younger wife is having an affair with the spouse of uptight Briton, Pamela (Andrews). When the cuckolds get together, sparks fly – in one highlight, Cesareo swallows a glass of water containing Pamela’s contact lenses, then burps.
Not every moment of Andrews’ career has been brilliant. Ronald Harwood co-wrote this hypnotically shoddy romcom starring Marcello Mastroianni as Cesareo, an Italian, living in Paris, whose much-younger wife is having an affair with the spouse of uptight Briton, Pamela (Andrews). When the cuckolds get together, sparks fly – in one highlight, Cesareo swallows a glass of water containing Pamela’s contact lenses, then burps.
- 9/21/2023
- by Charlotte O'Sullivan
- The Guardian - Film News
When first-time documentary director Leonard Manzella premieres his award-winning “Shoe Shine Caddie” at the Portobello Film Festival in London on September 16, it will represent a kind of return to the former actor’s roots in the international film scene.
A professional family therapist for the past 30 years in California, Manzella’s earlier career began when the native Angeleno left Los Angeles for Rome in 1968 “when everything was burning.” In his early 20s and armed with “no contacts and about $50 bucks in my pocket,” a fortuitous introduction to American actor Brett Halsey got Manzella into movies, first as an extra and eventually as a leading man.
Halsey, who landed in Rome in the ‘60s and worked steadily in Euro crime thrillers and in the burgeoning spaghetti western scene, often toiled under the moniker Montgomery Ford and Leonard Manzella became famous as Leonard Mann.
“I went to Rome to study political science,...
A professional family therapist for the past 30 years in California, Manzella’s earlier career began when the native Angeleno left Los Angeles for Rome in 1968 “when everything was burning.” In his early 20s and armed with “no contacts and about $50 bucks in my pocket,” a fortuitous introduction to American actor Brett Halsey got Manzella into movies, first as an extra and eventually as a leading man.
Halsey, who landed in Rome in the ‘60s and worked steadily in Euro crime thrillers and in the burgeoning spaghetti western scene, often toiled under the moniker Montgomery Ford and Leonard Manzella became famous as Leonard Mann.
“I went to Rome to study political science,...
- 9/15/2023
- by Steven Gaydos
- Variety Film + TV
Though she rose to fame thanks largely to her looks, Italian superstar Sophia Loren more than proved her acting chops with a series of international hits and an Oscar win for Best Actress. But how many of her titles remain classics? Let’s take a look back at 15 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best.
Born in 1934 in Rome, Loren began appearing in films both in her native Italy and in Hollywood, popping up in several titles that played more to her incredible beauty than her acting chops. That all changed with “Two Women” (1961), a stirring drama from Italian neorealist Vittoria De Sica that cast her as a mother protecting her daughter from the horrors of World War II. The role brought her international acclaim and Oscar, BAFTA and Cannes Film Festival victories as Best Actress, making her the first performer in a foreign language film to win at the Academy.
Born in 1934 in Rome, Loren began appearing in films both in her native Italy and in Hollywood, popping up in several titles that played more to her incredible beauty than her acting chops. That all changed with “Two Women” (1961), a stirring drama from Italian neorealist Vittoria De Sica that cast her as a mother protecting her daughter from the horrors of World War II. The role brought her international acclaim and Oscar, BAFTA and Cannes Film Festival victories as Best Actress, making her the first performer in a foreign language film to win at the Academy.
- 9/14/2023
- by Zach Laws and Chris Beachum
- Gold Derby
With Venice Film Festival wrapping up after quite an epic year, Damien Chazelle’s jury handed out their awards, giving the top prize to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, led by La La Land star Emma Stone. Elsewhere, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Matteo Garrone, Priscilla‘s Cailee Spaeny, and Memory‘s Peter Sarsgaard picked up top prizes.
Check out the list below courtesy of Cineuropa.
Competition
Golden Lion for Best Film
Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/UK/USA)
Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize
Evil Does Not Exist – Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Japan)
Silver Lion – Award for Best Director
Matteo Garrone – Me Captain (Italy/Belgium)
Volpi Cup for Best Actress
Cailee Spaeny – Priscilla (USA/Italy)
Volpi Cup for Best Actor
Peter Sarsgaard – Memory (Mexico/USA)
Award for Best Screenplay
Guillermo Calderón, Pablo Larraín – El conde (Chile)
Special Jury Prize
Green Border – Agnieszka Holland (Poland/France/Czech Republic/Belgium)
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Talent
Seydou Sarr...
Check out the list below courtesy of Cineuropa.
Competition
Golden Lion for Best Film
Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/UK/USA)
Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize
Evil Does Not Exist – Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Japan)
Silver Lion – Award for Best Director
Matteo Garrone – Me Captain (Italy/Belgium)
Volpi Cup for Best Actress
Cailee Spaeny – Priscilla (USA/Italy)
Volpi Cup for Best Actor
Peter Sarsgaard – Memory (Mexico/USA)
Award for Best Screenplay
Guillermo Calderón, Pablo Larraín – El conde (Chile)
Special Jury Prize
Green Border – Agnieszka Holland (Poland/France/Czech Republic/Belgium)
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Talent
Seydou Sarr...
- 9/9/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
As many predicted, the 80th annual Venice Film Festival bestowed its top prize, the Golden Lion, to Yorgos Lanthimos’ rapturously received “Poor Things.” The win furthers the film’s increasing Oscar buzz, powered by a performance from star Emma Stone that could bring her a second Oscar for Best Actress. The film will open in limited release from Searchlight on Dec. 8, then slowly roll out nationwide.
However, the leading actress prize went to Cailee Spaeny for her work in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” an intimate look at Priscilla Presley’s early courtship with Elvis Presley. (The film opens in theaters on Nov. 3.) Peter Sarsgaard won leading actor honors for his turn as a dementia-afflicted widower in Michel Franco’s “Memory,” opposite Jessica Chastain.
