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Australia’s Umbella Entertainment has announced the New Extremity Collection: Volume 2, a Blu-ray box set featuring four more provocative French films: Dobermann, Fat Girl, In My Skin, and Twentynine Palms.

1997’s Dobermann is directed by Jan Kounen (99 Francs) and written by Joël Houssin. Tchéky Karyo, Vincent Cassel, and Monica Bellucci star.

Dobermann is the world’s most ruthless bank robber and with his gang rob bank after bank, now in Paris. What can the police do but to let the mad, morally bankrupt police commissioner loose on him?

Special features:

Audio Commentary With Filmmakers And Film Historians Lee Zachariah And Paul Anthony Nelson (new) Audio Commentary By Director Jan Kounen, And Actors Vincent Cassel And Tchéky Karyo Audio Commentary By Director Jan Kounen, Author Benedicte Brunet And Screenwriter Joël Houssin Cassel In The Clouds: Guy Davis On The Daring, High-Wire Genre Work Of Vincent Cassel (new) Shoot the Dobermann: 2024 interview...

To watch Marco Bellocchio’s incendiary poliziottesco film Slap the Monster on Page One is to realize that the playbook of fascism has hardly changed over the past half-century. Exposing the thinly veiled collusion of right-wing politicians and reactionary media outlets, the demonization of leftist protesters, and the hypocritical piety that ran rampant during Italy’s “years of lead,” Bellocchio’s film probes the ways in which truth is undermined to shape public opinion and sway elections.

As the editor of Il Giornale, a fictional Italian newspaper, Giancarlo Bizanti (Gian Maria Volontè) certainly understands the power of seizing control of a narrative before one’s even been formed. Speaking to the lonely, embittered Rita (Laura Betti)—whom he manipulates into betraying her left-wing activist ex, Mario (Carrado Solari), ultimately falsely implicating the man in the murder of his current girlfriend, Maria (Silvia Kramar)—he says, “Let’s not try to lose our sense of reality.

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...

Hatchet for the Honeymoon doesn’t behave like other gialli. This Italian-Spanish movie does something unconventional at the beginning; the identity of the killer is revealed to the audience. It goes against tradition to spoil the mystery so early, but after feeling restrained while working under producer Dino De Laurentiis only a year earlier, director Mario Bava sought a fresh start in 1968. This almost forgotten movie was that creative reset, though it wouldn’t be until years later that everyone better appreciated this late entry in Bava’s unique oeuvre.

After taking a meat cleaver to a young bride and groom on a moving train, Stephen Forsyth’s character introduces himself. Not only is he a “madman, a dangerous murderer,” 30-year-old John Harrington is the movie’s protagonist. “I am a paranoiac,” he narrates during his morning rituals. From there John confesses to killing five brides and hiding their bodies,...

Director Luca Guadagnino discusses a few of his favorite films with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Bones And All (2022)

A Bigger Splash (2015)

Suspiria (2018)

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Apocalypse Now (1979) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Amarcord (1973) – Bernard Rose’s trailer commentary

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Jason And The Argonauts (1963) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s review

After Hours (1985) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary

Nashville (1975) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Dan Perri’s trailer commentary, Dennis Cozzalio’s review

Journey To Italy (1954)

Empire Of The Sun (1987)

The Flower Of My Secret (1995)

The Last Emperor (1987) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

1900 (1976)

Last Tango In Paris (1972) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Psycho (1960) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Suspiria (1977) – Edgar Wright’s U.S. and international trailer commentaries,...

Award-winning filmmakers are helpin filmmakers develop their projects at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event.

International filmmakers Talal Derki, Tala Hadid and Annemarie Jacir are among the lead mentors at this year’s edition of the Doha Film Institute’s talent and project incubator Qumra, running online March 18 to 25.

They reveal their own career breakthrough moments and the lessons learned that they now pass onto a new generation of filmmakers.

Syrian documentarian Talal Derki

What got you into film?

I belong to the generation that grew up with film as an art and way of giving a story meaning...

