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Pope Francis, who died at the age of 88 on Easter Monday, had a special relationship with cinema going back to his childhood in Buenos Aires.

“I owe my cinema culture above all to my parents who took us to the cinema a lot,” the pontiff said in a 2013 interview, a few months after his election as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in the Argentinian capital in 1936 to parents with roots in northern Italy, Italian cinema figured highly in his early cinema-going.

In the same 2013 interview, Pope Francis named Federico Fellini’s 1954 Oscar-winning work La Strada, starring Giulietta Masina as fragile protagonist Gelsomina who is abused by brutish circus strongman Zampanò, played by Anthony Quinn, as the film he loved the most.

“I identify with that film, in which there is an implicit reference to Saint Francis,” said the pontiff referring to its themes of love...

When director Duke Johnson sat down and watched Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic “La Strada,” he was immediately drawn to the iconic clown costume worn by Giulietta Masina. Now in his newest film, “The Actor,” a similar outfit is adorned by Edna (Gemma Chan) while out on an intimate date with Paul (André Holland).

“It’s these two people that feel like maybe they don’t fit into the world,” Johnson tells Variety. “With these two oddballs finding each other, the possibility of connection was the driving force. They’ve really hit it off.”

The moment takes place on Halloween night when Paul, still trying to piece together who he is after waking up with amnesia, goes out with Edna after the two meet at the cinema. Despite it being Halloween, you’d hardly be able to tell by looking at the men’s synonymous coats, making Edna’s hand-stitched blue clown costume immediately stand out.

Let’s start with Robert Altman’s 1992 “The Player” and its opening frenetic camera panning sequence: During that hilarious, farcical rapid-fire parade of studio-insider-wannabe sights and sounds, we see a quick pitch to make a film that is deemed as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman.” Over three decades later, we’ve actually witnessed a misguided facsimile of “Mean Streets” meets “Pretty Woman.”

In 2024’s “Anora,” writer/director Sean Baker’s presumed intentions fall short, with this latest installment in a body of work that seems to be very much of a tightly circumscribed acquired taste. His indie repertoire follows our marginalized (some might deem low-propensity voter type) ne’er-do-wells, who collectively appear nomadic and vulgar, but occasionally have their quiet interludes that can generate a stylish offset. With an affinity for sex workers and various car tricks, not just limited to front-seat romps and malodorous puking, Baker provides us...

When devising the central conflict for her short film Sidney, writer/director Iris Breward set her opposing characters against each other by emphasising both of their weaknesses and in so doing, opens up a much wider conversation whilst also giving the audience a deserved laugh. Sidney, our central protagonist, is a classically trained clown whose career might not have reached the heights he was aspiring to, with financial pressures placing him in the awkward ‘jobbing’ arena of a children’s birthday party which will take an unexpected turn that no one wanted. Breward gives us a glimpse into the highly trained and diverse world of clowns, taking reference from classic characters such as Pierrot while adding the modern influence of the clowncore social media trend to form her aspiring performer. Sidney is very much a film of two halves both narratively and visually and a short we’re excited to...

Sean Baker’s “Anora” continues to take the 2024 film circuit by storm, most recently celebrating at the Gotham Awards with nominations for Best Feature, Best Director, Outstanding Lead Performance, and Outstanding Supporting Performance. Ahead of the award ceremony in New York City on Monday, December 2, we caught up with lead Mikey Madison.

At the end of the film, Madison’s character Ani sheds a single tear in a moment that takes her character’s arc from peak to total devastation. “Well, it wasn’t planned,” she told IndieWire. “We had done multiple takes and Sean really wanted to see tears come out of my left eye. We wanted a single tear to come out of this [left] eye, but they were only coming out of this [right] eye and this [right] eye was laying on Yura’s chest. We just kept filming it until some of them were coming out of my left eye.

Anyone who’s seen Anora talks about the home-invasion scene.

The 28- minute thriller sequence, a tour de force worthy of Hitchcock, comes about an hour in. Up until then, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning movie has been an R-rated version of Pretty Woman. “Basically a romantic comedy, maybe a dirty romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy,” says the American indie auteur.

Anora, or Ani, a 23-year-old stripper living in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, played by Mikey Madison, hooks up with the slightly younger 21-year-old Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, who has been called the Timothée Chalamet of Russia), the son of a Russian oligarch. What starts as a sex worker/client relationship — after a lap dance, Ivan asks if he can have Ani “exclusively” for a week — turns into something more. A whirlwind romance, involving a week of wild parties, and wilder sex, ends in Vegas, where Ivan, smitten and enticed...

[Editor’s note: The following story contains major spoilers for “Anora.”]