Matteo Garrone’s immigrant drama “Me Captain” captured two major awards, including the best director prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Young Actor/Actress Award for breakout star Seydou Sarr.
However, the leading actress prize went to Cailee Spaeny for her work in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” an intimate look at Priscilla Presley’s early courtship with Elvis Presley. (The film opens in theaters on Nov. 3.) Peter Sarsgaard won leading actor honors for his turn as a dementia-afflicted widower in Michel Franco’s “Memory,” opposite Jessica Chastain.
Matteo Garrone’s immigrant drama “Me Captain” captured two major awards, including the best director prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Young Actor/Actress Award for breakout star Seydou Sarr.
- 9/9/2023
- by Jason Clark
- The Wrap
The 2023 Venice Film Festival persevered despite a dimmed Hollywood presence, with much of the onscreen talent sitting this year’s Lido event out due to the strikes. There in Italy, however, were directors like Michael Mann, David Fincher, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay, Wes Anderson, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, and even Woody Allen to present their latest films and do the talking on behalf of their sidelined actors.
Saturday at the Sala Grande, the jury headed up by president Damien Chazelle revealed the winners of the 2023 competition awards. Jurors including Martin McDonagh, Jane Campion, and Mia Hansen-Løve saw 23 movies over the last week and a half, including Lanthimos’ raved-about “Poor Things,” Coppola’s well-liked “Priscilla,” Bertrand Bonello’s daring “The Beast,” Fincher’s assassin thriller “The Killer,” Bradley Cooper’s Oscar hopeful “Maestro,” Mann’s gripping “Ferrari,” and more.
Word on the Lido was highest for eventual Golden Lion winner “Poor Things,...
Saturday at the Sala Grande, the jury headed up by president Damien Chazelle revealed the winners of the 2023 competition awards. Jurors including Martin McDonagh, Jane Campion, and Mia Hansen-Løve saw 23 movies over the last week and a half, including Lanthimos’ raved-about “Poor Things,” Coppola’s well-liked “Priscilla,” Bertrand Bonello’s daring “The Beast,” Fincher’s assassin thriller “The Killer,” Bradley Cooper’s Oscar hopeful “Maestro,” Mann’s gripping “Ferrari,” and more.
Word on the Lido was highest for eventual Golden Lion winner “Poor Things,...
- 9/9/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Actor Sandra Hüller could be the critical darling of awards season with two acclaimed performances in two high-profile international feature contenders, France’s “Anatomy of a Fall” from Justine Triet and United Kingdom’s “The Zone of Interest” from Jonathan Glazer.
The German performer has opted to campaign her work in Glazer’s Holocaust-era drama for best supporting actress, Variety can reveal exclusively, greatly increasing her chances for possible double acting recognition this year. Her work in Triet’s French Oscar hopeful will be submitted for lead actress consideration.
Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.
Both “Anatomy” and “Zone” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the former won the prestigious Palme d’Or prize, marking the third time a woman director has won the award. The two films are coming off screening at the Telluride Film Festival and will stop...
The German performer has opted to campaign her work in Glazer’s Holocaust-era drama for best supporting actress, Variety can reveal exclusively, greatly increasing her chances for possible double acting recognition this year. Her work in Triet’s French Oscar hopeful will be submitted for lead actress consideration.
Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.
Both “Anatomy” and “Zone” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the former won the prestigious Palme d’Or prize, marking the third time a woman director has won the award. The two films are coming off screening at the Telluride Film Festival and will stop...
- 9/7/2023
- by Clayton Davis
- Variety Film + TV
Peter Gonzales Falcon, the actor from Texas who portrayed a young Federico Fellini in Roma, the famed Italian director’s 1972 autobiographical film, has died. He was 74.
Gonzales Falcon was found dead at his home Tuesday in La Pryor, Texas, by authorities called there for a safety check, his friend Aurelio Montemayor told The Hollywood Reporter.
After dropping out of college after being cast in Viva Max (1969), a farcical present-day comedy about retaking the Alamo, Gonzales Falcon was hired by Fellini himself for Roma, which featured cameos from Anna Magnani, Marcello Mastroianni and Gore Vidal.
Segments of the film show Gonzales Falcon as Fellini during the 1930s and ’40s after the future filmmaker arrives in Rome to pursue a career as a journalist and wanders the city to experience what it has to offer. He worked on the documentary-style feature for 41 weeks, he told author Tom Lisanti during an expansive 2018 interview.
Gonzales Falcon was found dead at his home Tuesday in La Pryor, Texas, by authorities called there for a safety check, his friend Aurelio Montemayor told The Hollywood Reporter.
After dropping out of college after being cast in Viva Max (1969), a farcical present-day comedy about retaking the Alamo, Gonzales Falcon was hired by Fellini himself for Roma, which featured cameos from Anna Magnani, Marcello Mastroianni and Gore Vidal.
Segments of the film show Gonzales Falcon as Fellini during the 1930s and ’40s after the future filmmaker arrives in Rome to pursue a career as a journalist and wanders the city to experience what it has to offer. He worked on the documentary-style feature for 41 weeks, he told author Tom Lisanti during an expansive 2018 interview.
- 8/24/2023
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Mark Alan Ruffalo is a prominent American actor and producer. He is best known for his captivating performances as Bruce Banner and the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a role that has rightfully earned him worldwide recognition.
Mark Ruffalo Biography: Age, Early Life, Family, Education
Ruffalo was born on November 22, 1967 (Mark Ruffalo age: 55) in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo Jr., was employed as a construction painter, while his mother, Marie Rose, found work as a hairdresser and stylist. Ruffalo has two sisters, Tania and Nicole, and a brother, Scott, who tragically passed away in 2008 with a bullet wound found in his head.
Ruffalo’s father is of Irish descent while his mother is of French Canadian and Italian ancestry.
