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Italy’s expanding Effe TV has inked a flurry of deals for high-end international dramas from players such as Entertainment One, BBC Studios, Endemol Shine and ITV Studios Global Entertainment, from which it picked up the BBC’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel “The War of the Worlds.”

All six acquired dramas are based on literary properties. The deals signal the ambition of Effe TV, a subsidiary of Italian publisher and bookseller Feltrinelli Group, “to bring top international products to Italian TV audiences,” said Riccardo Chiattelli, director of the company’s Laf channel. The channel airs on Sky Italia, the Italian unit of Comcast-owned paybox Sky.

Besides the BBC’s three-part “War of the Worlds,” which toplines Rafe Spall (“The Big Short”) and Eleanor Tomlinson (“Poldark”) and is being produced by ITV-owned Mammoth Screen, Laf has also picked up three seasons of crime drama “Cardinal,” an...

Last week, David Bordwell posted "a brief tribute to the volcanic charm of the legend known as Jcc." Brief, maybe, but as always with David Bordwell, necessary in ways you may not have realized until you've read it. Today, as Jean-Claude Carrière — actor, novelist and screenwriter probably best known for his work with Luis Buñuel, though he's also written screenplays for Godard, Oshima, Malle, Forman, Wajda and Jonathan Glazer (and that's just scratching the surface) — turns 80, two paragraphs from this must-read:

Jcc entered cinema under the aegis of Jacques Tati. Tati wanted someone to turn M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle into novels, and the very young writer seemed the right candidate. But Tati quickly learned that Jcc didn't know how a film was made. So he assigned Pierre Etaix and the editor Suzanne Baron to tutor the lad in the ways of cinema. First lesson: Go through M. Hulot on a flatbed viewer,...