“Anora” ends with a grand gesture, and a moment of gratitude that curdles into despair and possibly hope. And Sean Baker is here to talk how it was done.

The writer/director’s finale, set inside a car as snow falls on Brighton Beach outside it and windshield wipers lull the audience into a kind of trance until Baker and team drop the hammer, is one of the all-time great movie endings. It’s the sort of shattering cut-to-black that leaves you stuck to your seat, an emotional sendoff to what was heretofore a deceptively screwball comedy about a sex worker and exotic dancer, Ani (Mikey Madison), whose “greatest day” leads to a rock-bottom revelation.

Dispatched Russian henchman Igor has carted Ani from Vegas, where she had a whirlwind contract marriage to a party-hopping childish whisp of an oligarch’s son (Mark Eydelshteyn), back to New York. The marriage (“a fraud marriage?...

The films “Anora” directed by Sean Baker and Federico Fellini’s classic “Nights of Cabiria” both focus on sex workers navigating harsh worlds. While made over half a century apart, the films share many similarities in their exploration of hope, relationships, and societal treatment of vulnerable women.

“Anora,” starring Mikey Madison, tells the story of the title character, an exotic dancer in New York City. The film opens in the dressing room of a strip club called Headquarters, setting the scene for Anora’s transactional work. When she meets Ivan, the son of a wealthy Russian businessman, Anora sees a chance to escape her current life. Fellini’s 1957 film “Nights of Cabiria” also centers on a sex worker, portrayed by Giulietta Masina, trying to survive on the streets of Rome.

Both movies examine themes of dreams, romantic fantasies, and power imbalances between social classes and genders. However, they reach different conclusions about maintaining hope.

[Editor’s note: The following essay contains major spoilers for “Anora.”]

Why do men do the things they do to women? Why do they offer affection and hope when all they’re really capable of is self-satisfaction? Why do they prop themselves as something they’re not at the expense of the physical and emotional well-beings of others? This is not to say women aren’t guilty of the same cruelties, but in a world where women continue to be persecuted, having their health, financial livelihoods, education, and more subject to legal control while men walk the Earth freely, seemingly bound by only the Darwinian laws of nature, I think it’s fair to say that one gender is granted a much wider latitude over the other. And why is that so? It was these questions that rattled through my brain as I took in every thrilling high and tragic low of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” and...

Dames, right? It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, although the more flamboyant also require a vigilant eye, especially if said dame is packing a pistol. Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is the self-effacing secretary to a senior judge in Santiago, Chile; Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin) is a murderer. The year is 1955 and, somewhat incredibly, the crime and punishment described in Maite Alberdi’s skittish film In Her Place really happened.

This, in itself, would make a ripping yarn. Geel, a popular writer, gunned down her former lover over afternoon tea in the fanciest hotel in town. She was then remanded in a nunnery, given a derisory sentence — less than two years in jail — before being released with a presidential pardon. Alberdi, whose previous films include the uncategorizable hybrid comedy/documentary The Mole Agent, has turned those events into the bones of In Her Place. The flesh on those bones,...

The 2009 film "Nine" — not to be confused with the 2009 film "9" — was an Oscar darling in the most frustrating possible way. It was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Supporting Actress (Penélope Cruz), Best Art Direction, Best Costumes, and Best Original Song. That was just enough nominations for mad Oscar completists to have to see "Nine," a movie that, many agreed, looked dull and baffling. The critics seemed to think so, anyway, as "Nine" only has a 39% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's the lowest approval rating of any film to star Daniel Day-Lewis.

"Nine" requires some explanation. Firstly, the film was based on a Broadway musical that debuted in 1982. The original production starred Raul Julia, playing a character that was very similar to, but legally distinct from, real-life Italian master Federico Fellini. The character, named Guido Contini, found both his marriage and his creative spirit flagging in the face of a midlife crisis.

In the history of American movies, and, arguably, of movies in general, there has never been a partnership between a husband and wife as consequential as that of director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands.

Not only did the two make several masterpieces together, among them Faces, A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night. They managed to create a whole body of deeply personal features — shot completely outside of the studio system and often inside their own family home in the Hollywood Hills — that would usher in the era of what we now call “independent film.”

Surely, there had been some memorable director-actress duos before them, mostly in Europe: Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti. But in those cases, which definitely yielded their share of masterpieces as well, the director was the auteur and the actress his muse.

Actress Anouk Aimée, the sophisticated French beauty who graced the films of Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy, Sidney Lumet, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Lelouch, has died. She was 92.

Aimee’s daughter said in an Instagram post on Tuesday that the star died at her home in Paris without providing further details.

Perhaps best known for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966) — for which she received an Oscar nomination for best actress and won a Golden Globe — Aimée also starred in such art house standouts as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Demy’s Lola (1961), Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981).

