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“Everything must change for everything to remain the same,” Tancredi, Prince Fabrizio Salina’s beloved nephew, says in a now-famous line from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard.” The same philosophy applies to the look and feel of the Sicily-set classic’s Netflix miniseries adaptation, which released globally Wednesday and marks the streamer’s most ambitious Italian original to date.

“The Leopard” chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the 19th-century unification of Italy, known as the Risorgimento. When tasked with telling the story in 2025, the lavish show’s production and costume teams faced a monumental challenge in envisioning a modern take on the sensual Sicilian saga. There would also be inevitable comparisons to “The Leopard’s” first adaptation — Luchino Visconti’s 1963 cinema classic starring Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival.

Netflix’s six-episode epic...

Shooting has kicked off in Rome on limited series “The Leopard” based on the classic Sicily-set novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that marks Netflix’s most ambitious Italian original to date.

Production on the lavish period piece will take place in the Sicilian cities of Palermo, Syracuse, Catania as well as the Italian capital over the next four months.

The historical tapestry with elements comparable to “Downton Abbey” or “The Crown,” and potential to make a global mark, is a modern take on the sensual Sicilian saga famously adapted into a film by Luchino Visconti starring Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster. The film, now an Italian cinema classic, won the 1963 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

The six-episode epic set against the backdrop of social revolution in 1860s Sicily will star top model Deva Cassell – who is Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel’s daughter – as Angelica Sedara,...

It’s kept deliberately vague where precisely Italian music-video director Francesco Carrozzini has set his feature debut, an adaption of the Jo Nesbø bestseller novel “Midnight Sun,” which closed a prestige-laden Venice Film Festival on an improbable note. One leans toward, maybe, Norway? But it could be Iceland or Greenland or any one of those far-flung, fjordy locales that usually turn out to belong to Denmark. It’s not like the language cues help: The dialogue is in English and the grand, windswept coastal landscapes are carefully scrubbed of signage that might, by so much as a single ‘ø,’ betray their provenance.

The actors’ nationalities are less use still. Headlined by Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (“The Eight Mountains”), the rest of the cast is stacked with UK talent, though we do know for sure, by the way the sun never sets and the mood is set firmly to “Nordic despair,...

Exclusive: Roadside Attractions is opening Roberto Benigni’s new Pinocchio movie from filmmaker Matteo Garrone on Christmas Day stateside on 2,000 screens. It’s more good news for those theaters which are braving the Christmas holiday. This past Thanksgiving proved that families will venture out during the pandemic where they feel safe and head to the movies; Universal/DreamWorks Animation’s The Croods: A New Age moving to a $14.2M five-day opening.

Having grossed $1.1M in the UK via distributor Vertigo Releasing back in August from an English language version, that Pinocchio print will be booked at U.S. and Canada theaters versus a subtitled one. Garrone’s Pinocchio opened in Italy a year ago where it grossed $17.1M, repping 84% of the pic’s $20.4M WW box office to date. The movie also played this past year’s Berlin Film Festival.

In this live-action version, which Roadside acquired U.S. on back on Nov.

Live-action adaptation premiered at Berlinale

Roadside Attractions has acquired US rights from HanWay Films to Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio and is planning an awards-qualifying release.

The adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s beloved novel premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year and stars Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, the woodcarver whose puppet creation magically comes to life and dreams of becoming a real boy.

Pinocchio, played by nine-year-old Federico Ielapi, gets caught up in a series of adventures that bring him into contact with bandits, the belly of a giant fish, the Land Of Toys, and the Field Of Miracles.

Garrone co-wrote...

Matteo Garrone’s Dogman features many of the same themes and motifs as his 2002 film, The Embalmer. Its grisly narrative is again loosely based on real events drawn from the news, it is again set in a run-down coastal suburb in southern Italy, and it again focuses on the skewed power dynamics between two male characters, one tall and the other short. The metaphorical slant, however, is even more pronounced this time around. By depriving their David and Goliath story of geographical and chronological specificity – both setting and time period are kept purposely vague – Garrone and his co-writers, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudisio, have also stripped the film of any genuine social relevance. The result is a philosophically bankrupt, if effectively constructed, spectacle of violence.

The two protagonists are Marcello (Marcello Fonte), a literal and figurative little man who owns a dog grooming salon, and Simone (Edoardo Pesce), a hulking...

Matteo Garrone has a history of directing fascinating films that vary from the gritty Gomorrah to the fantastical Tale of Tales (which screened here in Cannes in 2015). Dogman, based on a true crime story, fits snugly into the former category, yet it is also a fable for modern times.

The dog man in question is Marcello (Marcello Fonte), a diminutive dog groomer and petty criminal who dabbles in coke dealing to make ends meet. His home and shop are in Villaggio Coppola, a dilapidated seaside town with jerry-built buildings and a sense of social deprivation. Yet there is also a strong sense of community here: the shop owners are all pals and the men organise regular football matches. Marcello is well liked and even seems to have a good relationship with his ex, the mother of his beloved daughter Sofia. Yet all is not peace and love in this rundown town,...

A scientist is reborn as a robot in a frantic but familiar British science-fiction thriller

The Machine is British sci-fi about an AI scientist who gets reincarnated as an android. Former dancer Caity Lotz is good at lethal kicks and twitchy cyborg movements, but her ingenue manner and baby-doll voice don't make her any more convincing as a cybernetics genius than as a robo-femme super-soldier.

The Machine is hardly short on ideas, albeit too frantically crammed into a familiar narrative package. Still, writer-director Caradog James, cinematographer Nicolai Brüel and the effects team muster a passably dazzling CGI light show.

Rating: 2/5

Science fiction and fantasyJonathan Romney

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The Machine

Written and directed by Caradog W. James

UK, 2013

Some maudlin producers must be kicking themselves given recent events, as the post-credits blurb of the new science-fiction future-shock film The Machine sets the context of a near-future Britain locked into a new cold war with China. Can’t we simply revert back to the 1980s-era Soviet aggressor, just like the good old days? In fact, this visually striking but slightly constricted work has clearly been deeply influenced by the selfish decade’s most accomplished sci-fi movies, as Blade Runner and Escape From New York echo through the chrome-plated antechamber, with a deeper umbilical link to the titular feminine form shadowing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Brilliant neural programmer graduate Ava (Caity Lotz) successfully secures a job at a secret government installation after her creation passes the Turing test, impressing senior robotics employee Vincent (Toby Stephens), who has been frantically searching...