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Just about every movie buff knows that Clint Eastwood shot to international fame after starring in Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy," but what came next? It's a good pub quiz question because many people might leap straight to the year 1968 when a trio of hits cemented his status as one of Hollywood's top tough guys: "Hang 'Em High," "Coogan's Bluff," and "Where Eagles Dare." But tucked away in his filmography is a forgotten 1967 Italian movie called "The Witches," not to be confused with the Hammer production of the same name from the year before. Originally titled "Le streghe" in Italian, it's an offbeat anthology movie that isn't a horror film at all and has very little to do with witches, unless you squint really hard at its themes.

"The Witches" was the brainchild of legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, who would later make an impact in Hollywood with the 1976 "King Kong" remake,...

Lionsgate has just released a first look at the new Michele Civetta crime thriller hitting theaters this summer. Watch Parker (Shea Whigham) in The Gateway as he tries to help a family escape a father recently released from prison, ready to create a new up-start using his stash hidden before he went to prison. Can Parker help this troubled family in time?

Shea Whigham, Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse), and Frank Grillo (The Grey) star in this gritty, edge-of-your-seat crime-thriller. Whigham is Parker, a down-on-his-luck social worker who finds himself in over his head when he tries to protect his client from her recently paroled husband. Can Parker save the family from the violent threat of the maniacal drug dealer and his crew, desperate to reclaim their priceless stash? The cast includes Shea Whigham, Olivia Munn, Taryn Manning, Mark Boone Junior, Taegen Burns with Frank Grillo and Bruce Dern.

Michele Civetta is an Emmy-nominated director.

Stars: Asia Argento, Franco Nero, Jonathan Caouette, Nick Daly, Ninetto Davoli, Giulia Di Quilio, Monica Guerritore, Rade Serbedzija | Written by Michele Civetta, Joseph Schuman | Directed by Michele Civetta

Sometimes I feel a little sorry for low budget horror film makers today. Dial it back 30 years, you could make an incompetent piece of cinema, but put in enough hokey bloodletting, regardless of how laughably unrealistic those sausage string guts were, and you might well have a money-spinning film on your hands. Even objectively poor films like Driller Killer managed to (very deliberately) whip up enough conservative anger to ensure that a poorly made, dull film became widely seen, and naturally far more successful as a result.

Today, blood is not nearly enough. Some of the films I see today with a 15 certificate would have faced heavy censure back in the Mary Whitehouse days of video nasties. A time when films would...

Abel Ferrara on his selections for Abel Ferrara’s Cinema Village: “Desperate Living by John Waters, one of my favorite directors. Then we got a couple of films by the guys that I worked with. My editor and my Dp Sean Williams, Stephen Gurewitz, Michael Bilandic. Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Abel Ferrara’s Cinema Village starts on Tuesday, June 29 at 7:30pm with a free screening of The Projectionist on Nicolas Nicolaou, followed by a Q&a with Abel. Tommaso; Pasolini; Siberia (Dafoe); Ms. 45; 4:44 Last Day On Earth, and Driller Killer will have $5 screenings.

John Waters’ Desperate Living; Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist; Stephen Gurewitz’s Honky Kong; Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show are among the films selected by Ferrara to be screening during his celebration of the reopening...

“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,...

Abel Ferrara has come not to bury Pier Paolo Pasolini — writer, critic, activist, provocateur, communist, hedonist, out-and-proud homosexual and, last but not least, filmmaker — but to praise him. And, crucially, to commemorate the Italian director via a biopic that somehow doesn’t fall prey to the pitfalls that usually accompany hagiographic cinematic shrines. Focusing on the last 24 hours of Pasolini’s life, Ferrara’s tribute to the late Renaissance man of 20th century Rome is part hero worship, part recreation of a true-crime tragedy and completely of a piece with...