Her career kicked off in the late 1940s and lasted all the way through a reunion with Trintignant in The Best Years (Les Plus belles annees), Lelouch’s 2019 epilogue to A Man and a Woman.

With more than 80 feature credits,...

Paola Cortellesi’s directing debut, in which she also stars, depicts gruelling domestic abuse before finding its way to startling redemption

Italian actor and singer Paola Cortellesi has been breaking hearts and box office records on her home turf with this directing debut. It’s a richly and even outrageously sentimental working-class drama of postwar Rome, a story of domestic abuse whose heroine finally escapes from misogyny and cruelty through a piece of narrative sleight-of-hand that borders on magic-neorealism, performed with shameless theatrical flair and marvellously composed in luminous monochrome. The film pays homage to early pictures by De Sica and Fellini, and Cortellesi’s own performance is consciously in the spirit of movie divas such as Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren and Giulietta Masina.

The scene is Rome just after the end of the second world war, when American GIs were a presence on the streets and Italian women had...

Italian actress Sandra Milo, who was best known for her supporting roles in Federico Fellini’s Oscar winner 8 ½ and Golden Globe winner Juliet of the Spirits, has died at the age of 90.

Born in Tunisia to Italian parents in 1933, Milo grew up in Tuscany.

She got her first big screen break in 1955 opposite Alberto Sordi in Antonio Pietrangeli’s comedy The Bachelor.

Milo’s career quickly took off with roles in Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere, Pietrangeli’s Hungry for Love, Edouard Molinaro’s Witness in the City and Claude Sautet’s The Big Risk over the course of the late 1950s.

It briefly hit the buffers in 1961 when her performance in Rosselini’s Stendhal adaptation Vanina Vanni was brutally panned by critics at the Venice Film Festival, but Milo returned to the set and went on to rack up more than 80 credits across her 70-year career.

Internationally, Milo...

There are compliments and there are compliments. For a young Italian actress making her big screen debut, being compared to Giulietta Masina — best known for her work in front of the camera of Federico Fellini (who also doubled up as her husband), most notably La Strada and Nights of Cabiria — it’s definitely one of the better ones to receive.

But it was this that, Rebecca Antonaci explains, led director Saverio Costanzo to cast her as the lead in his Venice-bowing drama Finally Dawn (Finalmente L’alba in Italian). “Saverio told me that I, in some way, reminded him of Messina,” the 18-year-old says, speaking from Rome.

If Costanzo was looking for someone who could capture Masina’s renowned youthful, wide-eyed innocence, he certainly found it with this newcomer.

Set in the mid 1950s, in the golden age of the Italian capital’s historic Cinecitta studio (and the period where Masina...

The European Film Academy is changing the date of its annual award ceremony, the European Film Awards, so that it will be positioned within the awards season at the start of the year.

After the 37th edition in December 2024, the 38th edition will take place mid-January 2026 and will celebrate the best European films from the previous year. The date change is a next step in the repositioning and rebranding process of the event and the work of the European Film Academy.

With the European Film Awards moving a month later to the beginning of the calendar year, European nominees and winners will be featured much more visibly within the awards season, culminating with the Oscars.

As the nominations for the European Film Awards will continue to be announced by mid-November each year, the date change will create a larger window for nominated films to be promoted. Academy members eligible to...

Guy Maddin: “I’m just always shuffling around timelines in my head to make sense of time’s great flow.”

Guy Maddin on hacking my dreams, elevators and escalators, Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald, Lois Weber, Haruki Murakami, Mathieu Amalric and Arnaud Desplechin’s dreamwork, thinking of numbers, Federico Fellini’s dream journal, A Director’s Notebooks, I Vitelloni and Rimini, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and an enchanted place called Riminipeg were all discussed in the second instalment on The Rabbit Hunters, co-directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, and starring Isabella Rossellini as a “merged version” of Fellini and Giulietta Masina.

Guy Maddin with Anne-Katrin Titze on his hometown and Federico Fellini’s: “Fellini is from the city of Rimini in Italy, which is really just the Winnipeg of Italy.”

From Winnipeg, Guy Maddin joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on The Rabbit Hunters.

Anne-Katrin Titze:...

Slovak director, screenwriter and cinematographer Juraj Jakubisko, who won more than 80 international film awards, has died at the age of 84 in Prague, according to Film New Europe.

Jakubisko, who was given the nickname “the Fellini of the East“ due to his visual originality and magical realism, was born on April 20, 1938 in the eastern Slovak village of Kojšov. He studied photography at a secondary school for applied arts in Bratislava, and graduated in film directing from Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (Famu) in Prague.