Throughout his educational years, Ruffalo studied at both Catholic and progressive schools. Despite his struggles with Adhd and undiagnosed dyslexia, Ruffalo described himself as a happy child while...
Mark Ruffalo Biography: Age, Early Life, Family, Education
Ruffalo was born on November 22, 1967 (Mark Ruffalo age: 55) in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo Jr., was employed as a construction painter, while his mother, Marie Rose, found work as a hairdresser and stylist. Ruffalo has two sisters, Tania and Nicole, and a brother, Scott, who tragically passed away in 2008 with a bullet wound found in his head.
Ruffalo’s father is of Irish descent while his mother is of French Canadian and Italian ancestry.
Throughout his educational years, Ruffalo studied at both Catholic and progressive schools. Despite his struggles with Adhd and undiagnosed dyslexia, Ruffalo described himself as a happy child while...
- 8/5/2023
- by Trevor Hanuka
- Uinterview
Christophe Honoré has landed quite the cast for his next feature film. Re-teaming with daughter-mother team of Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, Honoré also adds Benjamin Biolay, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia and Fabrice Luchini to the mix. Les inrocks folks confirm (what we had mentioned last week), filming does take place in late August in Paris and it’ll then move to Rome (Marcello Mastroianni’s home turf). We can chalk what will likely be a meta exercise as a Cannes competition hopeful. Les Films Pelléas’ Philippe Martin and David Thion are producing the currently untitled feature.
Honoré will likely take an intimate approach into Chiara Mastroianni’s world tackling identity and possibly the splitting of two personas — he is in a good position to do so as he has worked with the actress on six prior occasions – their last collaboration being the Un Certain Regard Best Actress awarded for...
Honoré will likely take an intimate approach into Chiara Mastroianni’s world tackling identity and possibly the splitting of two personas — he is in a good position to do so as he has worked with the actress on six prior occasions – their last collaboration being the Un Certain Regard Best Actress awarded for...
- 6/26/2023
- by Eric Lavallée
- IONCINEMA.com
by Eric Blume
Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role. Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.
A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...
Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role. Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.
A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...
- 6/25/2023
- by EricB
- FilmExperience
On a picturesque day in the South of France, throngs of Johnny Depp fans gathered along the Croisette, shrieking and snapping photos as embattled movie star graced the world’s most famous red carpet. “Jeanne du Barry,” which marks Depp’s first leading film role in three years, since ongoing legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard stalled his Hollywood career, opened the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
Depp recently won a defamation case in the U.S. against Heard, who was ordered to pay the star $10 million in damages, and is trying to mount a comeback. But the move has been criticized by some and embraced by others, including Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux, who said earlier in the festival “I care about Johnny Depp as an actor.”
As Depp, sporting a slicked back ponytail and tinted purple shades, exited his black car, squeals echoed throughout the sprawling complex that houses the festival,...
Depp recently won a defamation case in the U.S. against Heard, who was ordered to pay the star $10 million in damages, and is trying to mount a comeback. But the move has been criticized by some and embraced by others, including Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux, who said earlier in the festival “I care about Johnny Depp as an actor.”
As Depp, sporting a slicked back ponytail and tinted purple shades, exited his black car, squeals echoed throughout the sprawling complex that houses the festival,...
- 5/16/2023
- by Brent Lang and Rebecca Rubin
- Variety Film + TV
‘La La Land’ director Chazelle will chair the Competition jury.
La La Land director Damien Chazelle will be president of the Competition jury for the 80th Venice Film Festival (August 30-September 9).
Saint Omer director Alice Diop will chair the Luigi De Laurentiis debut film award jury; with A Chiara filmmaker Jonas Carpignano chairing the Horizons jury.
Chazelle has opened the festival on two previous occasions, with La La Land in 2016 and with First Man in 2018, both in Competition. Emma Stone won the Volpi Cup for best actress for La La Land, and went on to take the best actress Oscar...
La La Land director Damien Chazelle will be president of the Competition jury for the 80th Venice Film Festival (August 30-September 9).
Saint Omer director Alice Diop will chair the Luigi De Laurentiis debut film award jury; with A Chiara filmmaker Jonas Carpignano chairing the Horizons jury.
Chazelle has opened the festival on two previous occasions, with La La Land in 2016 and with First Man in 2018, both in Competition. Emma Stone won the Volpi Cup for best actress for La La Land, and went on to take the best actress Oscar...
- 5/5/2023
- by Ben Dalton
- ScreenDaily
Luigi Comenicini’s The Sunday Woman makes for an intriguing blend of police procedural and comedy of manners. It isn’t really a giallo, despite an investigation into a bizarre murder that fuels further misdeeds. As a satire of Turin’s upper classes, it isn’t nearly as trenchant, let alone grim, as other examples of commedia all’italiana like Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned, though it does share their preoccupation with character types that border on the grotesque. Taken on its own terms, the film is absorbing, frequently amusing, and exceedingly well directed by Comencini, who keeps things moving with admirably brisk efficiency.
When sleazy architect Garrone (Claudio Gora) is found beaten to death with a large stone phallus (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Commissioner Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) takes up the case. A handy clue soon puts him on...
When sleazy architect Garrone (Claudio Gora) is found beaten to death with a large stone phallus (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Commissioner Santamaria (Marcello Mastroianni) takes up the case. A handy clue soon puts him on...
- 5/1/2023
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
Prior to becoming an actor, Giancarlo Giannini, who on March 6 will be getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, studied electronic engineering, a skill he’s been known to put to good use even on movie sets.
“I was meant to start working on the first artificial satellites, or on the first computers at Ibm,” the Italian film and theater thesp recalls. But then Giannini enrolled in acting school and soon was given major roles, first by Franco Zeffirelli and then by Lina Wertmüller, with whom he went on to make nine movies that brought them both international fame.
