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Each of the films collected in Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau emphasize the possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is and as the protagonists see it or want it to be. Like so many leads in noirs and neo-noirs alike, these men are plagued by big, unattainable dreams and are left grasping at any hope or freedom they can find, only to be inevitably confronted by the harsh truth that everything good is fleeting. Nothing is set in stone but their own demise, and they remain prisoners of their own passions and delusions as the cruel indifference of the world they inhabit takes care of the rest.

Laced with irony as bitter as arsenic, Corneau’s 1975 film Police Python 357 finds Detective Ferrot (Yves Montand) investigating the murder of the woman, Sylvia (Stefania Sandrelli), with whom he was sleeping with. Unaware that his boss, Commissioner Ganay (François Périer...

Genre-hopping maverick Elio Petri’s half-mod, half-madcap ’60s mindbender is set in a dystopian society obsessed with a government-sponsored game known as “The Big Hunt” that pits volunteer hunters against victims in mortal combat. Based on a Robert Sheckley sci-fi short story, Elio Petri’s social satire, co-written by the director and frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, takes aim at consumer capitalism and the “society of the spectacle,” five years before Guy Debord popularized the term in his Situationist manifesto.

Among its targets, the film draws a bead on ageism, with Marcello Poletti (Marcello Mastroianni) having to hide his elderly parents from government search and seizure. It spoofs corporate-media domination through the machinations of Marcello and Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress), the wily American trying to track him down, arranging to have their kills broadcast on live TV. And The 10th Victim takes on New Age cultism, with Marcello serving...

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

Roxy Cinema

Minority Report shows on 35mm Friday; The Beguiled, The Age of Innocence, and City Dudes play Saturday; Jean Rollin’s Lost In New York and The Sealed Soil screen on Sunday.

Film Forum

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town begins a 35mm run; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg‘s 4K restoration continues; Battling Butler screens Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

See It Big! Let It Snow brings Nanook of the North; Candyman screens on Saturday.

Museum of Modern Art

A dual celebration of Marcello and Chiara Mastroianni continues, this weekend bringing films by Fellini, Elio Petri and Antonioni.

Metrograph

Red Desert, L’eclisse, Playtime, Eyes Wide Shut, Moonstruck, and Con Air play on 35mm; The Holidays at Metrograph, It Looks Pretty from a Distance, Urban Ghosts, Absconded Art, and Nicolas Uncaged continue.

IFC Center

2001, Blood Simple, Eraserhead, and Society show late.

Directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson are no strangers to the offbeat and profoundly bizarre. Rumors the trio's latest film (the second feature collaboration between Maddin and the Johnson Brothers; the third between Maddin and Evan Johnson) stars Cate Blanchett as Hilda Ortmann, the Chancellor of Germany and host to the other participants of the annual G7 Summit. For those who don't know, the conclave is framed thusly by a title card: "an intergovernmental political and economic forum consisting of the world's wealthiest liberal democracies." In short, these are the chosen few with the power to make decisions that will impact nations on a major scale -- if only they can remain focused on the task at hand.

Among the G7 attendees are Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Mnohchet), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Prime Minister...

France’s Les Films du Losange is taking international sales outside Italy on “Sicilian Letters” (“Iddu”), the hotly anticipated drama about Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro – who was dubbed “the last godfather” – directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (“Sicilian Ghost Story”).

“Sicilian Letters” pairs two top Italian actors — Elio Germano, who plays Messina (see first-look image above) and Toni Servillo (first-look image below) as his antagonist Catello, a shady secret services operative — working in tandem for the first time. The title refers to a surreptitious correspondence between them using “pizzini,” the small slips of paper that the Sicilian Mafia uses for high-level communications.

The film – which is expected to launch on the fall festival circuit – looks at a time during Denaro’s three decades as a fugitive from Italian justice, when he was at the peak of his nefarious powers. After being on the run for three decades,...

Martin Scorsese was at the Berlinale this week for the first time in a decade. His presence to collect an honorary Golden Bear was a reminder of the festival’s glories of yesteryear.

In decades past, Scorsese touched down in Berlin with major works such as Raging Bull (1981), Cape Fear (1992); Gangs of New York (2003 ), Shine a Light (2008) and Shutter Island (2010). It feels a long time since the event — traditionally one of the world’s great cinema showcases — has attracted such movies. In recent years the studio splashes have dried up.

