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Rocco Siffredi, the retired global porn star whose life story inspired Netflix’s recent series “Supersex,” is to star in “Blue,” an Italian drama set in the erotic social media world.

Shooting is underway in Italy’s central Marche region on the film, which according to promotional materials revolves around a young female student named Luce contending with “tough choices” as she navigates the deceptive world of erotic websites and social media. The indie film is directed by first-timer Eleonora Puglia.

Italy’s PiperFilm is handling international sales and will release “Blue” in Italy.

Alongside Siffredi, the “Blue” cast also includes young Italian actresses Alexia Cozzi — who plays Luce — and Shaheen Barletta (“Prisma”). Siffredi plays Luce’s father.

“Blue” is a co-production between Italy’s Camaleo Film and Poland’s Agreswyna Banda, with support from the Marche Film Commission and Lazio Cinema International.

Siffredi, who has made roughly 1,400 hardcore films,...

Australia’s Umbella Entertainment has announced the New Extremity Collection: Volume 1, a Blu-ray box set featuring four provocative French films: High Tension, Anatomy of Hell, Frontier(s), and Martyrs.

2003’s High Tension (also known as Haute Tension and Switchblade Romance) is directed by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), who co-wrote with Grégory Levasseur. Cécile de France, Maïwenn, and Philippe Nahon star.

Best friends Marie and Alexia decide to spend a quiet weekend at Alexia’s parents’ secluded farmhouse, but their idyllic getaway turns into an endless night of horror.

Special Features:

Audio Commentary by Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur Audio Commentary by film hustorians Josh Nelson and Alex Heller-Nicholas (new) Haute Horror: Making of High Tension 2003 Documentary 2003 Interview with Cécile de France 2003 Interview with Maïwenn 2003 Interview with Phillippe Nahon Head Case: Final Girls, Fabulism and Amour Fou in Alexandre Aja’s High Tension with Anton Bitel (new) Stills Gallery...

Catherine Breillat‘s psychosexual reckless return to form is here. Her acclaimed latest film, “Last Summer” (Sideshow/Janus), will premiere on the Criterion Channel on November 21 with a live-streaming event, as IndieWire announces exclusively. The “Last Summer” live-stream, happening that evening at 6 p.m. Pt/9 p.m. Et, is in line with Criterion’s new tradition of launching the Sideshow/Janus titles early — the streamer similarly launched Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” that way over the summer.

“Last Summer” also joins the Criterion Channel as a retrospective of provocative filmmaker Breillat’s oeuvre streams on the platform, including “Fat Girl” and “Anatomy of Hell” and “Sex Is Comedy.” Starring Léa Drucker in one of the year’s best performances, “Last Summer” earned raves earlier this year and at Cannes and other festivals in 2023. The streaming premiere is good cause to remember “Last Summer” for your year-end lists. Bonus features accompanying...

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

Across the River and Into the Trees (Paula Ortiz)

Hemingway’s work across novels and short stories has been adapted for film countless times over, yet Across the River and Into the Trees has never properly been rendered onscreen. Until now. Written by Peter Flannery and directed by Paula Ortiz, here is a handsome film that is decidedly modest in its endeavor. The best thing going for it is Liev Schreiber as Colonel Richard Cantwell, the lead of the picture. Schreiber is one of those actors who has somehow always been underrated, despite being capable of playing nearly any kind of part. A kind boyfriend thrust into an impossible familial situation (The Daytrippers)? Check. Tough-but-fractured fixer living on the edge (Ray Donovan)? Check.

November 2024, Criterion Channel is set to deliver an exceptional lineup of films that will excite cinephiles and casual viewers alike. The month promises a rich exploration of genres, featuring a strong selection of Coen Brothers classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and The Big Lebowski (1998), along with their more recent works like A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Noir and crime enthusiasts will revel in an array of titles, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gilda (1946), and The Big Heat (1953), showcasing the genre’s iconic narratives and stylistic depth. International cinema also shines through with compelling French dramas like Fat Girl (2001) and Dheepan (2015), highlighting diverse storytelling from around the globe.