He began winning international acclaim with his experimental short films even before his directorial feature debut with “Crucial Years” (Kristove roky) (1967). The films “The Deserter and the Nomads” (Zbehovia a pútnici) (1968), which won the Little Lion award for young artist at the Venice Film Festival, “Birds, Orphans and Fools” (1969), and the tragicomedy “See You in Hell, Friends” were banned in the 1970s,...

Backstage at the Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2020 collection with Hannelore Knuts and creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli Photo: Archivio Fotografico Paolo Di Paolo

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Charlotte Rampling, Grace Kelly, Marcello Mastroianni, Rudolf Nureyev, Sophia Loren, Ezra Pound, Faye Dunaway, Monica Vitti, Giorgio de Chirico, Gina Lollobrigida, Tennessee Williams, Marlene Dietrich, Giulietta Masina, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Anita Ekberg, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Moravia, and many others were photographed by Bruce Weber’s muse and subject of his latest documentary The Treasure Of His Youth: The Photographs Of Paolo Di Paolo, which starts with an overture of images and film clips. After putting his camera away for decades we see di Paolo return to shoot Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2020 collection.

Paolo di Paolo with Silvia di Paolo and Anne-Katrin Titze on Tennessee Williams: “I...

It’s TCM‘s 28th annual airing of films recognized by the Academy, and this year’s lineup features only Oscar victors, not nominees, grouped by decade or category. Here are some can’t-miss golden titles airing through the first week of March. Tuesday: 1940s Winners, Gaslight (2am/1c) The term gaslighting — manipulating a person for your benefit — comes from this mesmerizing 1944 thriller. Best Actress Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer (above) play a young wife and the husband who preys upon her sanity. La Strada (Credit: Courtesy of the Everett Collection) Wednesday: 1950s Winners, La Strada (6/5c) The Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar went to Federico Fellini’s 1954 tale of a sweet, simpleminded woman (Giulietta Masina) and a callous circus strongman (Anthony Quinn). The tear-jerking finale is stunning. Thursday: 1960s Winners, The Graduate (10:15/9:15c) From 1967: that rare film to win Best Director (Mike Nichols) and nothing else. Dustin Hoffman...

Oscar voters take their duties seriously and seem to have a few key criteria in voting: Is this work emotionally honest, does it pop off the screen, and is it something that will be admired 50 years from now?

Penelope Cruz in “Parallel Mothers” checks all those boxes. There are no guarantees with Oscars, but if there’s justice in the world, she will be nominated Feb. 8. She grabs the screen and invites comparisons to the best work of Bette Davis, Anna Magnani and Barbara Stanwyck, but is very much an original.

Cruz plays photographer Janis, who becomes a single mother. As she withholds the truth about her baby, she is trying to uncover the truth of mass killings that have been covered up since the Francisco Franco regime.

She rehearsed with writer-director Pedro Almodovar for four months. Still, filming was difficult. “I couldn’t release any emotions in the early section,...

Director Federico Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" ('Le notti di Cabiria"), winner of the 1957 Academy Award for 'Best Foreign Language Film', starring Giulietta Masina, is being re-released by Rialto Pictures in a 4K restored theatrical version, December 17, 2021: 

"...a happy, laughing 'Cabiria' is standing on a river bank with her current boyfriend and live-in lover, 'Giorgio'. Suddenly he pushes her into the river and steals her purse which is full of money. She cannot swim and nearly drowns, but is rescued by a group of young boys and revived at the last possible moment by ordinary people who live a little further down the river. 

"In spite of saving her life, she treats them with disdain and starts looking for Giorgio. "Cabiria returns to her small home, but Giorgio has disappeared. She is bitter, and when her best friend and neighbor, 'Wanda' tries to help her get over him,...

It’s a pleasant thing to revisit an old favorite and discover that it’s better than you remember. The tale of Zampanò and Gelsomina is Italo neo-realism 2.0: it’s got poverty, misfortune and misery but also a bankable American star or two. The visually revamped presentation of Federico Fellini’s international breakthrough picture is a wonder — no more distorted audio and images that look as if they were filmed yesterday. Several of the extras are new, but the main charm is still provided by Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn and the Nino Rota music.

La Strada

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 219

1954 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 98 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 2, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovena, Livia Venturini.

Cinematography: Otello Martelli, Anna Primula.

Production Designer: Mario Ravasco

Art Direction: E. Cervelli, Brunello Rondi

Film Editor: Leo Cattozzo

Original Music: Nino Rota

Written by ederico Fellini,...