For those in New York City, this spring is an Abel Ferrara jubilee. Tribeca Film Festival will host the world premiere of his new documentary The Projectionist, which follows Nick Nicolaou, a figure deeply embedded in the city’s exhibition history. Then, the Museum of Modern Art will host a career retrospective throughout the entire month of May, titled Abel Ferrara Unrated. Finally, Kino Lorber has announced they have picked up the director’s Pier Paolo Pasolini biopic, which premiered way back at the 2014 Venice Film Festival, for a release starting at NYC’s Metrograph on May 10 before expanding. Following the final days in the Italian director’s life, a new trailer and poster and have now debuted for the drama.

Tommaso Tocci said in our Venice review back in 2014, “Before being beaten and run over with his own car on the beach of Ostia’s Idroscalo, Pasolini was busy...

"Let me be frank with you - I've been to hell... And I know things that don't disturb other people's dreams." Kino Lorber has debuted a new official Us trailer for a French-Italian drama titled Pasolini, which actually first premiered back in 2014 and is just finally getting a Us release. This "kaleidoscopic look at the last day of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini" first showed at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, and then opened throughout Europe in 2014 and 2015. After five years of waiting, it's finally getting a small theatrical release this May. Directed by filmmaker Abel Ferrara, Pasolini stars Willem Dafoe as Pier Paolo Pasolini, along with Ninetto Davoli, Riccardo Scamarcio, Valerio Mastandrea, Roberto Zibetti, Andrea Bosca, and Damiano Tamilia. It seems a bit odd to still try and release this film after so many years, but if they think it's worthy of another release, then why not. The footage looks intriguing,...

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,...

The Witches (1967) is now available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy. It can be ordered Here

In the mid-sixties, famed producer Dino De Laurentiis brought together the talents of five celebrated Italian directors for an anthology film. Their brief was simple: to direct an episode in which Silvana Mangano (Bitter Rice, Ludwig) plays a witch.

Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, Death in Venice) and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (Bicycle Thieves) open the film with The Witch Burned Alive, about a famous actress and a drunken evening that leads to unpleasant revelations. Civic Sense is a lightly comic interlude from Mauro Bolognini (The Lady of the Camelias) with a dark conclusion, and The Earth as Seen from the Moon sees Italian comedy legend Totò team up with Pier Paolo Pasolini (Theorem) for the first time for a tale of matrimony and a red-headed father and son. Franco Rosso (The Woman in the Painting) concocts a...

The Italian film legend, known for his expressive face, made many films with Pier Paolo Pasolini and starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films

The Italian cinema legend Franco Citti has died in Rome aged 80 following a long illness. Friend and fellow actor Ninetto Davoli confirmed that Citti had died on Thursday.

Citti, known internationally for his role as Calò in Francis Ford Coppola’s the Godfather I and III and as the face of films by director Pier Paolo Pasolini, came to fame at the age of 26 playing the title role in Pasolini’s 1961 Accattone. He continued to work with the legendary director throughout the 60s and 70s, appearing in films such as Mamma Roma, Edipo Re, Pigsty and The Decameron.

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Stars: Lou Castel, Mark Damon, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Barbara Frey, Rossana Martini, Mirella Maravidi, Franco Citti, Luisa Baratto, Ninetto Davoli, Nino Musco, Carlo Palmucci, Vittorio Duse | Written by Lucio Battistrada, Andrew Baxter | Directed by Carlo Lizzani

Lou Castel takes the lead role in Requiescant, a young man raised to be a pacifist by a travelling preacher who discovered him as a baby after a massacre of his family. Searching for his adopted sister he soon finders her in the employment of George Ferguson (Mark Damon) an evil landowner who manipulates the young man for his own amusement. When his history is heritage is discovered it is revealed Ferguson was the man who ordered the death of the man’s family all for the control over the land that belonged to them.

Requiescant may not be the strongest story for a Western and it does tend to fluff over a few...

