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Exclusive: Italy’s National Cinema Museum in the northern Italian city of Turin is one of the country’s most popular museums welcoming more than 600,000 visitors in 2022.

The institution made international headlines this week when it honored Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey with a lifetime achievement award and a masterclass.

The event marked Spacey’s first big public appearance since his career was put on ice in 2017 following a series of sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Monday’s celebration of the actor raised eyebrows in the U.S. and the U.K., where the Oscar-winner will go on trial in June on 12 sexual assault charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty, but was largely viewed as a success in Italy.

Enthusiastic fans flocked to the awards ceremony and masterclass, an accompanying special screening of American Beauty was sold-out, and there was barely a whiff of controversy around the politics of his visit in Italian media.

Tim here, asking the most burning question of them all: who’s ready to talk about Italian silent film?!?!

(Blogging pro-tip: italics and interrobangs make people excited to discuss things that they are not, in fact, excited to talk about).

But actually, we do need to talk about Italian silent film a little bit. Because this weekend marks the centennial anniversary of one of the greatest milestones in film history: Cabiria, a massive historical epic produced and directed by Giovanni Pastrone, and written by literary celebrity Gabriele D’Annunzio. It’s a film in which the title character, played by Lidia Quaranta as a young woman and Carolina Catena as a child, escapes the eruption of Mt. Etna, is captured by Carthaginian pirates, is rescued by a great Roman warrior Fulvio Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) and his muscular slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano), who are themselves then caught up in the Second...

Ray Harryhausen—no, make that The Great Ray Harryhausen— one of the most wondrous craftsmen and peerless special effects artists in the history of cinema, died on Tuesday, May 7, in London, where he had lived for years. He was 92 years old.

Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

Though Ray Harryhausen utilized all kinds of Diy effects over the years in such films as Mighty Joe Young (1941), The Beast from 20th Fathoms (1953), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One Million Years B.C. (1966), Clash of the Titans (1981) and a bunch of others (if you’re not familiar with at least a couple of these, you’re from another planet), he was best known for his work in the field of stop-motion animation.

Out of deep respect for Mr. Harryhausen and the stop-motion artistry of which he was the undisputed king, let me quickly explain what it all was...

Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

With a filmography boasting some of the most important and entertaining films of the last forty years, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to The Departed and Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese could be forgiven for resting on his laurels or at least taking a nice relaxing holiday. Yet this doesn’t seem to be in his make-up. A dedicated cinephile and music lover, the director has been an equally prolific documentarian over the years and the results are rarely less than spellbinding, with his chosen subject matter always deeply personal.

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999) – which is released on DVD tomorrow – are among the best of these movies, with Marty himself narrating – passionately sharing his thoughts on the films which have inspired him in an accessible, unpretentious style. Aided by his own touching reminiscences as well as...

Cabiria (1914) was the seminal Italian historical epic, adding to the gigantic sets and overplayed melodrama of predecessors like Nero and The Fall of Troy, with elegant camera moves (using Segundo de Chomon's first purpose-built dolly) and celebrity cameos for Hannibal and Archimedes. "It had everything but a story," observed Karl Brown, Dw Griffith's camera assistant. Giovanni Pastrone and Gabriele D'Annunzio's historical pageant influenced movies from Intolerance to Metropolis to Conan the Barbarian, and Fellini borrowed its heroine's name for his wife's role in The White Sheik and Nights of Cabiria.

But the figure who caught the public imagination was not the titular heroine, but Maciste, the heroic slave, played by Bartolomeo Pagano, a Genovese longshoreman with a spectacularly muscled physique. Maciste/Pagano went on to star in twenty-four more movies over the next fourteen years, of which the most famous (and the only one available, albeit in somewhat...

COLOGNE, Germany -- A rediscovered and now restored color version Hamlet (1920/21), featuring silent film diva Asta Nielsen as the cross-dressing prince of Denmark, will have its world premiere at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival.

Several black-and-white copies of the film exist but the full-color version has never been shown since the movie's initial release.

Hamlet will have its premiere Feb.10 at Berlin's Volksbuehne and features a new score from composer Michael Riessler.

Berlin will hold a special screening of another recently rediscovered work, Giovanni Pastrone's epic Cabiria. The Berlin Festival will show both versions of the Italian classic, the 1914 silent version and the 1931 sound version, which had been thought lost, on Feb. 17 and Feb. 18. The films have been restored by Turin's Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Both films fit nicely with Berlin's Retrospective this year, which focuses on images of women in the silent film era.

The 57th Berlin International Film Festival runs Feb.