“I owe it to Lina that I will be getting the star. The only other Italian actor who has one is Rudolph Valentino,” he notes.
Before traveling to Los Angeles, Giannini spoke to Variety about his career journey and what he learned from Anna Magnani, Marlon Brando and Marcello Mastroianni.
“I was meant to start working on the first artificial satellites, or on the first computers at Ibm,” the Italian film and theater thesp recalls. But then Giannini enrolled in acting school and soon was given major roles, first by Franco Zeffirelli and then by Lina Wertmüller, with whom he went on to make nine movies that brought them both international fame.
“I owe it to Lina that I will be getting the star. The only other Italian actor who has one is Rudolph Valentino,” he notes.
Before traveling to Los Angeles, Giannini spoke to Variety about his career journey and what he learned from Anna Magnani, Marlon Brando and Marcello Mastroianni.
- 3/2/2023
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
It was an epic night for the Academy, with now-classic films and performances in competition, an anomaly between Best Picture and Best Director nominations, a young actress redefining the acting categories and the culmination of a decades-long feud. Let’s flashback to when first-time host Frank Sinatra guided the 35th Academy Awards ceremony on April 8, 1963.
In the years of the Best Picture category being limited to five films, the Best Director category typically fell in line with those productions, with maybe one variation. In 1963, only two directors from Best Picture nominees received bids; unsurprisingly, those two films also had the most nominations and the most wins. David Lean‘s sprawling epic biopic “Lawrence of Arabia” led the pack, coming into the night with ten bids and leaving with seven statues, including Best Picture and Lean’s second career win for Best Director. It has the unusual distinction of being the...
In the years of the Best Picture category being limited to five films, the Best Director category typically fell in line with those productions, with maybe one variation. In 1963, only two directors from Best Picture nominees received bids; unsurprisingly, those two films also had the most nominations and the most wins. David Lean‘s sprawling epic biopic “Lawrence of Arabia” led the pack, coming into the night with ten bids and leaving with seven statues, including Best Picture and Lean’s second career win for Best Director. It has the unusual distinction of being the...
- 2/21/2023
- by Susan Pennington
- Gold Derby
Exclusive: Italian director Mario Martone, who has been on the festival and awards circuit over the past year with Oscar submission and Cannes title Nostalgia, is at the Berlinale with his passion project Somebody Down There Likes Me.
The documentary pays tribute to late Italian actor and fellow Neapolitan Massimo Troisi who died tragically young at the age of 41 in 1994, just hours after filming wrapped on Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman).
Selected for the Berlinale Specials sidebar, the documentary plays at a sold-out screening on Saturday, on the eve of what would have been the actor’s 70th birthday on February 19. Deadline can reveal a trailer.
Martone says he wants to shed light on the popular actor who he believes has never been properly celebrated.
“Massimo has always remained alive in the collective consciousness because he was a great actor and a great artist,” says the director.
Il Postino,...
The documentary pays tribute to late Italian actor and fellow Neapolitan Massimo Troisi who died tragically young at the age of 41 in 1994, just hours after filming wrapped on Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman).
Selected for the Berlinale Specials sidebar, the documentary plays at a sold-out screening on Saturday, on the eve of what would have been the actor’s 70th birthday on February 19. Deadline can reveal a trailer.
Martone says he wants to shed light on the popular actor who he believes has never been properly celebrated.
“Massimo has always remained alive in the collective consciousness because he was a great actor and a great artist,” says the director.
Il Postino,...
- 2/18/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Raquel Welch had a 50-plus year career in film and television, starring opposite Marcello Mastroianni, Edward G. Robinson, Robin Williams, Jimmy Stewart, Faye Dunaway, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Farrah Fawcett, Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn and many others.
Her breakout role came as Cora in the wild 1966 sci-fi pic Fantastic Voyage, opposite Stephen Boyd, Edmund O’Brien and Arthur Kennedy. Welch then starred as a cavewoman in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. Her next major film was with Mae West and John Huston in the title role of Myra Breckinridge. She later starred opposite Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed and Michael York in 1973’s The Three Musketeers, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Related: Raquel Welch Dies: ‘Fantastic Voyage’, ‘One Million Years B.C.’, & ‘Myra Breckinridge’ Star Was 82
While often celebrated for her appearance, Welch also essayed more serious roles such as the 1987 television drama Right to Die,...
Her breakout role came as Cora in the wild 1966 sci-fi pic Fantastic Voyage, opposite Stephen Boyd, Edmund O’Brien and Arthur Kennedy. Welch then starred as a cavewoman in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. Her next major film was with Mae West and John Huston in the title role of Myra Breckinridge. She later starred opposite Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed and Michael York in 1973’s The Three Musketeers, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Related: Raquel Welch Dies: ‘Fantastic Voyage’, ‘One Million Years B.C.’, & ‘Myra Breckinridge’ Star Was 82
While often celebrated for her appearance, Welch also essayed more serious roles such as the 1987 television drama Right to Die,...
- 2/15/2023
- by Robert Lang
- Deadline Film + TV
Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including “Fanfan la Tulipe,” “Beat the Devil,” “Trapeze” and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” has died. She was 95.
According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.
After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.
Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread,...
According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.
After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.
Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread,...
- 1/16/2023
- by Carmel Dagan and Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
(Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we take a look at an Oscars category from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy's winner stands the test of time.)
Last week, I went through the eight Academy Award nominations of Glenn Close to examine why the renowned actor has yet to win even a single Oscar in her career. She holds the record for the actor with the most nominations in history without winning, but she doesn't hold that record alone. She shares it with someone I think is safe to call a legend: Peter O'Toole. The British thespian of stage and screen who became an instantaneous movie star in 1962 with the release of "Lawrence of Arabia" was also nominated eight times over the course of his career and never won, and because he died back in 2013, the chance to win is obviously gone, whereas Close still could.