This interview conducted by the late Hans Hurch, former artistic director of the Viennale, was originally published in the book, “Vom Widerschein des Kinos. Hans Hurch Texte aus dem Falter von 1978 – 1991.” Falter Verlag, Vienna 2017. By Claus Philip, Christian Reder, Armin Thurnher (Hg.) Straub-Huillet's Class Relations (1984) is showing on Mubi from August 20 – September 18, 2019 as part of a Mubi retrospective devoted to the filmmakers.Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie-Straub’s film Class Relations (1984) is based on the novel “Amerika” by Franz Kafka. Class Relations is a film in black and white, shot in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, with the participation of 31 actresses and actors, among them: Christian Heinish, Mario Adorf, Alfred Edel, Libgart Schwarz, Klaus Traube, and Laura Betti. The following text is an excerpt from a conversation conducted by Hans Hurch with Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie-Straub on 12 February 1984, after the film’s premiere at the Metropolis theater in Hamburg.

Spring has (mostly) sprung; the birds chirp and the salt coats the cars, so I thought we would look at a film that is light, frothy, and fills the lungs with the smell of blood-splattered pine cones and fresh water memories. I’m speaking of course about Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), Mario Bava’s notorious ‘body count’ film that was ground zero for our beloved ‘80s slashers.

Why was it notorious? Well, this was not the elegant gothic tinged giallo audiences were expecting from the master of such; in fact the gritty and unpleasant shocker threw a lot of critics for a loop when it splashed across the screen first as Bay of Blood in Italy. Stateside it was picked up by Hallmark Releasing Corporation and renamed Carnage; when that didn’t play, they called it Twitch, which is the default moniker it goes by. Unless you have A Bay of Blood release.

“Pasolini” is not a biopic of the late Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (played here by Willem Dafoe). The complicated director of “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” “Teorema” and “Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom” (a scene involving its editing opens the film) was more personality than a 90-minute movie could handle. Any filmed biography presuming to grapple with the whole of his life would beg to be, at least, a limited TV series.

This is, perhaps, one reason why director Abel Ferrara (“Bad Lieutenant”) has scripted a 24-hour ticking clock that mostly ignores chronology and backstory. It’s the final day of Pasolini’s life, presented as part historical detail and part imagined glimpse into the man’s mind, and it culminates, as it must, in his brutal murder at age 53.

Fittingly, to touch on the life of a man who was a writer, a filmmaker, a philosopher,...

Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to Abel Ferrara’s drama Pasolini, nearly five years after its world premiere at Venice and subsequent festival slots that year in Toronto and New York.

The film, which stars Willem Dafoe, will have its theatrical premiere in New York at The Metrograph on May 10. Leading up to the theatrical bow, it will screen May 3 as part of a month-long Ferrara retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

In Pasolini, Dafoe plays Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film chronicles his final hours after completing his controversial classic, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, leading up to his brutal murder on the beach in Ostia in 1975.

Facing resistance from the public, politicians and press, Pasolini visits with friends and family, including actress Laura Betti (played by Maria de Madeiros). He persists in working on an ambitious new novel and screenplay...

The strangest Italian portmanteau picture of the sixties features glorious Silvana Mangano in dozens of costume changes, directed by big names (Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini) and paired with a woefully miscast Clint Eastwood. The other major attraction is a delightful music score by Piero Piccioni, with an assist from Ennio Morricone.

The Witches

Special Edition Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1967 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 (?) 111 105 min. / Le streghe / Street Date January 30, 2018 / 34.95

Starring: Silvana Mangano, Clint Eastwood, Annie Girardot, Francisco Rabal, Massimo Girotti, Véronique Vendell, Elsa Albani, Clara Calamai, Marilù Tolo, Nora Ricci, Dino Mele Dino Mele, Helmut Berger, Bruno Filippini, Leslie French, Alberto Sordi, Totò, Ciancicato Miao, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti, Luigi Leoni, Valentino Macchi, Corinne Fontaine, Armando Bottin, Gianni Gori, Paolo Gozlino, Franco Moruzzi, Angelo Santi, Pietro Torrisi.

Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Film Editors: Nino Baragli, Adriana Novelli, Mario Serandrei, Giorgio Serrallonga

Original Music: Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni

Written by Mauro Bolognini, Fabio Carpi,...