So have memorable movies from A-list arthouse filmmakers. Scorsese this week sang the praises of the event for the encouragement it had given him as an emerging filmmaker. Citing Brian de Palma’s Silver Bear win for his second film Greetings in 1969, Scorsese said the prize had marked a turning point for unknown, independent American directors such as himself, de Palma,...

Italian cinema is in the spotlight at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles where the screening series “Ennio Morricone: Essential Scores from a Movie Maestro,” programmed in partnership with Cinecittà, is currently playing to sold-out audiences.

The Oct. 6-Nov. 25 event comprises 20 titles, including Sergio Leone’s “The Good the Bad and the Ugly” in a new restored print, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (pictured) and Don Siegel’s “Two Mules for Sister Sara,” plus a selection of other works hailing both from the master composer’s native Italy and the U.S.. Among these are Brian De Palma (“The Untouchables”), Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) and Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” for which Morricone finally won the the Oscar for best original soundtrack in 2016.

“Hateful Eight” screened at the museum’s David Geffen Theatre in the 70mm “Roadshow” version with an intermission and an overture.

Cinecittà operates...

Marina Cicogna, a film producer and one of the first women to establish herself in the traditionally male cinema environment in Italy, died Saturday in Rome. She was 89.

Cicogna produced several important Italian films, including Metti, una Sera a Cena by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) by Elio Petri, with the latter winning the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1971. The New York Times called her “one of the most powerful women in European cinema.”

Her extraordinary experience and career were recounted in 2021 in the documentary film Marina Cicogna. Life and Everything Else by Andrea Bettinetti and in her autobiography, Ancora Spero, released this year by Marsilio Publishing.

Cicogna died with Benedetta Gardona, her companion of more than 30 years, by her side.

Ahead of receiving the 2023 David Award for Lifetime Achievement this year, Cicogna...

Marina Cicogna, Italy’s first major female film producer who shepherded films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, including Petri’s Oscar-winning “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” has died. She was 89.

Cicogna died on Nov. 4 in her Rome home after a long battle with an unspecified form of cancer, according to Italian news agency Ansa.

The Venice Biennale foundation is a statement, praised her as “the first female film producer in Europe” and noted that she was always deeply linked to the Venice Film Festival that was founded by her grandfather, Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata.

Born in Rome on May 29, 1934, to Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, Cicogna attended high school in Italy and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she struck up a friendship with Jack Warner’s daughter Barbara Warner and established a connection with Hollywood.

In...

Despite its soft-sounding title, Stefano Sollima’s crime drama is a gripping call-back to the heyday of poliziotteschi movies, a peculiarly Italian genre that dealt with inter-gang wars in a country where the police were often more venal than the bad guys. Adagio, though, takes a unique tack, borrowing from Martin Scorsese’s fatalistic masterpiece The Irishman to portray to tell a story in which a trio of gangsters — one blind, one suffering early-onset dementia, and another with terminal cancer — are forced to reunite against a team of bent cops involved in an elaborate blackmail plan.

There are shades of Elio Petri’s classic Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, too, although it takes a while for this to become obvious. Indeed, for some 45 minutes, Sollima keeps us guessing as to which side the villains are actually on, starting with a long sequence in which a young man named Manuel...

Like the early works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rudolf Thome’s films owe a significant debt to the French New Wave, particularly Jean-Luc Godard’s penchant for irreverent genre deconstruction. In that vein, Thome’s Red Sun is an exercise in keeping things “medium cool,” holding both its erratic narrative and characters’ motivations at a Brechtian distance. The violence, when it comes, is perfunctory and decidedly nondramatic, paving the way for The American Friend, Wim Wenders’s abstract and stylized adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game.

After drifting into Munich, Thomas (Marquard Bohm) heads straight for the Take Five nightclub, where he renews his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Peggy (Uschi Obermaier). Little does this rambling man realize that, by crashing at her pad, he’s stumbled into a truly bizarre living arrangement. Peggy and her three roommates—statuesque Christine (Diana Körner), redheaded Sylvie (Sylvia Kekulé), and sprightly Isolde (Gaby Go...

“The Eight Mountains,” Belgian directors Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s Italian-language drama about friendship, mountains and growing up, scored the top prize at Italy’s 68th David di Donatello Awards.

Besides winning best picture, the film also scooped statuettes for best non-original screenplay, photography and sound.

Given that the directors are not Italian, it was a particularly significant victory for “Mountains,” which was praised as “quietly magnificent” by Variety critic Jessica Kiang. The film, which is currently playing well on the U.S. arthouse circuit, tracks the decades-long friendship between two Italian boys named Pietro and Bruno — one from the city, the other a shepherd boy from the Alps.