Last week, I went through the eight Academy Award nominations of Glenn Close to examine why the renowned actor has yet to win even a single Oscar in her career. She holds the record for the actor with the most nominations in history without winning, but she doesn't hold that record alone. She shares it with someone I think is safe to call a legend: Peter O'Toole. The British thespian of stage and screen who became an instantaneous movie star in 1962 with the release of "Lawrence of Arabia" was also nominated eight times over the course of his career and never won, and because he died back in 2013, the chance to win is obviously gone, whereas Close still could.
- 1/5/2023
- by Mike Shutt
- Slash Film
The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: Landscapes of TimeFourteen films will be showing from October 13 to December 18, 2022 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood with free tickets and free parking thanks to an anonymous donor to the Hammer Museum. Sponsored by UCLA’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles, the kickoff film, ‘Landscapes in the Mist’ played to a full house.
How did all these people know Theodoros Angelopoulos? I thought he was my own private guilty pleasure, my own discovery from the days when I would spend the last day of every film festival where I was working to see a film I wanted to see, knowing I would never be able to convince my company to buy it. It was at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 1991 when I first saw an Angelopoulis film, The Suspended Step of the Stork starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. I had never seen such a film with the story only revealing its impact at the end. I had seen slow films of Antonioni (not knowing his screenwriter was the same who wrote Angelopoulos’s films), but this film was so unlike any film I had ever seen before. I barely understood what was happening until the end when story revealed the inner core of its truth. At that moment, I knew that the film had changed my life and my perceptions. This was the first in Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders.
‘Suspended Step of the Stork’
As of this writing, two films have screened thus far: Landscape in the Mist (European Film Award for Best Film), the last of his Trilogy of Silence. It was followed the next week by Eternity and a Day (Palme d’Or at the 51st edition of the Cannes Film Festival), the last of his Trilogy of Borders. Having seen these two, so many questions arose for me that I knew I needed to find out more about Angelopoulos himself.
Why these trilogies? Does he always work in threes, making trilogies and why?
Why were both Eternity and a Day and Landscape in the Mist about a little boy Alexander who has no parents, and most particularly no father? Is Alexander in all his films?
What’s with the troupe of actors which keeps showing up in Landscape in the Mist and is central to The Traveling Players his Trilogy of History?
Why are there always three yellow jacketed bicycle riders in the two films I have so far seen?
Why is there always a wedding — sometimes happy, sometimes not so?
Critic Andrew Horton calls Angelopoulos’ films, “Cinema of Contemplation” which does give the context within which one derives the full impact of his stories, more through contemplation than through following a plot line which nevertheless exists. Angelopoulos believed cinema was creating a new form of universal communication. He also saw his own life as a continuation of Greek history from the beginning of time, a theme he reiterates in his films. To absorb such a large picture, one must be in a contemplative state of mind. The films provide a framework for meditation. And his end shot is more than once a line of yellow jacketed repair workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon or riding bicycles to beyond the frame of what we see. I must see the rest of the films to know what these repairmen are doing to extend travel and communication beyond borders.
Angelopoulos views the world through the eyes of a child named Alexander who in Landscape in the Mist is about five and is traveling across Greece to Germany with his ten year old sister Voula to find the father they have never known. They recognize they are part of a story with no end. The only adult words describing their odyssey are in the bedtime story Voula tells Alexander; in the introduction to a staged play that the friend they find on the road, named Orestes, describes to them; and in the first words spoken by a singing actor as the traveling theater troupe is about to start performing the play. But, as in the bedtime story and in Orestes’ description, the play, seemingly interrupted by other events, never finishes. The story starts, “in the beginning is darkness, then comes light, then the sea and sky, then the plants and trees.” When his sister feels fear for what lies ahead, Alexander comforts her with his promise to continue telling the story that never finishes. Through the mist, they find the tree, so vaguely described by Orestes as he shows them blank frames of a 35mm piece of film he picks up and so materially there in front of them when they cross the last border to Germany. They hug its trunk in relief and renewed trust in the will of some higher order that they have arrived safely.
Landscape in the Mist is the last of the Trilogy of Silence, haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness, myth, and memory. Landscape in the Mist represents the “silence of God”. The other two parts are the “silence of history” in Voyage to Cythera (1984) and the “silence of love” in The Beekeeper [1986).
In Eternity and a Day, the child in himself, Alexander (Bruno Ganz), has become a great writer and poet who is now facing his final days of a fatal illness. Putting his affairs in order and bidding farewell to family and friends before admitting himself into the hospital where he will await death, he asks “How long is tomorrow?” and is told, it is “eternity and a day.” He finds himself paired on his last day with a child, an Albanian illegal of Greek origin who fears the future with no adult to guide him into an unknown land across the sea. The poet himself lacks to words to finish his own work let alone help the child with his fears and his own journey, but his redemption comes from a literal exchange of words through the child which allows him to transcend his life and his emotional distance.
The three words Alexander receives from the Albanian boy are korfulamu, a delicate word for the heart of a flower, a literal ‘word of comfort’ for his physical suffering. The second is xenitis, the feeling of being a stranger everywhere, including with his own beautiful wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). and daughter. The third is argathini, meaning ‘very late at night’, a metaphor for the ‘twilight’ of his existence.
The story that never finishes is the human odyssey of migrations and crossing borders, both in lands and in our minds as we face unknown futures in landscapes we do not recognize as our own. Angelopoulos’ reality unfolds through the prism of his memories. And he counts himself lucky to have lived consciously within the context of history. His memories are a continuation of the long history of Greece. He was born in 1935 the year before King George II of Greece returned to Rome with his Prime Minister Metaxas who, with the agreement of the king, suspended the parliament and established the quasi-fascist Metaxas regime. He lived through World War II, the subsequent Civil War, and the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.