Photo: ‘Nights of Cabiria’ While browsing the dreaded email from Criterion Channel about what’s leaving the platform in August I was surprised to see Federico Fellini’s masterpiece ‘Nights of Cabiria’ as one of the ill-fated titles losing their spot on the streamer. Although these monthly emails are never a welcome sight, The Criterion Channel’s monthly programming is as good as it gets. I understand what it takes to curate a channel with such high standards and dedication to Cinema, however, I truly believe a film like ‘Nights of Cabiria’ deserves a place in the never-changing “all-time favorites” section. The film stands as an important part of Fellini’s career, the bookend to his part in the neorealist movement, using the last five minutes to openly bid farewell to it in a move of genius. It’s his fifth and singularly most important collaboration with Giulietta Masina, the...

“What a funny face! Are you a woman, really? Or an artichoke?”

Frederico Fellini’s LA Strada (1954) will available on 4k and Blu-ray as part of The Criterion Collection November 2nd

With this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in favor of a personal, poetic vision of life as a bittersweet carnival. The infinitely expressive Masina registers both childlike wonder and heartbreaking despair as Gelsomina, loyal companion to the traveling strongman Zampanò, whose callousness and brutality gradually wear down her gentle spirit. Winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, La strada possesses the purity and timeless resonance of a fable and remains one of cinema’s most exquisitely moving visions of humanity struggling to survive in the face of life’s cruelties.

Blu-ray Special Edition Features

• 4K digital restoration,...

It’s been 10 years since Enrico Casarosa was nominated for an Oscar for his debut short film with Pixar, “La Luna.” Now, his debut feature, “Luca,” is about to hit Disney+, and his film is solid proof that the venerated animation studio has changed enormously in the last decade.

Casarosa is just one of the new faces at Pixar stepping up from shorts to features with not just original ideas, but also deeply personal stories that break from the more high-concept films that have made the studio iconic. Last year, Dan Scanlon directed his second film, “Onward,” that dealt with brotherhood and father figures. And next year, Domee Shi will follow up her Oscar-winning short “Bao” with her debut Pixar feature, “Turning Red,” which draws from her Asian Canadian heritage.

In speaking with TheWrap, Casarosa said he’s been able to flourish under the “wonderful” leadership of “Soul” director Pete Docter...

Isabella Rossellini in The Rabbit Hunters

Guy Maddin’s The Rabbit Hunters, co-directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, stars Isabella Rossellini as a “merged version” of Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina. Marcello Mastroianni and a red scarf, David Niven in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death (aka Stairway To Heaven), commissions and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Luis Buñuel and a line from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Héctor Babenco’s widow Barbara Paz and her dance to Singin’ In The Rain, Ella Emhoff and knitted pants - all came up after Guy Maddin shared with me his memories of Bertrand Tavernier, who died in Paris at the age of 79 on March 25, 2021, the date of our conversation.

Guy Maddin with Anne-Katrin Titze: “Fellini and Giulietta Masina are merged together so often in Fellini’s dreams …”

“Last night I dreamt that I was alive again,” we...

Guy Maddin on Bertrand Tavernier: “He really taught me how to love the Lumières because they had always been as dry as dust before. Thanks to him and his voice and his delight, his Gallic delight, I think of them every day now.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Prior to meeting with Guy Maddin yesterday for a Zoom conversation on The Rabbit Hunters, starring Isabella Rossellini as Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina combined into one persona, I passed on the very sad news that Bertrand Tavernier had died.

In 2019, Bertrand Tavernier was appointed to be UniFrance’s American Ambassador for New York’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema and was scheduled to introduce François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. He was unable to attend at the last moment and was replaced by Paul Schrader who did the honours.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Hello!

Guy Maddin: Great to see you!

Akt: Great to see you too!

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is a series on Production Design.

This week we mark the centennial of actress Giulietta Masina, which I consider an opportunity to do something a little different. The Furniture, as you might expect, is rarely a column about performance. I spend a lot of time trying to get screenshots without any actors present at all. Production design often works in support of performance, or in parallel, but rarely are they what you might call intertwined.

In the films of Federico Fellini, Masina’s husband and collaborator, design often threatens to overwhelm or absorb performance. Actors become moving props in his most extravagant productions, rotating like carousel horses around a central figure or two. And these protagonists are often ciphers of style themselves, particularly when they’re played by Marcello Mastroianni.

Not so with 1965's Juliet of the Spirits. Masina is the well from which the entire production springs.

by Cláudio Alves

Born 100 years ago in San Giorno di Piano, Giulietta Masina is one of the most indelible faces of Italian cinema. She started her career as a theatre and radio actress but, by the time her husband Federico Fellini made the transition from screenwriter to film director, Masina was ready to follow him on the journey to the big screen. Despite having worked for other such notable auteurs as Rossellini and Wertmüller, Masina's legacy is defined by her husband's pictures. He immortalized her in more ways than one, both creating film monuments to her humanity, and using their marital strife to create many a celluloid drama...