“It’s pretty incredible,” commented a visibly moved Van Groeningen. “Two Belgians who win this prize in Italy for an Italian movie.” “Thank you for this declaration of love,” added Vandermeersch, his partner in life. “We love Italy very much.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSKristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016).The next film directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead) will star Kristen Stewart as…Susan Sontag. Based on Ben Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life, the project will have some hybrid-doc elements, as we might expect from Johnson: according to Screen Daily, Johnson will film an interview with the actress about her preparation for the role at the Berlinale, where Stewart is jury president.Richard Ayoade will direct and star in an adaptation of George Saunders’s The Semplica Girl Diaries, with casting currently underway.New Spanish Cinema luminary Carlos Saura died last week aged 91. His best-known films depicted and critiqued life under the Franco dictatorship, like La Caza...

This review originally ran May 25, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.

If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.

This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director, Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.

A big welcome to the new disc company Radiance! This first CineSavant Radiance review is a knockout political drama from Italy’s Elio Petri, with one of the best performances ever by Gian-Maria Volontè. Model factory machinist Lulù Massa offends his peers on the assembly line with his individualistic egotism. An injury on the job makes him a focus for Unionists and student radicals. Petri’s warmly humanist picture is also blunt in its outlook — our imperfect hero is adrift in an unsatisfactory system, and the politicals’ agenda isn’t helpful either. It’s compelling filmmaking, co-starring Mariangela Melato and driven by an excellent Ennio Morricone music score.

The Working Class Goes to Heaven

Region B Blu-ray

Radiance (U.K.)

1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 115 min. / Street Date February 1, 2023 / La classe operaia va in paradiso, Lulù the Tool / Available from / £16.99

Starring: Gian Maria Volontè, Mariangela Melato, Salvo Randone, Mietta Albertini, Gino Pernice,...

This Region-Free import gives us both versions of Gillo Pontecorvo’s fictional tale of colonial misdeeds that sums up old Europe’s attitude toward the New World. Marlon Brando’s agent provocateur and freebooting soldier of fortune foments revolution against the Portuguese and then hires out to reverse everything he’s done for English interests. The big scale production was filmed in several locations across the globe; it has a standout performance from Evaristo Márquez as a charismatic peasant eager to become a conqueror.

Burn!

Region Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 194

1969 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 129, 112 min. / Street Date December 28, 2022 / Available from Viavision / au 79.95

Starring: Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez, Norman Hill, Renato Salvatori.

Cinematography: Marcello Gatti, Giuseppe Ruzzolini

Production Designer: Sergio Canevari

Art Director: Piero Gherardi

Film Editor: Mario Morra

Original Music: Ennio Morricone

Written by Franco Solinas, Giorgio Arlorio

Produced by Alberto Grimaldi

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

The enterprising Italian producer Alberto...

To mark the Blu-ray release of Big Time Gambling Boss and The Working Class Goes to Heaven, both out on 2nd January, we’ve been given a Blu-ray bundle of both movies to give away to 2 winners.

Big Time Gambling Boss

Tokyo, 1934. Gang boss Arakawa is too ill and a successor must be named. The choice falls on Nakai, but being an outsider he refuses and suggests senior clansman Matsuda instead. But Matsuda is in jail and the elders won’t wait for his release, so they appoint the younger and more malleable Ishido to take the reins. Clan honour and loyalties are severely tested when Matsuda is released, resulting in an increasingly violent internal strife. An atmospheric tale of gangland intrigue written by Kazuo Kasahara (Battles Without Honour and Humanity) and starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, and genre legend Koji Tsuruta, Big Time Gambling Boss is one of the all-time classics of the yakuza genre.

Giancarlo Giannini, who was the late great Lina Wertmüller’s muse, helmer Gabriele Muccino (“The Pursuit of Happyness”), and Teresa Saponangelo, star of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” are among top honorees of the seventh edition of Filming Italy — Los Angeles, the bridge between Italy and Hollywood set to run as a hybrid event Feb. 28-March 3.

The celebration of Italy’s top film and TV titles is headed by longtime Italian industry promoter Tiziana Rocca, a former chief of the Taormina Film Festival. She proudly points out that its physical screenings, starting on March 1 in L.A.’s Harmony Gold Theater, are among the first inperson events in Los Angeles as ceremonies open up in the city.

