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Weeknd feat.

Italy has selected “Vermiglio” as the country’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. The movie written and directed by Maura Delpero won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and will make its stateside debut at the Hamptons International Film Festival on October 10.

“Vermiglio” is set in 1944, in Vermiglio, a high mountain village of the Italian Alps where war looms as a distant but constant threat. The arrival of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a refugee soldier, disrupts the dynamics of the local teacher’s family, changing them forever. During the four seasons marking the end of World War II, Pietro and Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), the eldest daughter of the teacher, instantly drawn to each other, led to marriage and an unexpected fate. As the world emerges from its tragedy, the family will face its own.

Italy has won Best International...

The Oscars international feature film race got another strong competitor on Tuesday when Italy announced it would submit “Vermiglio” as its entry for the 97th Academy Awards. Written and directed by Maura Delpero, the film won the Silver Lion in Venice earlier this month.

Delpero’s drama is set in 1944 in the alpine village of the film’s title. When a young Sicilian soldier named Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) comes to town, his presence, according to the synopsis provided by Sideshow and Janus Films, “disrupts the dynamics of the local teacher’s family, changing them forever. During the four seasons marking the end of World War II, Pietro and Lucia, the eldest daughter of the teacher, instantly drawn to each other, led to marriage and an unexpected fate. As the world emerges from its tragedy, the family will face its own.”

Produced by Cinedora, Charades and Versus Productions, “Vermiglio” was...

Sophia Loren is recovering from emergency surgery for a fractured hip following a fall on Sunday in her home in Geneva, Switzerland.

Italy’s most famous living movie star, who turned 89 on Sept. 20, suffered several fractures after accidentally falling at home on Sunday morning, according to multiple reports. On Sunday afternoon, “Sophia was operated with positive outcome and will now have to undergo a brief period of convalescence followed by a complete rehabilitation,” said Italian national news agency Ansa.

She sustained “serious fractures” to different parts of her hip and femur, according to her agent Andrea Giusti who confirmed that both Loren’s sons, Carlo and Edoardo Ponti, were at her bedside. “The surgery went perfectly and we only need to wait,” Giusti told Variety in an email.

News of Loren’s hospitalization was first announced by a restaurant bearing her name that she was set to inaugurate on Tuesday...

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.

While it's not very common, a number of movies have been nominated for Oscars in multiple years. As a general rule, movies can not be nominated at the Academy Awards one year and then come back another year to try again, even in another category. However, there are exceptions to the rule, mainly if the film's original nomination was in a category not requiring a U.S. release, and then their subsequent recognition came after its opening in America. This really only happens with movies initially submitted in the Best International Film category.

There are other movies that have received honors in multiple years at the Oscars but not necessarily in the form of nominations. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs broke Academy Awards rules by receiving a special Honorary Oscar in 1939, presented to Walt Disney with a unique statuette. The animated feature had previously been nominated in 1938 for Best Score.

Starting in 1947, the Film Academy began recognizing foreign-language films for Oscars. For the first nine years, however, it was a non-competitive award as there were no nominations, just one winner. Italian director Vittorio De Sica was the first winner for his film Shoe Shine.

In 1956, the Academy created a Best Foreign-Language Film category and countries began submitting films for Oscar nominations. The prize has been given out every year since. The Academy changed the name of the category to Best International Feature Film in 2020.

The foreign-language competition has been dominated by European films. Italy and France have won 14 and 12 times, respectively. Outside of Europe, Japan has the most foreign-language Oscars with five. Akira Kurosawa was the first non-European director to capture the Oscar, winning in 1951 for Rashomon. Kurosawa’s other Oscar, oddly enough, did not come for a Japanese film, but for a film submitted by the Soviet Union in 1975, Dersu Uzala.

It’s thanks to Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica — the genius behind such films as 1948’s The Bicycle Thief and 1970’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — that the Academy Awards has a best international film category. That’s because his 1946 film Shoeshine (or in Italian, Sciuscià, the Neapolitan pronunciation of the English word) was awarded a special foreign-language Oscar in 1948. (De Sica won again in 1950 for Bicycle Thief. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the category, then known as best foreign-language film, became competitive, with multiple nominees; after that, he won in 1965 for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and ...

It’s thanks to Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica — the genius behind such films as 1948’s The Bicycle Thief and 1970’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — that the Academy Awards has a best international film category. That’s because his 1946 film Shoeshine (or in Italian, Sciuscià, the Neapolitan pronunciation of the English word) was awarded a special foreign-language Oscar in 1948. (De Sica won again in 1950 for Bicycle Thief. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the category, then known as best foreign-language film, became competitive, with multiple nominees; after that, he won in 1965 for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and ...

ROME -- Producer Carlo Ponti, one of the forces behind Italy's post-war film renaissance and the long-time husband of Italian film legend Sophia Loren, died early Wednesday at the age of 94.

Ponti produced more than 100 films during a career that spanned nearly 60 years. Among his most famous productions were David Lean's Doctor Zhivago(1965), Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954) and Vittorio De Sica's 1960 classic La Ciociara (Two Women), for which Loren won the 1962 Oscar for best actress.

"His was a life dedicated to cinema," Loren and her two sons, Carlo and Edoardo, said in a statement. "Surrounded by the love of his family, Carlo Ponti passed away serenely at the age of 94 during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday in Geneva's hospital."

Ponti, who had been in relatively good health until December, had been admitted to the Geneva hospital on New Year's Eve for lung problems.

Ponti got his start in the industry distributing films in Milan during World War II. He produced a few small films during the war and immediately afterward, but began to make a name for himself with director Riccardo Freda's 1948 production of Les Miserables.

Ponti met Loren, named Sophia Villani Scicolone at the time, during a beauty contest in Naples in the 1950s and persuaded her to change her name to Sophia Loren and begin studying acting and English. They were married in 1957.

In 1956, La Strada, which he co-produced, won the Academy Award for best foreign film, as did Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow in 1964.

But it was his affair with the young ingenue Loren that captivated the public, rather than his work with top filmmakers such as Dino De Laurentiis, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Ustinov, David Lean and Roman Polanski.

"I have done everything for love of Sophia," he said in a newspaper interview shortly before his 90th birthday in 2002.