6 random things that happened on this day, February 22nd in showbiz history...

1921 Fellini's muse Giulietta Masina is born in San Giorgia di Plano, Italy. But more on her tonight for her Centennial.

1935 The Little Colonel opens in theaters. The movie featured the first interracial dance in an American movie in the famous staircase tap dance scene between tiny Shirley Temple and trailblazing entertainer Bill Robinson. The innocuous scene was somehow controversial and was reportedly cut out of the movie when it played in the South...

The star from Sid & Nancy, Terminator 2, Candyman, Gattaca, Leaving Las Vegas and the new chiller The Dark And The Wicked takes us on a journey through some of his favorite foreign films.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Candyman (1992)

Frankenstein (1931)

Sid and Nancy (1986)

The Dark And The Wicked (2020)

The Wall of Mexico (2019)

La Dolce Vita (1961)

Il Bidone (1955)

Day For Night (1973)

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1967)

8 ½ (1963)

Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939)

Rififi (1955)

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Z (1969)

The Sleeping Car Murders (1965)

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Burn! (1969)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

The Italian Job (1969)

The Italian Job (2003)

The Magician (1958)

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Persona (1966)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

The Last House On The Left (1972)

The Virgin Spring (1960)

Paperhouse (1988)

The Strangers (2008)

The Monster (2016)

Andrei Rublev (1966)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Nostalghia (1983)

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Zorba The Greek (1964)

Pollyanna (1960)

Other Notable Items

Lon...

8 random things that happened on this day (October 30th) in showbiz history

Rudolph Valentino cheekily decides you can't watch him undress in behind the scenes footage

1921 The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino premieres, inventing the male movie star sex symbol. The world swoons. Women faint.

1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of Hg Wells "The War of the Worlds" causes mass panic when people are convinced it's real.

1943 Federico Fellini (23) and Giulietta Masina (22) marry in Italy. A scriptwriter and a radio actress at the time, they will become legends.

American History X, Baby Boom, Harry Hamlin, and more after the jump...

Cinema Retro has received the following press release:

Joining in the international celebration of Federico Fellini's 100th birthday, Criterion is thrilled to announce Essential Fellini, a fifteen-Blu-ray box set that brings together fourteen of the director's most imaginative and uncompromising works for the first time. Alongside new restorations of the theatrical features, the set also includes short and full-length documentaries about Fellini's life and work, archival interviews with his friends and collaborators, commentaries on six of the films, video essays, the director's 1968 short Toby Dammit, and much more.

The edition is accompanied by two lavishly illustrated books with hundreds of pages of notes and essays on the films by writers and filmmakers, as well as dozens of images of Fellini memorabilia. Essential Fellini is a fitting tribute to the maestro of Italian cinema!

Fifteen-blu-ray Special Edition Collector's Set Features

New 4K restorations of 11 theatrical features, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks for...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Alejandra Márquez Abella's The Good Girls is exclusively showing July 23 - August 22, 2020 in most countries in Mubi's Viewfinder series.Sofía saunters through her birthday party with the regal gait of a monarch. It’s the early 1980s in Mexico City, and she’s hobnobbing with the country’s crème de la crème, a chatty contingent of men and women in glamorous clothes who’ve flocked to her mansion. The 1982 economic crisis has just broken out, but none of the guests can foresee its seismic consequences, the way the peso crash and President López Portillo’s policies will spell the demise of many of the country’s richest. The Good Girls, Alejandra Márquez Abella’s sophomore feature, is the story of a fall from grace. It starts off with the outside world at an arm’s length, watching as...

Mubi's retrospective Fellini at 100 is showing April 29 - July 13, 2020 in many countries.As someone raised in a town of 500, itching to escape to the nearest city for the best part of my childhood, Fellini’s characters have always felt familiar. “His films are a small-town boy’s dream of the big city,” Orson Welles told Playboy in a 1967 interview, and indeed, dotting them are heroes and eccentrics who either share the director’s provincial origins or dance through the frame with the stupor of perpetual strangers in strange lands. “He’s right,” Fellini said about Welles’s remark, “and that’s no insult.” For that naïve awe is the source of the ageless charm of Fellini’s whole cinema. If the films he made over a career spanning five decades still feel so alive and vibrant, it’s because they nurture the same childlike wonder of their protagonists, and their inordinate lust for life.