Thanks to Rocca’s dogged determination Giannini, who starred in nine Wertmüller films, starting with sex comedy and social satire “The Seduction of Mimi,” is to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Above: Italian poster for The Girl with a Pistol. Artist: Giorgio Olivetti.Monica Vitti, who died on February 2nd at the age of 90, was an icon of modern cinema—one of its most famous and most beautiful faces—but she is best known outside Italy for just four films, all of which she made for her one-time partner Michelangelo Antonioni. In the original Italian poster for L’avventura (1960), the film that made both their names, her head is tilted to the side, her face barely visible: she is mostly a shock of blonde hair. But in the posters that were created as that film travelled the globe, and in her ensuing posters for Antonioni's La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), she gets her close-up, usually staring into the middle distance or directly at the viewer. Always impassive, never smiling. But of course, in a career that lasted another 25 years there were many more films,...

Next month’s Mubi lineup for the U.S. has been unveiled and a number of our recent festival favorites that were awaiting distribution will be coming to the service, including Mr. Bachmann and His Class, Ballad of a White Cow, Madalena, Taste, The Monopoly of Violence, and For Lucio.

One of last year’s great films, Hong Sangsoo’s The Woman Who Ran, will also be arriving, alongside Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, and Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, with the latter two pairing for a Valentine’s Day double feature.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

February 1 | The Monopoly of Violence | David Dufresne | From France with Love

February 2 | Looking for Venera | Norika Sefa | Festival Focus: Rotterdam

February 3 | Madalena | Madiano Marcheti | Festival Focus: Rotterdam

February 4 | Honey Cigar | Kamir Aïnouz | From France with Love

February 5 | …and...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

Despite the proliferation of streaming services, it’s becoming increasingly clear that any cinephile only needs subscriptions to a few to survive. Among the top of our list are The Criterion Channel and Mubi and now they’ve each unveiled their stellar April line-ups.

Over at The Criterion Channel, highlights include spotlights on Ennio Morricone, the Marx Brothers, Isabel Sandoval, and Ramin Bahrani, plus Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, the brand-new restoration of Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, and one of last year’s best films, David Osit’s Mayor.

At Mubi (where we’re offering a 30-day trial), they’ll have the exclusive streaming premiere of two of the finest festival films from last year’s circuit, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema, plus Philippe Garrel’s latest The Salt of Tears, along with films from Terry Gilliam, George A. Romero,...

Italian actor and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, who played the prying journalist Gianna Brezzi in the Dario Argento cult classic “Deep Red”(Profondo Rosso), and was herself a cult figure, has died. She was 70.

The cause of her death, announced by her daughter Asia Argento and Italian news reports, was not disclosed.

Born in Florence in June 1950, Nicolodi made her acting debut in Italian master Francesco Rosi’s “Many Wars Ago” (Uomini Contro). She was working with helmer Elio Petri when in 1974 she met Dario Argento, with whom she had a longstanding romance, becoming his muse both on and off the screen. In 1975, Nicolodi gave birth to their daughter, Asia Argento, now an actor, director, singer and well-known media personality.

After “Deep Red’s” release in 1975, Nicolodi went on to perform in Dario Argento films “Inferno,”(1980), “Tenebre” (1982), “Phenomena” (1984) and “Opera” (1987).

She is also credited with conceiving the original idea and contributing...

Chances are, if you’ve seen many of the late films of Theodoros Angelopoulos, Michelangelo Antonioni (everything since L’avventura), Marco Bellocchio, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini (almost everything since Amarcord), Mario Monicelli, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia), the Taviani brothers, and/or Luchino Visconti, and paid much attention to their script credits, you know who Tonino Guerra (1920–2012) was and is—a ubiquitous presence in modernist European cinema, especially its Italian branches. Petri was his first cinematic employer, after Guerra started out as a schoolteacher and poet whose parents were illiterate; later on, he became a visual artist as well as a screenwriter with over a hundred credits.Even after one acknowledges the exceptionally collaborative role played by multiple writers on Italian films, it seems that no one else was considered quite as essential by so many important directors. In Nicola Tranquillino’s documentary about Tonino (visible on YouTube...

The David di Donatello Awards, which are modeled on the Oscars, were established in the 1950s as Italy’s film industry started thriving amid the country’s postwar reconstruction effort.

Below are some milestones that provide a partial mini-history of postwar Italian cinema.