The lineup doesn’t shy away from classic drama, featuring timeless films like On the Waterfront (1954) and Seven Samurai (1954), which continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Additionally, viewers can look forward to a variety of documentary and experimental films, including Wild Wheels...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

From her controversial 1976 directorial debut “A Real Young Girl” to even more confrontational later works like “Romance” (1999) and “Anatomy of Hell” (2004), French auteur Catherine Breillat has long been one of the cinema’s premier chroniclers of desire in all its complexities and contradictions. Her latest film, “Last Summer,” is one of her best, a riveting and nuanced portrayal of an affair between an attorney (Léa Drucker) and her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher) that’s paced like a languorous Éric Rohmer dramedy but grips the audience like a thriller. It’s a remake of the Danish movie “Queen of Hearts,” and while the script by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer provides “Last Summer” with meticulously crafted dialogue, characterizations, and situations, it’s only a starting point; the greatness of the film is in the visual execution, which is just as Breillat intended.

“One mistake that people often make is they confuse the script with the film,...

New York audiences might be the luckiest cinephiles this summer: French legend Catherine Breillat’s newest gem of a film Last Summer not only opens theatrically this weekend, but they were treated to a retrospective of the director’s work at Film at Lincoln Center. A very rare occasion, unfortunately, for the rest of the world––the reputation of Breillat’s earlier films precede her. Romance and Anatomy of Hell were both associated with the New French Extremity, considered provocative and often inappropriate for their explicit sex scenes and violent ways in which they frame male-female relationships. However, if you look at Breillat’s oeuvre as a whole, you’d find a strong thread of idealism, even hope her characters try to own up to (unsuccessfully).

Last Summer is a close remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen of Hearts, where a successful lawyer begins an affair with her stepson.

Nothing in this sick, sad world is simpler or more complicated than sex, a principle that helps to explain why the ever-provocative Catherine Breillat — whose films so often consecrate female desire by rendering it violently indefinable — was drawn to remake a 2019 Danish movie about a middle-aged lawyer who dedicates her life to defending young rape victims, only to begin a torrid affair with her own 17-year-old stepson.

May el-Toukhy’s “Queen of Hearts” spun that stark hypocrisy into a melodrama ridden with shame and secret darkness. Breillat’s “Last Summer” is much lighter in every way, and all the more revealing as a result; it leverages the same premise into a rich exploration of the inadequate judgment such a premise exists to invite.

Seductively empathetic without absolving its heroine or trolling the audience into aligning themselves with her, this adaptation bypasses any sort of moral binary in order to make...

Last Summer.Catherine Breillat holds eye contact with such intensity that it’s difficult not to feel a little intimidated in her presence. It’s an apt trait for a filmmaker of equally, and brilliantly, intimidating films. Unafraid, even eager, to cause discomfort, Breillat has dedicated her career to the cinematic excavation of taboo subjects and liberating female desire onscreen.With her first film in ten years, Last Summer, Breillat presents a reworking of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen of Hearts in which a lawyer, predominantly working on sexual assault cases, has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson. The project is challenging in the ways you might expect from the filmmaker, but somehow tamer, too; the sex is not explicit in the manner of Romance (1999) or Anatomy of Hell (2004), nor are the shocks quite as violent as they are in her widely celebrated Fat Girl (2001). Her approach here feels more...

Like some of her most memorable films, including 36 Fillette, Romance, Sex is Comedy and Anatomy of Hell, French writer-director Catherine Breillat’s new feature, Last Summer (L’Été dernier), dangerously straddles borders between unnerving drama, dark comedy and erotic exploitation — which is precisely the place the director wants to be.

On the surface, the plot seems to come right out of a softcore stepmom flick, following a successful lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), having an illicit affair with her stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), a rebellious 17-year-old who looks like a camera stand-in for Timothée Chalamet. But while the film might follow that template at first blush, including a handful of rather direct sex scenes, Breillat is after something other than mere Skinemax fodder, probing the depths of desire among a bourgeoisie constrained to live out dull, cold existences, and the manipulation that can happen between two lovers with a significant age gap.

Almost a full decade away from the camera since, Catherine Breillat returns to the competition with L’Été dernier (Last Summer). This is her second time here after 2007’s Une vieille maîtresse. Best known for Romance (1999), Fat Girl (2001), and Anatomy of Hell (2004), her 2013 Abuse of Weakness was a TIFF premiere.

A remake of May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts – this sees Anne (Léa Drucker) a respected lawyer who lives in Paris with her husband Pierre and their two young daughters. Théo, Pierre’s 17-year-old son (Samuel Kircher) from a previous marriage, moves in, and Anne eventually begins an affair with him.…...