Late Italian actress Giulietta Masina, the original Feather Fairy, is to be digitally revived for The Feather Fairy and Two Worlds. Slovakian filmmaker and part of the Czechoslovak New Wave Juraj Jakubisko is finishing the special effects on his latest project, a sequel to his fairy tale The Feather Fairy. The Feather Fairy and Two Worlds is intended to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the original’s release. The first film is an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm short story Mother Hulda and follows a grandmotherly character, the titular fairy, and a boy called Jacob who is not afraid of death. The sequel will revolve around Lukáš, Jacob’s son, who wanders off into the world in search of happiness and love as he is looked after by his godmother, the Feather Fairy. The official synopsis further elaborates on the main plot line: “He arrives late in the fairy-tale land that she.

The centennial celebration of Federico Fellini continues as another one of his classics has been restored and will be getting a theatrical run here in the United States. Following his first solo directorial effort The White Sheik, Film Forum will premiere the new 4K restoration of his masterpiece Nights of Cabiria, which follows Giulietta Masina as a prostitute in Rome looking for love.

Masina won Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival for the drama, which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957, marking the second year in a row this would happen for Fellini, following La Strada. This new 4K restoration, by TF1 Studio in partnership with Studiocanal and with the support of the Cnc, also boasts a brand-new translation and subtitles.

Ahead of an April 17 release (and likely Criterion box set), see the restoration trailer below via IndieWire.

Streetwalker “Cabiria,” a seemingly tough cookie,...

Franco-German TV network Arte has boarded high-profile doc “Fellini of the Spirits” exploring Italian director Federico Fellini’s lifelong interest in everything metaphysical and featuring Oscar winners Damien Chazelle and William Friedkin among talking heads.

The project, now in post, is directed by Anselma Dell’Olio whose “Marco Ferreri: Dangerous but Necessary,” about eclectic Italian auteur Marco Ferreri, went to Venice and won Italy’s David di Donatello award for best doc in 2018.

Dell’Olio, who is Rome-based but U.S.-born, developed a rapport with Fellini during the 1980s working with the maestro on subtitles for his “Ginger and Fred.”

“Fellini of the Spirits” covers uncharted ground, she says, delving into Fellini’s fascination with spirituality, religion, esoterica and astrology that stemmed initially from his encounter with Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard who “had a huge influence” on him.

The title takes its cue from Fellini’s 1965 film “Juliet of the Spirits,...

After she won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival last month, writer/director Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” finally comes to U.S. theaters on March 13. The abortion drama first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the bespoke U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Neorealism — which this realistic movie is in spades. The final trailer for the film has arrived, courtesy of Focus Features. Watch below.

Playing out almost like a road movie, the film is an intimate portrayal of two teenage girls in rural Pennsylvania. Faced with an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support — including a local clinic that all but traumatizes her with anti-abortion scare tactics — Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) embark across state lines to New York City on a fraught journey. Complications arise that force Autumn and...

Just one year after winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (now known as the Best International Feature Film) in 1956 for his opus “La Strada,” iconic Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini repeated the win with “Nights of Cabiria,” also starring his wife and muse Giulietta Masina. Inspired by her brief appearance in his “The White Sheik,” the episodic drama follows Masina’s Cabiria through a series of interactions and incidents that highlight her search for true love.

When the star-studded film premiered at Cannes, Masina’s work was widely hailed as her best ever, and she went on to win the festival’s Best Actress award for her startling turn as the title heroine.

Over six decades since its release, New York City’s Film Forum is gearing up for a two-week run of the film, freshened up with a new 4K restoration, which also boasts a new translation and subtitles.

Hope is indeed in short supply in William Thompson’s fussy, dour divorce drama “Hope Gap.” Adapted from Thompson’s own play (the more intriguingly titled “The Retreat from Moscow”), “Hope Gap” picks up nearly three decades into the marriage of Grace (Annette Bening) and Edward (Bill Nighy), and about 10 minutes before the union’s total collapse. Run through with the requisite tropes of a divorce drama — the tear-stained arrival of divorce papers, spying on the “other woman,” talking trash to the child caught in the middle —

Introduced through a series of voiceovers meant to set up the film’s three primary characters — a conceit that gets old fast, only to reappear at random moments throughout the rest of the film — “Hope Gap” opens with son Jamie (Josh O’Connor) musing about the film’s eponymous location, a local spot that once held happy memories for his family of three. Soon enough,...

Sabine Choucair is an entertainer from Lebanon and rather than performing on stage, she feels it is better to perform for refugees and the marginalized. We go through her diary entries over many months of having visited several refugee camps as well as interviews with Sabine as to why she has chosen this profession and we also get glimpses of some performances at Slovenia, Croatia, Lebanon and many others. As per Sabine, clowning is for adults and yet it is the children who enjoy it most. The plight of refugees and migrants who come looking for a better life takes its toll on the clown’s personal life as it involves cycles of normalcy and crying. The documentary also introduces the workshop conducted for adults which teaches people how to clown. These groups perform at refugee camps and settlements.