1956: The first David di Donatello awards ceremony takes place at Rome’s Cinema Fiamma. The gold statuette, which is a replica of Michelangelo’s David, is made by Bulgari. Vittorio De Sica, Walt Disney, and Gina Lollobrigida are among the year’s prizewinners.

1957: The Davids ceremony moves to Taormina’s Ancient Greek Theater, which will host the ceremony for many more years to come. Federico Fellini wins the best director prize for “Nights of Cabiria.”

1958: Anna Magnani wins best actress for George Cukor’s “Wild Is the Wind.” Marilyn Monroe is feted for her role in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” directed by Laurence Olivier.

by Eric Blume

Fifty years ago director Luis Bunuel's Tristana, his second collaboration with Catherine Deneuve, opened. It went on to become  a 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee.  While it lost the statue to Elio Petri's excellent Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion from Italy, it's fascinating to look back at Bunuel's fourth-to-final film and see it still standing strong.

In many ways, Tristana is one of the more straightforward and accessible Bunuel films, but "straightforward Bunuel" is thankfully still pretty fucked up...

Above: Chinese poster for Spirited Away; artist: Zao Dao.The most popular poster to date on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram, by a dragon’s length, with more than double the amount of likes of its closest contender, was this gorgeous Chinese poster (and its color variant which you can see here) for Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), which apparently just got a Chinese theatrical release eighteen years after it was made. The posters were painted by the young Chinese comic book artist Zao Dao who you can, and should, read more about here.I was happy to see Renato Casaro’s prop poster for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood’s film-within-the-film Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo—which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago—make such an impression, as well as another of my favorite Casaros painted forty years earlier, for Screamers, a.k.

Arrow Video resurrects another Lee Van Cleef headliner with 1972’s The Grand Duel, the debut of Giancarlo Santi, who had previously been the assistant director on Sergio Leone’s celebrated The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Notably, the film was scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, a noted genre writer (who also directed a handful of titles), responsible for Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim (1965) and Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963). Like Gastaldi’s other spaghetti western treatment featuring Van Cleef, 1967’s Day of Anger, recycled themes popularized by Leone provide the narrative backbone of a title which supplies exactly what it promises, a climactic showdown, with little to run on between its opening and closing acts.…...

In many ways, as both its plot and title indicate, Luciano Ercoli’s jazzy 1970 directorial debut, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, is merely highly stylized pastiche. Technically, the title is classified as a “melodrama gialli,” meaning it’s defined by psychological excess rather than the hyper violent aesthetics of the giallo craze, which would shortly take over following Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). Instead, Ernesto Gastaldi’s script pays heavy homage to the gaslighting melodrama which popularized international film noir, particularly staples like (of course) Gaslight (1944) and Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955). And the fantastic, unmistakably giallo-y title capitalizes on Elio Petri’s celebrated Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, released only months prior to Ercoli’s film—both Above Suspicion titles are marked by equally idiosyncratic scores from Ennio Morricone.…...

Playboy magazine in Germany defended its story in which Ennio Morricone called Quentin Tarantino “a cretin” whose movies are “trash,” saying Monday that the comments were made by the legendary Italian composer in an interview at the end of June.

Morricone had said over the weekend that he had not spoken to Playboy and that the scathing comments about Tarantino, with whom he had worked on the film “The Hateful Eight,” were fabricated. But Hubert Burda Media, the international publishing group which owns Playboy in Germany, rejected that disavowal.

“We are surprised that composer Ennio Morricone denies giving an interview to German Playboy,” the company said in a statement issued Monday evening. “In fact, the conversation took place on June 30, 2018, at his estate in Rome. The interview, about the concert organizer Semmel Concerts, which was also present at the interview, had been agreed to with German Playboy. We also cannot...

At the age of 81, Vanessa Redgrave has no qualms about arriving on the Lido to collect a Golden Lion celebrating 60 years on stage and screen. Not because she feels it’s time to rest on her laurels and bathe in the glow of past achievements, but because her career is still very much in full flow. Last year she made her directorial debut with her Cannes entry “Sea Sorrow,” a documentary about the immigration crisis in Europe, and now she’s playing truant from London’s Theatreland, where she’s appearing in Matthew Lopez’s AIDS drama “The Inheritance” at the Young Vic. A recent film she made, “The Aspern Papers,” is showing at Venice by way of tribute, but whether or not — or even how — this all stacks up as a body of work seems to be of no concern to her. “An actor, or an actress, is always...