Some of the films have never been seen by Scandinavian audiences.

Nordic distributor NonStop Entertainment’s classics label NonStop Timeless has acquired Scandinavian rights to a huge batch of 111 classic films from a variety of international sellers.

The films span Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (pictured) through to James Ivory’s Maurice. Some of the notable filmmakers included in the deals are David Lynch, Catherine Breillat and Nina Menkes.

The acquisitions also include George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park from Yellow Veil; Taika Waititi’s Boy and Eagle vs. Shark from HanWay; Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable...

Global porn icon Rocco Siffredi is set to star in “Red Academy,” an English-language horror film to be shot entirely in his academy for aspiring porn stars; however, it will not be an X-rated pic.

Rome-based True Colours has taken world sales on the film to be directed by Italy’s Alessio Liguori, whose previous chiller, the English-language “In the Trap,” was sold widely by the company earlier this year in Cannes. “Trap” signalled the resurgence of Italy’s capability to churn out genre films that can travel amid the growing global appetite for horror titles.

In “Red Academy,” two best friends named Ricky and Eve become bored with their European vacation and to spice it up visit the Rocco Siffredi Academy in Budapest. This turns out to be “a shocking journey” into a scary “underground world where mystical rituals mix with faith,” and “domination melts into adoration and violence,...

Never a stranger to controversy, “Fat Girl” director Catherine Breillat made some provocative remarks during a recent Variety interview in the lead-up to her new role as Locarno Film Festival jury chief. The interview runs the gamut of topics, with Breillat touching on everything from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche to disgraced #MeToo crusader Asia Argento, with whom Breillat worked on 2007’s “The Last Mistress.”

Breillat said she feels that Kechiche, whose 2019 Cannes film “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo” appalled audiences with its graphic and some say misogynistic depictions of sex and nudity, overdid it with the sex scenes in 2013’s Nc-17-rated lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

“Well, I do think Kechiche spent way too long shooting that sex scene. He shot it over two weeks, whereas I would have done it in a day,” Breillait said. “You can’t put actresses in that position for 15 days. I’ve...

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999) is playing January 25 - February 24 and Anatomy of Hell (2004) is playing January 26 - February 25, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the series Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?“Why do men who disgust us understand us better than the ones we love?”—Marie, Romance“Forget it. She’s a bitch. A slut like any other.”“Yes, but the queen of sluts.”—Man, Anatomy of HellNobody fucks like the French. Or is that the Italians? Ask Catherine Breillat, the French auteur who remarked, when probed in an interview promoting her 2004 feature Anatomy of Hell, regarding the decision to cast Rocco Siffredi, the Italian megastar of hardcore porn, in one of the film’s two leading roles: “No French actor could do it. Rocco performs with his entire body and mind, so he is a sort of perfection.” The Italian Stallion,...

Exclusive: Company also reveals more details about Claire Denis’s High Life and will show fresh footage of Emir Kusturica’s On The Milky Road.

Wild Bunch will kick-off sales on an authorised, no-holds-barred documentary about legendary Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi at the upcoming Efm.

Simply entitled Rocco, the documentary features a candid interview with the star in which he speaks about his true life, touching on his early career, fame and life with his wife of 20 years, Rosa Caracciolo, who he co-starred with in Tarzan X: Shame Of Jane- before they married and went on to have two children together.

Sometimes referred to as the “Italian stallion”, Siffredi has appeared in more than 1,500 films over his 30-year career and also dabbled briefly in the French arthouse cinema world, appearing in Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy Of Hell.

The film also follows Siffredi’s recent decision to quit the porn business for good, shortly after appearing...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- A moral group's bid to ban French film Anatomy of Hell from this month's Auckland and Wellington film festivals failed Monday. The Film and Literature Review Board turned down the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards' application to stop the screenings but said it would review the film's censorship rating, which restricts it to patrons 18 years and older. The Society also is appealing the R18 rating for another festival title, Twenty-nine Palms.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- The 36th Auckland International Film Festival opens Friday under threat of legal action that could stop the screening of two of its more than 130 features, Anatomy of Hell and Twentynine Palms. Although the New Zealand film censor has already approved both French movies as suitable for filmgoers 18 years old and older, the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards is appealing the decisions. In its submission to the Film and Literature Board of Review, the Society said Anatomy of Hell contained violence and dehumanizing sexual content that is "injurious to the public good" because it demeans women and promotes misogyny.