Europictures

Rating: ★★★

Abel Ferrara has been toying with the idea of making a film on the life of late Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini since the early 1990s. The original idea was set to be quite different from the one we’ve got, mind, and would see actress and collaborator Zoe Lund (Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant) playing a sort-of female version of Pasolini living the life that he did (the project was scrapped when Lund tragically died in 1997).

It’s easy to understand why Ferrara, the enfant terrible of New York cinema, was and is attracted to Pasolini: both men have been accused of peddling exploitation from those who find their work morally objectionable but, conversely, they have also been hailed as genuine auteurs and makers of important art (Pasolini more so than Ferrara, it must be said).

Pasolini chronicles the final 24 hours in the late director, novelist, critic and intellectual’s life.

Neil Armfield.s Holding the Man, Simon Stone.s The Daughter, Jeremy Sims. Last Cab to Darwin and Jen Peedom.s feature doc Sherpa will have their world premieres at the Sydney Film Festival.

The festival program unveiled today includes 33 world premieres (including 22 shorts) and 135 Australian premieres (with 18 shorts) among 251 titles from 68 countries.

Among the other premieres will be Daina Reid.s The Secret River, Ruby Entertainment's. ABC-tv miniseries starring Oliver Jackson Cohen and Sarah Snook, and three Oz docs, Marc Eberle.s The Cambodian Space Project — Not Easy Rock .n. Roll, Steve Thomas. Freedom Stories and Lisa Nicol.s Wide Open Sky.

Festival director Nashen Moodley boasted. this year.s event will be far larger than 2014's when 183 films from 47 countries were screened, including 15 world premieres. The expansion is possible in part due to the addition of two new screening venues in Newtown and Liverpool.

As previously announced, Brendan Cowell...

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.

brouillard passage #14

Dear Fern,

Many of the features you have told me about I have subsequently seen and very much like: Ferrara's tender, banal Pasolini (with a fantastic lead performance by Willem Dafoe, and, as you so justly pointed out, a truly moving homage with Ninetto Davoli), and the eccentric structural romantic comedy from Johnnie To, Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2. Two of the best films at Toronto, so far. Maybe I will return to these films later in the festival to tell you more of what I thought, but first somethings you may not have seen.

The much-anticipated shorts programs of the Wavelengths section wrapped up two nights ago and was presided over as always by indomitable programmer Andréa Picard—practically a cult figure in the festival world these days—who year after year has made it the most distinctive, the most personal, and the most engaged and engaging section at Tiff.

Dear Danny,

I also rode the Tokyo Tribe rollercoaster, and my head hasn’t stopped spinning yet. Slamming together the most rabid excesses of the worlds of manga comics and hip-hop music, it’s a continuous blitzkrieg: Sono’s ne plus ultra of sheer brio, and, along with Godard’s Adieu au language, the festival’s most assaultive sensory experience so far. Its pinwheel neon hues, inflamed camera movements and acrobatic gangland mugging are straight-up dilations of Seijun Suzuki’s vintage gonzo pulp—indeed, the first time I ever heard Japanese rapping on screen was during a brief interlude in Suzuki’s mock-opera Princess Raccoon. I doubt even that veteran iconoclast, however, could have dreamed up the bit in Tokyo Tribe when the vile underworld kingpin (Riki Takeuchi), swollen like an obscene parade float, pulverizes a field of warring gangs with a Gatling gun held, of course, crotch-level. Such moments of absolute glee abound,...

Abel Ferrara's Pasolini has released its first trailer.

Willem Dafoe will take on the eponymous role as the controversial filmmaker in the biopic.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was best known for his work on films such as Marquis de Sade adaptation Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Gospel According to St Matthew.

The film focuses on the filmmaker's final days.

After Pasolini was murdered, a prostitute confessed to the crime but later claimed that he had been forced to do so when his family was threatened.

Pasolini's muse Ninetto Davoli also features in the movie.

The film is yet to announce a release date.

As we look in the rearview mirror of the summer blockbusters, September heralds the start of the fall movie season. Filled with Hollywood heavyweights and A-listers, here’s our Big list of the most anticipated movies coming to cinemas this autumn and during the holidays.