Review by Roger Carpenter

While Lucio Fulci made his reputation with a series of graphically violent horror movies like Zombie (Aka Zombi 2), City of the Living Dead (Aka The Gates of Hell), The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, and The New York Ripper, his early career was a hodgepodge of film genres including comedies, spaghetti westerns, and poliziotteschi. However, many critics argue that his greatest films were his early gialli films like A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling. Fulci was handicapped by terribly low budgets for most of his career but some of his earlier works were actually well-funded, allowing his cinematic craftsmanship to be on full display. Such was the case with Don’t Torture a Duckling.

As was the case with many gialli of the time period, the film titles were influenced by Argento’s first three gialli, collectively known as the “Animal Trilogy.

Remembered best for his genre infused social issue/ills films through the 1960s and 1970s, Elio Petri significant filmography has recently begun to be recuperated piecemeal.

Continue reading...

Writer-director Elio Petri scores big in his first feature, the story of a heel suspected of murder. Is he a killer, or just an average guy trying to get ahead, who uses women to his advantage? Marcello Mastroianni impresses as well in a serious role, with Salvo Randone shining as the police inspector trying to pry a confession from him. Beautifully restored in HD; the show is from a time when Italian film was at its zenith.

The Assassin

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1961 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date April 18, 2017 / L’Assassino / Available from Arrow Video

Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle, Cristina Gaioni, Salvo Randone, Andrea Checchi, Francesco Grandjacquet, Marco Mariani, Franco Ressel.

Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma

Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni

Original Music: Piero Piccione

Written by Tonino (Antonio) Guerra, Elio Petri, Pasquale Fest Campanile, Massimo Franciosa

Produced by Franco Cristaldi

Directed by Elio Petri

Fans of Elio Petri...

Elio Petri remains one of the unsung auteurs of Italian cinema, a master of the grotesque and bizarre, who’s morbid narratives were often more politically outré than the works of peers like Fellini or Scola, and never quite as internationally scandalizing as Ferreri or Pasolini.

Continue reading...

Can radical theater make a good movie? Elio Petri continues his string of biting social comment movies with a black comedy about rich people, thieves, and the notion of ownership — it’s a caustic position paper but also a funny satire, with quirky yet believable characters. Ugo Tognazzi is terrific as scheming capitalist, as much a prisoner of his wealth as a poor clerk is of his poverty.

Property is No Longer a Theft

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 126 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / La proprietà non è più un furto / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95

Starring: Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci, Daria Nicolodi, Mario Scaccia, Orazio Orlando, Julien Guiomar, Cecilia Polizzi, Jacques Herlin, Ada Pometti, Salvo Randone.

Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller

Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni

Original Music: Ennio Morricone

Production design / Costume design: Gianni Polidori

Written by Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro

Produced by Claudio Mancini

Directed by Elio Petri

Essere o Avere?...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is showing February 21 - March 23, 2017 in the United Kingdom in the Oscar Series.Petri’s cinema involved neither a utopian vision nor victorious narratives of class struggle. Rather, his central effort was to make the toxic condition appear as ugly, pervasive, and totally absurd as it actually was.—Evan Calder Williams“Drink up, Mr. Innocent. Everybody here is innocent. Only one person here is guilty. And that’s me.”—Chief Inspector, Investigation of a Citizen Above SuspicionIn her Rome apartment—an entrapment of curtains, doorways, plants, ceramics, a cluttered sea of earthen shades offset by a colorful stained-glass window—Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan) welcomes her lover (Gian Maria Volonté). He is a brutish man, with slicked-back hair and dark brown eyes. She asks him: “How are you going to kill me this time?...

Canadian and American arthouse film fans rejoice! The UK's Arrow Films is expanding their Academy high-brow imprint to North America next March with an impressive slate of films that are sure to please. Among the first releases are Walerian Borowczyk's Story of Sin, Elio Petri's Property Is No Longer A Theft, Jasper Sharp's festival hit The Creeping Garden, Luchino Visconti's Ludwig, and Giuseppe Tornatore's Academy Award-winning paean to the glory of the moving image, Cinema Paradiso. Each of these films is a must-own, and of the lot, four are new releases for Arrow, with only Cinema Paradiso having seen a release in the UK. Arrow's unending assault on pocketbooks worldwide continues, but what sweet oblivion it will be.  Check out the details for each release...