He sees his films not as psychological studies of characters but as characters’ personal lives within a historical context, of “finding one’s own history within the history of a place.” He considers his political films quite different from those of Costa Gavras’ whose he calls bourgeois.
Starting with The Iliad, The Odyssey, and later the concluding Aeneid, continuing with the classic tretralogies, cycles of three plays by the great playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Angelopoulis likewise writes in trilogies, three tragedies intended to be seen in one sitting, but way too long for most of us modern westerners. The trilogies of Angelopoulos would have greater impact if we could see them sequentially, even if not in one sitting. But the programmers did not see it that way and so we must see each film (which stands on its own) interspersed in what seems to be a random order. Even so, the themes intertwine seamlessly creating a textile of modern Greek myth, thought and insight.
Angelopoulos created Days of ’36 in 1972. It is the first film of what would become his self-described Trilogy of History that also includes The Traveling Players (1975) and Alexander the Great (1980) with an epilogue of The Hunters (1977). (The Greek plays also had epilogues.) That he made the first two films in Greece during the dictatorship required an “imposed silence” and indeed, that is the prevalent element in Days of ’36, the story of the country’s ruling leisure class suppressing the fight of leftist labor. The film begins with the assassination of a labor organizer and ends with a mafiosa-type last word of the ruling class which needs stability at any cost.
In The Traveling Players, Senses of Cinema writes:
It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos uses members of an otherwise anonymous cast of marginalized traveling players as conveyers of contemporary Greek history …: Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) traces his immigration from Asia Minor to Greece (a reminder of the country’s historically borderless, ethnically diverse population that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire), Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) chronicles the start of the Civil War after the defeat of the Germans in 1944, and Pylades (Kiriakos Katrivanos) provides a personal account of the torture of political prisoners. In essence, by using the testament of people who are literally transient and homeless (and without identity), Angelopoulos creates a powerful analogy for all Greek people as displaced exiles within their own country.
Again, from Senses of Cinema:
Angelopoulos returned to the theme of the nation’s historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to examine the the refugee’s resigned sentiment, “We’ve crossed the border and we’re still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?”, carries through to the makeshift, outdoor cinema in Angelopoulos’ next film, Ulysses’ Gaze, as A arrives for an unauthorized screening of his film. Like the adrift Spyros in The Beekeeper, A’s devastating emotional odyssey through his ancestral homeland is also a personal journey to reconnect with his cultural past, striving to recapture the purity of human vision that has been tainted by romantic loss, artistic controversy, familial estrangement, ideological disillusionment, and the ravages of war.
Regarding the written words of the scripts, Angelopoulos consistently worked with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who also frequently collaborated with such celebrated directors as Federico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni (he wrote all of his movies’ scripts) and Francesco Rossi. Guerra consulted on The Dust of Time, cowrote The Weeping Meadow, Eternity and a Day, Ulysses’ Gaze, and wrote The Suspended Step of the Stork, Landscape in the Mist, The Beekeeper and Voyage to Cythera.
Angelopoulos also collaborated regularly with the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis and the composer Eleni Karaindrou, both of whom are essential to his works’ impact.
One of the recurring themes of his work is immigration, the flight from homeland and the return, as well as the history of 20th century Greece. Angelopoulos was considered by British film critics Derek Malcolm and David Thomson to be one of the world’s greatest directors.
Angelopoulos died late 24 January 2012, several hours after being involved in an crash while shooting the last film of his latest trilogy on modern Greece, The Other Sea in Athens. On that evening, the filmmaker had been with his crew in the area of Drapetsona, near Piraeus when he was hit by a motorcycle ridden by an off-duty police officer. The crash occurred when Angelopoulos, 76, attempted to cross a busy road. The first two films were The Weeping Meadow (2004)) and The Dust of Time (2008).
As his legacy lives on, it reminds those of us who contemplate time and space that our Western Civilization began when Greece’s voice was raised to express our most primal emotions in its tragedies. Angelopouos’ work, along with the oldest epic cycle and the Greek tragedies, all deal with the aftermath of world shaking wars which are the results of revenge and murder, sex and power wielded by those more powerful than even the king despots of the age, but by the gods themselves (whoever she is).
How did all these people know Theodoros Angelopoulos? I thought he was my own private guilty pleasure, my own discovery from the days when I would spend the last day of every film festival where I was working to see a film I wanted to see, knowing I would never be able to convince my company to buy it. It was at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 1991 when I first saw an Angelopoulis film, The Suspended Step of the Stork starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. I had never seen such a film with the story only revealing its impact at the end. I had seen slow films of Antonioni (not knowing his screenwriter was the same who wrote Angelopoulos’s films), but this film was so unlike any film I had ever seen before. I barely understood what was happening until the end when story revealed the inner core of its truth. At that moment, I knew that the film had changed my life and my perceptions. This was the first in Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders.
‘Suspended Step of the Stork’
As of this writing, two films have screened thus far: Landscape in the Mist (European Film Award for Best Film), the last of his Trilogy of Silence. It was followed the next week by Eternity and a Day (Palme d’Or at the 51st edition of the Cannes Film Festival), the last of his Trilogy of Borders. Having seen these two, so many questions arose for me that I knew I needed to find out more about Angelopoulos himself.
Why these trilogies? Does he always work in threes, making trilogies and why?
Why were both Eternity and a Day and Landscape in the Mist about a little boy Alexander who has no parents, and most particularly no father? Is Alexander in all his films?
What’s with the troupe of actors which keeps showing up in Landscape in the Mist and is central to The Traveling Players his Trilogy of History?
Why are there always three yellow jacketed bicycle riders in the two films I have so far seen?
Why is there always a wedding — sometimes happy, sometimes not so?