As the film that bridges the two decades of Mario Bava’s output as a director, 1970’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon feels strangely trapped between two worlds. It contains the traces of gothic horror with which Bava made his name, as well as elements of the supernatural and the psychosexual leanings of the giallo genre he more or less helped create. At the same time, it’s steeped in dazzling colors and psychedelia—it feels seedier than his usual output even though it’s far less graphic than some of his other works.

Stephen Forsyth plays John Harrington, working at a bridal dress factory managed by his older wife, Mildred (Laura Betti), with whom he shares very little love. He has a proclivity for watching young women wear bridal gowns and then murdering them; one day, however, he meets and gradually falls in love with Helen (Dagmar Lassandar), one of...

“There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies, whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image – electronic avatars of dead shadows perpetually retelling their own story.” —Jean Baudrillard in Telemorphosis Around 1979 the American filmmaker Robert Kramer and the French schizo-analyst Félix Guattari started working together on a film about two Italian fugitives from the Italian Autonomia Movement, Latitante. The film, which was to star Pier Paolo Pasolini's regular actress Laura Betti, was meant to be a sort of first person collective reflection on the finitude and fragility of the body, “opposing the enormous weight of things-as-they-are, systematically defined by vast power.” A film about the intimacy of resistance. Somewhere along the way the film morphed into a significantly different creature, the science fiction flick A Love of Uiq, a formal shift (sub)consciously informed by the wider political changes taking place off screen: from the grand...

Germany's Explosive Media company has a serious itch for American westerns, and they have a trio of new releases. One is a minor Hollywood classic with major graces, from the late 1950s. A second sees an American producer based in England filming in Italy with a rising international star, and for the third an established American star goes European  to stay in the game. The best thing for Yankee buyers? The discs are Region-free.

Gunman's Walk, Land Raiders, A Man Called Sledge Three Westerns from Explosive Media Blu-ray Separate Releases 1958-1970 / Color Starring Van Heflin, Tab Hunter; George Maharis, Telly Savalas; James Garner

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The majority of American studios now choose not to market their libraries for digital disc, and license them out instead. Collectors unwilling to settle for whatever's on Netflix or concerned about the permanence of Cloud Cinema, find themselves increasingly tempted by discs from Europe,...

Abel Ferrara’s account of the last days of the Italian auteur, played by Willem Dafoe, is beautiful and enigmatic

“Narrative art is dead – we are in a period of mourning”; “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure”; “Refusal must be great, absolute, absurd…” Abel Ferrara’s infatuated tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini is littered with such gnomic bon mots, which could apply equally to either director. Like Pasolini, Ferrara has courted both outrage and admiration; he made his name with The Driller Killer, and remains most celebrated for Bad Lieutenant, a film drenched in equal parts with Catholic ideology and censor-baiting exploitation.

This handsomely oblique film focuses on the very end of Pasolini’s life, as he completes work on Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom and makes plans for Porno-Teo-Kolossal, the unmade magnum opus which is here reimagined by Ferrara in startling, elegiac fashion. Willem Dafoe...

The Gospel According to Pier: Ferrara Poetically Captures an Auteur’s Last Day on Earth

It appears that 2014 marks a resounding return for auteur Abel Ferrara, unleashing two new films comingled from actual noted events, both destined for diverse responses and uncompromising in their audacity. The first is, of course, the Strauss-Kahn film, Welcome to New York, which has already received a debilitated premiere after a botched release on the Cannes market (treated to an unwarranted, venomous response reeking of pretentious bias) and the Us distributor has come under direct fire from Ferrara for suggesting cuts—don’t listen to any of that drama and see it as soon as you’re able. The other title is Pasolini, reuniting Ferrara with Willem Dafoe to explore the last day in the life of the famed Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini, who died on November 2, 1975, and whose murderer has never been found.