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

Gian Maria Volonté has a big part in this prime quality Italo crime thriller blessed with a great score by Ennio Morricone. But the movie belongs to Robert Hoffman as the real-life public enemy who earned the alias 'The Machine Gun Soloist.' Director Carlo Lizzani's realistic treatment glamorizes nothing and implicates the police in shady policies as well. Award-winning co-star Lisa Gastoni is the woman who loves Hoffman, and is tempted to betray him. Wake Up and Kill Blu-ray + DVD Arrow Video (UK) 1966 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 124 98 min / Svegliati e uccidi; Lutring; Wake Up and Die / Street Date November 24, 2015 / 29.95 Starring Robert Hoffmann, Lisa Gastoni, Gian Maria Volonté, Claudio Camaso, Renato Niccolai, Ottavio Fanfani, Pupo De Luca, Corrado Olmi. Cinematography Armando Nannuzzi Film Editing Franco Fraticelli Original Music Ennio Morricone Written by Ugo Pirro, Carlo Lizzani Produced by Jacques Bar, Joseph Fryd, Carlo Lizzani Directed by Carlo Lizzani  

Reviewed by...

Eva Doesn’t SleepDear Danny,Apologies not needed, my friend, downers come with the territory in any festival. I do understand your irritation and boredom with a film like Victoria, especially as a formerly obsessive long-take fetishist. Right before my flight, I watched an old Tay Garnett film which features a slowly zigzagging tracking shot that passes through a bustling crowd, picking up various conversational earfuls along with the off-key beat of a saloon band. It’s a shot that surely must have taken enormous preparation (think of the sheer heft of shooting apparatus back in 1930!), yet Garnett, a rowdy and expedient mechanic, moves on quickly once it’s done, he’s got sailors and flappers to focus on. With weightless cameras and digital lubrication, single-take exercises are too often now little more than “mine’s bigger than yours” contests where the only thing at stake is directorial egotism. No...

Kino Lorber brings the 1967 spaghetti Western Face to Face to Blu-ray this month, one of director Sergio Sollima’s most notable titles, previously released on DVD as a box-set with the two other titles in Sollima’s trilogy The Big Gundown (1966) and Run, Man, Run (1968). Noted for imbuing his work with a bit of actual social and historical context, there’s a bit more substance than usual for a film relegated to the periphery of a movement dominated by a mere handful of notable names. Though it’s ultimately not at the same level as iconic works by Sergio Leone and hasn’t reached the same level of reappraisal as several other retroactively recuperated directors, it features more nuanced characterizations in its complex narrative structure than is usually evident in other titles of the era.

Boston professor Brad Fletcher (Gian Maria Volonte) is suffering from poor health, and is forced...

Two of director Philippe de Broca’s earliest renowned titles get new restorations and are available for the first time on Blu-ray, That Man From Rio (1964) and Up to His Ears (1965), the first two titles from a loose James Bond spoof trilogy featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Certainly ahead of his time, de Broca’s amusing adventure films are much more than the kind of lowbrow entertainment that would come to typify the genre known as spoof, and this became a notable inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, particularly 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Inspired by the adventures of Belgian cartoonist Herge’s Tintin adventures (which also provided the basis for a 2011 Steven Spielberg adaptation), a prized Amazonian statue is stolen from a Parisian museum. Three such statues left South American on an expedition that involved the late father of Agnes (Francoise Dorleac) and and two colleagues. Professor Catalan...

Hi, Lee. In his DVD review in issue #30, Adrian Smith writes that The 10th Victim “prefigures Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Running Man and even The Hunger Games in its idea of murder as mass entertainment, and [director/co-writer Elio] Petri deserves to receive some credit.” How about giving some to Robert Sheckley, upon whose 1953 short story “The Seventh Victim” the film was based, and whose name is nowhere mentioned? Sheckley (1928-2005) may not have been in Bradbury’s class, but he was a Hugo and Nebula nominee, named author emeritus by Sfwa in 2001. He even published a tie-in novelization of the film and, in the 1980s, two sequels, Victim Prime and Hunter/Victim. Sheckley’s work was also adapted into more than a dozen other films and television episodes, the best-known of which—for better or worse—is probably Freejack, based on his novel Immortality Inc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert...

Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Michelle Presle, Salvo Randone, Cristina Gaioni, Andrea Checchi, Francesco Grandjacquet, Marco Mariani, Franco Ressel | Written by Elio Petri, Tonino Guerra | Directed by Elio Petri

When I think of the Italian film industry I often think of horror and the so-called Spaghetti Westerns but in fact the industry is bigger and far more impressive than that. In the sixties there was a golden era of film making, true to form Arrow Films under its Arrow Academy banner have released one of the most noteworthy movies of that time withL’Assassino.