“We Must Clown” is screening at Vesoul International Film Festival for...

Next year will mark the centennial of Federico Fellini, born on January 20, 1920 in Rimini, Italy. While we imagine there will be no shortage of retrospectives and screenings celebrating the Italian master, New York City’s Film Forum is getting ahead of the pack with a presentation of a new 4K restoration of the director’s first solo directorial effort The White Sheik. We’re pleased to present the exclusive trailer debut ahead of an opening on Christmas Day.

Coming after Fellini’s 1950 debut Variety Lights, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, this 1952 slapstick rom-com follows a honeymoon gone off the rails when the bride (Brunella Bovo) goes off in search of her titular idol. Based on an original treatment by Michelangelo Antonioni, the film also marks a number of early collaborations with future Fellini stalwarts, notably a memorable cameo by Giulietta Masina as Cabiria (five years before Nights of Cabiria) and a score by composer Nino Rota.

Film at Lincoln Center and Subway Cinema, in association with the Korean Cultural Center New York, announce Relentless Invention: New Korean Cinema, 1996–2003, a showcase of the essential films and filmmakers of this transformative movement, November 22–December 4.

The South Korean film industry has been in the midst of a remarkable, decades-long creative explosion, with Bong Joon Ho, Hong Sang-soo, and Park Chan-wook jolting new life into art-house and genre cinema alike. With the end of the nation’s military rule and the relaxing of government censorship, Korean film experienced the kind of renaissance that hadn’t been seen since its golden age in the 1950s. This new generation of filmmakers took more than political and social issues as their inspiration: they re-energized national cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s with homegrown blockbusters that imbued the pleasures of pop cinema with a subversive, gleefully inventive approach to genre and a sharp sociopolitical edge.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has announced a partnership with Italy’s Istituto Luce – Cinecittà under which the state film entity will become a “founding supporter” of the museum as part of a five-year agreement that will involve a series of annual events celebrating Italian cinema.

The Italian cinema series will kick off with a centennial tribute to late great Italian auteur Federico Fellini. Besides Los Angeles the Fellini tribute will be traveling to other major museums and film institutes around the world.

The long delayed $388-million Renzo Piano-designed museum at Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard in Los Anegles is expected to open sometime in 2020, which is the year of the centennial of Fellini’s birth. He died in 1993.

The partnership, which is a first of this type for the Academy Museum, was announced on Tuesday in Rome prior to an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences member...

What’s so riveting about Netflix’s “Russian Doll” is the voice at its center. Brainy narcissist trash-talking hard-living game coder Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) seems to be completely out of control throughout the dizzying rush of eight half-hour episodes, which were tailor-made to binge. The series flies at you with such a saturated flurry of images, sex and death shocks and Altman-speed profane dialogue that it feels exploded out of a cannon. Which belies its precise craftsmanship.

The ever-expanding universe of television programming has created huge demand for shows that pop and grab, that aren’t the same as everything else. You haven’t seen “Russian Doll” before, its brazen female anti-hero, its bravura style. “Nadia was this character I’d created long before ‘Russian Doll,'” said Lyonne, who’s been seeped in show business for 35 years with one dramatic break for rehab. “She’s my alter ego Nadia,...

What’s so riveting about Netflix’s “Russian Doll” is the voice at its center. Brainy narcissist trash-talking hard-living game coder Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) seems to be completely out of control throughout the dizzying rush of eight half-hour episodes, which were tailor-made to binge. The series flies at you with such a saturated flurry of images, sex and death shocks and Altman-speed profane dialogue that it feels exploded out of a cannon. Which belies its precise craftsmanship.

The ever-expanding universe of television programming has created huge demand for shows that pop and grab, that aren’t the same as everything else. You haven’t seen “Russian Doll” before, its brazen female anti-hero, its bravura style. “Nadia was this character I’d created long before ‘Russian Doll,'” said Lyonne, who’s been seeped in show business for 35 years with one dramatic break for rehab. “She’s my alter ego Nadia,...

Leo (Félix Maritaud) never counts his money after he’s with a client. The gay sex worker at the center of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s film Sauvage/Wild is, honestly, happy to be there. Drifting from client to client and from place to place, the homeless hustler has one constant that is quickly disappearing: his unrequited feelings for fellow hustler (though “gay 4 pay”), Ahd (Éric Bernard). Leo’s intense yearning for human connection and affection, mixed with his somewhat paradoxical disinclination to be “kept” in a (facile) domestic situation, and ailing body but unrelenting spirit, are reminiscent of Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s Nights […]...