Critic Andrew Horton calls Angelopoulos’ films, “Cinema of Contemplation” which does give the context within which one derives the full impact of his stories, more through contemplation than through following a plot line which nevertheless exists. Angelopoulos believed cinema was creating a new form of universal communication. He also saw his own life as a continuation of Greek history from the beginning of time, a theme he reiterates in his films. To absorb such a large picture, one must be in a contemplative state of mind. The films provide a framework for meditation. And his end shot is more than once a line of yellow jacketed repair workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon or riding bicycles to beyond the frame of what we see. I must see the rest of the films to know what these repairmen are doing to extend travel and communication beyond borders.
Angelopoulos views the world through the eyes of a child named Alexander who in Landscape in the Mist is about five and is traveling across Greece to Germany with his ten year old sister Voula to find the father they have never known. They recognize they are part of a story with no end. The only adult words describing their odyssey are in the bedtime story Voula tells Alexander; in the introduction to a staged play that the friend they find on the road, named Orestes, describes to them; and in the first words spoken by a singing actor as the traveling theater troupe is about to start performing the play. But, as in the bedtime story and in Orestes’ description, the play, seemingly interrupted by other events, never finishes. The story starts, “in the beginning is darkness, then comes light, then the sea and sky, then the plants and trees.” When his sister feels fear for what lies ahead, Alexander comforts her with his promise to continue telling the story that never finishes. Through the mist, they find the tree, so vaguely described by Orestes as he shows them blank frames of a 35mm piece of film he picks up and so materially there in front of them when they cross the last border to Germany. They hug its trunk in relief and renewed trust in the will of some higher order that they have arrived safely.
Landscape in the Mist is the last of the Trilogy of Silence, haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness, myth, and memory. Landscape in the Mist represents the “silence of God”. The other two parts are the “silence of history” in Voyage to Cythera (1984) and the “silence of love” in The Beekeeper [1986).
In Eternity and a Day, the child in himself, Alexander (Bruno Ganz), has become a great writer and poet who is now facing his final days of a fatal illness. Putting his affairs in order and bidding farewell to family and friends before admitting himself into the hospital where he will await death, he asks “How long is tomorrow?” and is told, it is “eternity and a day.” He finds himself paired on his last day with a child, an Albanian illegal of Greek origin who fears the future with no adult to guide him into an unknown land across the sea. The poet himself lacks to words to finish his own work let alone help the child with his fears and his own journey, but his redemption comes from a literal exchange of words through the child which allows him to transcend his life and his emotional distance.
The three words Alexander receives from the Albanian boy are korfulamu, a delicate word for the heart of a flower, a literal ‘word of comfort’ for his physical suffering. The second is xenitis, the feeling of being a stranger everywhere, including with his own beautiful wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). and daughter. The third is argathini, meaning ‘very late at night’, a metaphor for the ‘twilight’ of his existence.
The story that never finishes is the human odyssey of migrations and crossing borders, both in lands and in our minds as we face unknown futures in landscapes we do not recognize as our own. Angelopoulos’ reality unfolds through the prism of his memories. And he counts himself lucky to have lived consciously within the context of history. His memories are a continuation of the long history of Greece. He was born in 1935 the year before King George II of Greece returned to Rome with his Prime Minister Metaxas who, with the agreement of the king, suspended the parliament and established the quasi-fascist Metaxas regime. He lived through World War II, the subsequent Civil War, and the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.
He sees his films not as psychological studies of characters but as characters’ personal lives within a historical context, of “finding one’s own history within the history of a place.” He considers his political films quite different from those of Costa Gavras’ whose he calls bourgeois.
Starting with The Iliad, The Odyssey, and later the concluding Aeneid, continuing with the classic tretralogies, cycles of three plays by the great playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Angelopoulis likewise writes in trilogies, three tragedies intended to be seen in one sitting, but way too long for most of us modern westerners. The trilogies of Angelopoulos would have greater impact if we could see them sequentially, even if not in one sitting. But the programmers did not see it that way and so we must see each film (which stands on its own) interspersed in what seems to be a random order. Even so, the themes intertwine seamlessly creating a textile of modern Greek myth, thought and insight.
Angelopoulos created Days of ’36 in 1972. It is the first film of what would become his self-described Trilogy of History that also includes The Traveling Players (1975) and Alexander the Great (1980) with an epilogue of The Hunters (1977). (The Greek plays also had epilogues.) That he made the first two films in Greece during the dictatorship required an “imposed silence” and indeed, that is the prevalent element in Days of ’36, the story of the country’s ruling leisure class suppressing the fight of leftist labor. The film begins with the assassination of a labor organizer and ends with a mafiosa-type last word of the ruling class which needs stability at any cost.
In The Traveling Players, Senses of Cinema writes:
It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos uses members of an otherwise anonymous cast of marginalized traveling players as conveyers of contemporary Greek history …: Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) traces his immigration from Asia Minor to Greece (a reminder of the country’s historically borderless, ethnically diverse population that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire), Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) chronicles the start of the Civil War after the defeat of the Germans in 1944, and Pylades (Kiriakos Katrivanos) provides a personal account of the torture of political prisoners. In essence, by using the testament of people who are literally transient and homeless (and without identity), Angelopoulos creates a powerful analogy for all Greek people as displaced exiles within their own country.
Again, from Senses of Cinema:
Angelopoulos returned to the theme of the nation’s historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to examine the the refugee’s resigned sentiment, “We’ve crossed the border and we’re still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?”, carries through to the makeshift, outdoor cinema in Angelopoulos’ next film, Ulysses’ Gaze, as A arrives for an unauthorized screening of his film. Like the adrift Spyros in The Beekeeper, A’s devastating emotional odyssey through his ancestral homeland is also a personal journey to reconnect with his cultural past, striving to recapture the purity of human vision that has been tainted by romantic loss, artistic controversy, familial estrangement, ideological disillusionment, and the ravages of war.