L’Assassino is the tale of Alfredo Martelli (Mastroianni) a playboy antiques dealer arrested under suspicion of murder of his older lover Adalgisa (Presle). Protesting his innocence to the police his please fall on deaf ears as they increase the pressure on him to confess, convinced without a shadow of a doubt that he is the killer.

Even...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

To mark the release of L’Assassino on 21st July, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on Blu-ray and DVD combo.

Released within months of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Antonioni’s La Notte, Elio Petri’s dazzling first feature L’Assassino also stars Marcello Mastroianni, this time as dandyish thirty-something antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli, arrested on suspicion of murdering his older, far wealthier lover Adalgisa (Micheline Presle). But as the increasingly Kafkaesque police investigation proceeds, it becomes less and less important whether Martelli actually committed the crime as his entire lifestyle is effectively put on trial.

Best known for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Tenth Victim, Petri was one of the finest and yet most underrated Italian directors of the 1960s and 70s. Highly acclaimed on its original UK release but unjustly neglected since, L’Assassino is a remarkably assured debut from one...

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the 21 restored films – 18 features and 3 shorts - that will screen in its Classics section of restored films.

The section, introduced in 2012, features a selection of classic film restorations completed over the past year by film libraries, cultural institutions or production companies around the world.

Director Giuliano Montaldo will chair the jury of film students which will award the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film and for Best Documentary on Cinema.

The 2014 Venice Classics line up:

Features

Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses), dir François Truffaut (France, 1968, Colour) restored by : Mk2

Bez końca (No End), dir Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland, 1984, 108’, Colour) restored by: Studio Filmowe Tor with the support of the National Audiovisual Institute (the Multiannual Government Programme Culture +) and the Polish Film Institute

Gelin (Bride), dir Omer Lütfi Akad (Turkey, 1973, 92’, Colour) restored by: Erman Film

Guys and Dolls, dir Joseph L. Mankiewicz (USA, 1955, 150’, Colour) restored by: Warner Bros. Motion Pictures Imaging and [link...

After finally securing 1961’s La Notte as part of the Criterion line-up, we’re treated to a new restoration and Blu-ray transfer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, which originally graced the collection back in 2005. The final chapter of the unofficial “Incommunicability Trilogy,” it is, perhaps, the most ‘sex positive’ chapter of the erotomania that partially defines the crumbling of the troubling social orders at hand, and it certainly has a more vibrant energy than the previous films, beginning with 1960’s L’Avventura. As far as narrative goes, however, this may possibly be the most oblique of the three films, meandering through possibilities before delivering a confounding final seven minutes that are as strikingly at odds with the rest of the feature as well as confoundingly, maddeningly riveting.

A beautiful woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), tiredly pads back and forth in her lover’s (Fernando Rabal) apartment, a fan providing the...

Raro Video continues remastering rare and obscure Italian titles with the long unavailable 1970 curio from Duccio Tessari, Death Occurred Last Night. A rare hybrid of police thriller and giallo, this fascinating title is a definite highlight in the little known Tessari’s varied filmography. Most noted for his work in spaghetti westerns, those unfamiliar with his work will surely be interested in seeking out other available titles. As seedy and ridiculous as it is intriguing and unfailingly amusing, its attention to character and narrative development sets it apart from similar titles of the time period, preceding comparable American fare such as Paul Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore.

A self-controlled yet increasingly desperate father (Raf Vallone) informs Detective Duca Lamberti (Frank Wolff) at the police station in Milan that his girl is missing. As he answers a round of questions, we discover his girl is actually a mentally handicapped twenty five year old...

The 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will pay tribute to Anurag Kashyap, along with Italian filmmaker Elio Petri and British director and artist Ben Rivers.

Director, screenwriter and producer Anurag Kashyap presented his ambitious gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur at Cannes Film Festival in 2012. At the same festival last year the filmmaker presented his latest feature Ugly (2013).

The festival describes Kashyap as a ““Powerful storyteller, who ingeniously injects Western cinematic styling into Indian situations…”

Among the seven movies that he will personally introduce to audiences this year at Karlovy Vary are Dev.D (2009), Gulaal (2009), and That Girl in Yellow Boots (2010).

While Ben Rivers is a contemporary British filmmaker, Elio Petri (1929-1982) was a self-taught Italian filmmaker and intellectual who took the Palme d’Or at Cannes (The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1971) and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1969). However, he was...