Our exhaustive list includes films that are playing at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival as well the ones that already have a theatrical release date. With the awards season on the horizon, we also added a few bonus films at the end to keep your eye out for in the months ahead.

Pull up a chair, grab a pen and paper and get ready for Wamg’s Guide to the 100+ Films This Fall And Holiday Season.

We kick it off with what’s showing in Toronto at the film festival that runs September 4 – 14.

Maps To The Stars – September 2014 – Toronto International Film Festival; UK & Ireland September...

Opening Night – World Premiere

Gone Girl

David Fincher, USA, 2014, Dcp, 150m

David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage,...

The 71st Venice Film Festival announced its lineup this morning, highlighted by films from American directors, including David Gordon Green, Barry Levinson, Peter Bogdanovich, Lisa Cholodenko, Andrew Niccol, and James Franco. As had been previously announced, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton and many others, will be the opening film when the festival begins on Aug. 27.

Click below for the entire list of 55 films playing in Venice.

Competition

The Cut, directed by Fatih Akin

Starring Tahar Rahim, Akin Gazi, Simon Abkarian, George Georgiou

A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, directed by Roy Andersson

Starring Holger Andersson,...

Fashion boss Vittorio Missoni is missing after his plane disappeared off the coast of Venezuela on Jan. 4. The plane -- carrying Missoni, 58, his wife, Maurizia Castiglioni, and four other people (including two crew members) -- went off the grid shortly after taking off from Los Roques archipelago for Caracas, Italian media told Reuters. "It disappeared yesterday. [Emergency services] have been looking for it with helicopters and ships, but have not found anything yet," Italian consul Giovanni Davoli said. "They are still searching for it this morning." Missoni [...]...

His life tragically and brutally cut short by a still unknown assassin, Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last completed project, known as the Trilogy of Life, gets the master treatment from Criterion this month, which includes three films based on classic literary anthologies, The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1975). Pasolini was one third done with his next project, to be called the Trilogy of Death, of which his last film, Salo (1975), was the first installment. Upon each of their initial releases, the Life films were all equally greeted with controversy, celebration, and a distinct notoriety, but all overshadowed by the infamy of Salo, which stands on many lists as one of the most difficult to watch films of all time (and was the first Pasolini title to be inducted into Criterion’s annals). Pasolini’s overall motif encapsulated in these three features is a celebration of life,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Nov. 13, 2012

Price: DVD $79.95, Blu-ray $79.95

Studio: Criterion

Ninetto Davoli enjoys the sweet smell of life in Pasolini's The Decameron.

Italian poet, philosopher and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (Salò) Trilogy of Life, from the early 1970s, consists of his film renditions of a trio of masterpieces of pre-modern world literature: Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights (which is often referred to as The Arabian Nights).

The late Pasolini’s comedy-drama movies are now considered to be most uninhibited and extravagant works, a brazen and bawdy triptych that sets out to challenge consumer capitalism and celebrate the human body while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies.

Definitely not for all tastes, the films offer heaping doses of Pasolini’s scatological humor and his rough-hewn sensuality, most of which leave all modern standards of decency behind.

Chicago – Critics don’t have any business reviewing films if they aren’t able to admit when they are wrong. I am here to freely admit that I was wrong about “I Am Love.” While it blindsided me at the European Union Film Festival, I detected certain glaring flaws in its plot during the film’s limited theatrical run, which seem to have evaporated upon its magnificent DVD release.

Yes, the film is an unabashed melodramatic romance at heart, requiring the viewer to buy into its less-than-credible flights of fancy. But as an experiment in pure cinema, the film is an extraordinary hybrid of the classical and contemporary. Love is depicted as nothing less than a force of nature, inspiring its central character to evolve into the person she was always meant to be. The film is about revolution rather than repression, and that is its stroke of genius, reflecting...