Regarding the written words of the scripts, Angelopoulos consistently worked with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who also frequently collaborated with such celebrated directors as Federico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni (he wrote all of his movies’ scripts) and Francesco Rossi. Guerra consulted on The Dust of Time, cowrote The Weeping Meadow, Eternity and a Day, Ulysses’ Gaze, and wrote The Suspended Step of the Stork, Landscape in the Mist, The Beekeeper and Voyage to Cythera.
Angelopoulos also collaborated regularly with the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis and the composer Eleni Karaindrou, both of whom are essential to his works’ impact.
One of the recurring themes of his work is immigration, the flight from homeland and the return, as well as the history of 20th century Greece. Angelopoulos was considered by British film critics Derek Malcolm and David Thomson to be one of the world’s greatest directors.
Angelopoulos died late 24 January 2012, several hours after being involved in an crash while shooting the last film of his latest trilogy on modern Greece, The Other Sea in Athens. On that evening, the filmmaker had been with his crew in the area of Drapetsona, near Piraeus when he was hit by a motorcycle ridden by an off-duty police officer. The crash occurred when Angelopoulos, 76, attempted to cross a busy road. The first two films were The Weeping Meadow (2004)) and The Dust of Time (2008).
As his legacy lives on, it reminds those of us who contemplate time and space that our Western Civilization began when Greece’s voice was raised to express our most primal emotions in its tragedies. Angelopouos’ work, along with the oldest epic cycle and the Greek tragedies, all deal with the aftermath of world shaking wars which are the results of revenge and murder, sex and power wielded by those more powerful than even the king despots of the age, but by the gods themselves (whoever she is).
- 12/18/2022
- by Sydney
- Sydney's Buzz
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...
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...
- 12/7/2022
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
John Aniston, the charming Greece-born actor who for more than three decades portrayed the ruthless Victor Kiriakis on the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives, has died. He was 89.
The father of actress Jennifer Aniston died Friday, his daughter announced.
“Sweet papa … John Anthony Aniston,” the Friends megastar wrote in a tribute post on Instagram Monday, “You were one of the most beautiful humans I ever knew. I am so grateful that you went soaring into the heavens in peace — and without pain. And on 11/11 no less! You always had perfect timing. That number will forever hold an even greater meaning for me now.”
She ended the post: “I’ll love you till the end of time.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jennifer Aniston (@jenniferaniston)
Aniston had played a different character, a doctor, on Days of Our Lives in 1969-70, then worked on two other daytime serials,...
The father of actress Jennifer Aniston died Friday, his daughter announced.
“Sweet papa … John Anthony Aniston,” the Friends megastar wrote in a tribute post on Instagram Monday, “You were one of the most beautiful humans I ever knew. I am so grateful that you went soaring into the heavens in peace — and without pain. And on 11/11 no less! You always had perfect timing. That number will forever hold an even greater meaning for me now.”
She ended the post: “I’ll love you till the end of time.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jennifer Aniston (@jenniferaniston)
Aniston had played a different character, a doctor, on Days of Our Lives in 1969-70, then worked on two other daytime serials,...
- 11/14/2022
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Monica Bellucci was among the guests of honor at the 14th edition of the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, where the Paris-based Italian icon discussed her latest film, “The Girl in the Fountain,” and looked back on her career.
In “The Girl in the Fountain,” which alternates archival footage of Hollywood icon Anita Ekberg with the story of Bellucci, the Italian actress retraces Ekberg’s frailties and choices, reflecting on what it feels like to be an icon.
The Swedish-born star was immortalized in Federico Fellini’s film, which sees her character wade into the Trevi fountain followed by Marcello Mastroianni.
“Through my eyes, you find out who this actress was, and it’s a piece of Italian history that we’re telling. But ‘La Dolce Vita’ isn’t just about post-war Italy – it has an international reach. At the time, there was so much creativity, there were so many great filmmakers – Fellini,...
In “The Girl in the Fountain,” which alternates archival footage of Hollywood icon Anita Ekberg with the story of Bellucci, the Italian actress retraces Ekberg’s frailties and choices, reflecting on what it feels like to be an icon.
The Swedish-born star was immortalized in Federico Fellini’s film, which sees her character wade into the Trevi fountain followed by Marcello Mastroianni.
“Through my eyes, you find out who this actress was, and it’s a piece of Italian history that we’re telling. But ‘La Dolce Vita’ isn’t just about post-war Italy – it has an international reach. At the time, there was so much creativity, there were so many great filmmakers – Fellini,...
- 10/22/2022
- by Lise Pedersen
- Variety Film + TV
“La Dolce Vita” inspired a sweet flash mob performance of the iconic film score in Rome.
Composer Nino Rota crafted the soundtrack to Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1960 classic about a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who searches for the beauty of Rome over the course of a week. The soundtrack is getting a re-release via record label Cam Sugar, and led to an impromptu performance of select “Dolce Vita” songs in front of the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome.
The 10-piece Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta performed in the flash mob, organized by automaker Fiat along with the Rome Film Festival to promote the “La Dolce Vita” newly remastered re-release soundtrack, out October 21. The 14 tracks will be available on digital and vinyl.
“We were delighted to collaborate with Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta to put on this special event to celebrate the release of ‘La Dolce Vita,'” Cam Sugar CEO Filippo Sugar said in...
Composer Nino Rota crafted the soundtrack to Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1960 classic about a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who searches for the beauty of Rome over the course of a week. The soundtrack is getting a re-release via record label Cam Sugar, and led to an impromptu performance of select “Dolce Vita” songs in front of the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome.
The 10-piece Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta performed in the flash mob, organized by automaker Fiat along with the Rome Film Festival to promote the “La Dolce Vita” newly remastered re-release soundtrack, out October 21. The 14 tracks will be available on digital and vinyl.
“We were delighted to collaborate with Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta to put on this special event to celebrate the release of ‘La Dolce Vita,'” Cam Sugar CEO Filippo Sugar said in...
- 10/21/2022
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
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