Terence Stamp Finds His Song

By Alex Simon

One of the iconic actors and faces of London’s “swinging” sixties; Terence Stamp was discovered by actor/director Peter Ustinov for the titular role in his adaptation of Melville’s “Billy Budd” in 1962. The Cockney lad from London’s notorious Bow district was thrust into the limelight almost overnight, becoming a symbol of the English working class “intelligentsia,” which helped shape that decade’s pop culture. Along with game-changers like Joe Orton, (Stamp’s former roommate) Michael Caine, and the Beatles, Stamp et al proved to the world that one needn’t have graduated with a First from Oxford to make a mark on the world.

Terence Stamp marked his 50th year in show business with the release of last year’s “Unfinished Song,” being released today on DVD and Amazon Instant Video by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Stamp plays grumpy pensioner Arthur Harris,...

★★★★☆ However disposable our current trends are, there's still a desperate need to classify what digital culture means to us. Trolling, outrage on social media, hacktivism - is it just iconoclasm writ large across the web? Some argue that these actions represent the mutilation of community, the loss of social value, worth and privacy. If so, we haven't travelled far from a 1960s culture which wrestled with the emptiness of bourgeois living. So we revisit 1968: stumbling towards the end of a tumultuous decade which united the student population and liberated many attitudes towards sex, politics and money.

All across Italy (and indeed much of the West), undergraduates rioted against police, supported by the convictions of left-wing organisations. But Pier Paolo Pasolini, openly an anti-consumerist along with communist comrades, opposed the students, arguing that policemen were the real proletariat. The same year, Pasolini delivered his sixth feature film, Theorem (Teorema, 1968), which...

A Bay Of Blood, more commonly known as Twitch Of The Death Nerve, is a 1971 Mario Bava film, that was made to give Bava and actress Laura Betti, a reason to work together again. The film was first met with with disappointment, but over the years would gain popularity, later being listed as one of the 50 horror films of all time, in a 2005 issue of Total Film. The story is a quite convoluted tale of murder and suspense, all regarding who wil…...

Ryan looks back at Mario Bava’s gore classic, A Bay Of Blood, a film that provides the link between Italian pulp literature and American slasher movies...

In their native Italy, they're known affectionately as giallo. Cheap, paperback novels so named because of their lurid yellow covers, their pages were filled with mystery and murder. While the genre had existed in the pages of pulp fiction since the 30s, it was director Mario Bava who brought the sensationalist themes of giallo to the big screen with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo) in 1962.

It was Bava, with his operatic direction filled with dramatic shadows and often drenched in colour, who established many of the trappings that would become familiar in giallo cinema. His heavily stylised camera work, expressive use of lighting and, above all, imaginatively brutal murders would have a profound, lasting impact on filmmaking,...

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Terence Stamp

Terence Stamp photographed by Terence Donovan, 1967

Take One: A family of Stamp collectors

Announced only as "The Stranger", Stamp waltzed into the home and lives of Teorema’s (Theorem/1968) wealthy Italian family like a bolt from the blue: in turn he sexed them all up good and proper, irrespective of gender, or even order, then left them reeling and the audience flummoxed. Everyone – on screen and off – was seduced by this perplexing guest. He left us all gagging for more. It was that naughty old Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fault. He dashed off his own personal spectator theory with the zestiest, most carefree and open abandon. Stamp’s stranger, most folk presume, is a Christ figure, a sexy Jesus substitute in the shape of a ‘60s heartthrob. The controversy of the film was aroused by this contentious quirk more than the frank and playful sexuality on display.

When world-class writers get to the last fifth or so of their career trajectory, after having put in four or more decades building their monuments, they often give themselves permission to write a memoir, a summing up, an attempt to gaze back and figure out how life and art have fought and entangled and rhymed over the lifetime. As they should.

Filmmakers rarely do this, and it's a pity -- what we wouldn't have done for an autumnal self-examination from Luis Buñuel (we got a book, but not a film) or Orson Welles, and consider how lucky we'd be today if Jacques Rivette or Werner Herzog decided to venture backwards this way, inspecting the weave of creativity, history, personal tumult and movie love.

Chris Marker, of course, has been doing this all along, albeit rather impersonally, and his distinct approach may've ultimately been what compelled his pal and compatriot Agnès Varda,...