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February is a time for lovers. Romance, as well as the hope to find it are abound and what better place to seek it out than at your local repertory cinema. Sure, a dark theater full of strangers may seem like an odd space for finding a potential suitor, but who knows what can happen at the concession stand or under the marquee? One thing’s for sure: There’s nothing quite like the allure of the big screen.

This month’s offerings across New York and Los Angeles feature a whole host of fare designed to fill audience’s hearts, not just in the sense of discovering love, but also reaching to the soul. Starting January 31 and running through March 5, Film at Lincoln Center will be hosting a career retrospective titled “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” that is sure to envelop newcomers to the documentarian’s hypnotic work, as well as longtime fans.

Abel Ferrara is set to begin production on his latest feature, “American Nails,” a modern gangster story inspired by ancient tragedy that stars Asia Argento and Willem Dafoe, Variety has learned.

According to the producers, “American Nails” charts “the rise and fall of this modern Phaedra, in a tale set in the gangster world of primal violence, power and revenge. This no-holds-barred retelling of Euripides’ masterpiece pits Argento against the male-dominated remnants of power and entitlement in contemporary Italy.”

Written by Ferrara and Rossella De Venuto, pic is produced by Diana Phillips and Philipp Kreuzer for Rimsky Productions and Maze Pictures. Production is set to begin in Italy this summer.

“American Nails” marks Dafoe’s eighth collaboration with Ferrara, including the 2014 Venice biopic “Pasolini,” 2019 Cannes Film Festival selection “Tommaso” and 2020 Berlinale entry “Siberia.” Coming off his acclaimed performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar hopeful “Poor Things,” Dafoe will again team up...

Abel Ferrara is the maverick director responsible for violent and controversial gems like Ms. 45, King of New York, and Bad Lieutenant. He also helmed the solid 1993 Body Snatchers remake and the 2019 drama Tommaso, starring Willem Dafoe. Although not all of his films were successful on release, Ferrara's work went on to influence subsequent filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and the Safdie brothers.

Italy’s Taormina Film Festival kicks off its 69th edition Friday evening against the backdrop of its landmark Teatro Antico amphitheatre with a “Pavarotti Forever” benefit event headlined by Placido Domingo and Vittorio Grigolo.

It’s not the typical opening for a film festival, but it is in keeping with the eclectic programming of incoming artistic director Barrett Wissman, whose interview with Deadline on his plans for the festival can be read here.

Much is riding on the edition, with Wissman being brought in to raise its local and international profile after a turbulent decade, which was compounded by the Covid pandemic.

Topping the bill over the first weekend is the Italian premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny in the presence of Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mads Mikkelsen. It’s the first time a major Disney production has touched down at the festival since Inside Out in 2015. Indiana Jones,...

Market

The Cannes Film Market has launched Cannes Investors Circle, which will commence with a keynote introduction by Liesl Copland, Participant’s executive VP, content and platform strategy, who will offer her perspective on the modern media landscape. The initiative will also feature a panel discussion titled Navigating Film Finance in a Changing World that aims to offer insights on global financing and market trends in 2023 and beyond. The panelists will include Elisa Alvares, finance expert at Jacaranda Consultants; Rikke Ennis, CEO of REinvent Studios; Emilie Georges, co-founder and CEO of Paradise City; Mike Goodridge, U.K. producer at Good Chaos who is also presenting Jessica Hausner’s “Club Zero” in the festival’s official competition; with film festival consultant Wendy Mitchell moderating.

The event will also include an invitation-only session where VIP private investors will listen to pitches of nine new global film projects at the investment stage. The...

The Italian premieres of Cannes Film Festival opener Jeanne du Barry starring Johnny Depp and Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny will be among the international highlights of the 69th Taormina Film Festival which gave a taster of its line-up at a press conference in Rome on Tuesday.

Principal cast for James Mangold’s Indiana Jones reboot including Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies and Mads Mikkelsen are expected to be in attendance for the screening.

The event, unfolding June 23 to July 1 in Sicily, is under the new co-artistic directorship of Barrett Wissman this year.

There will also be Italian premieres for Lisa Cortes’s Little Richard: I Am Everything, a documentary about the life and career of the legendary musician, and A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, starring Teyana Taylor.

Italian highlights include the world premiere of the comedy The Worst Days by Edoardo Leo,...

When Willem Dafoe's Nemo takes on a routine heist during Inside, he expects to steal a few priceless paintings from a millionaire's penthouse and slip out undetected - but once he's unexpectedly locked in, several clues indicate that he's the one who becomes a piece of art. What was supposed to be an easy job quickly turns into a nightmare, and when Nemo is cut off from his handler on the radio, he realizes that the penthouse has become a prison. As the temperature begins to spike radically and his calls for help echo back to him in mockery, he begins to question his reality.

With no other option than to wait for someone to discover him, he begins to rummage through the homeowner's space for food, find fresh water, and engage with the thought-provoking art around him.

Though he's certainly become a fixture of arthouse cinema, Dafoe has...

Padre Pio

His insatiable appetite for the seventh art means that when Abel Ferrara ain’t making one movie in particular, he is already onto some other project. His output in the last five years includes one doc, Tommaso (2019), Siberia (2019) and Locarno winning Zeros and Ones (2021). Long in the works and the subject of his 2015 docu Searching for Padre Pio, the fiction film Padre Pio would inevitably have a part for Willem Dafoe but he also made the interesting casting choice of Shia Labeouf – rescuing him from his persona non grata status. Production would have begun last November and so this will likely target a Venice Film Festival showing – a festival that the Italian American is a recurrent guest at.…...

Lionsgate has provided /Film with an exclusive clip from "Zeros and Ones," the intense new thriller from acclaimed director Abel Ferrara which is scheduled to hit select theaters, Apple TV+, VOD and digital on November 19, 2021 before it arrives on Blu-ray and DVD January 4, 2022. The film stars Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke in the dual roles of JJ and Justin, along with Cristina Chiriac ("Tommaso") as Laughing Russian agent and Valerio Mastandrea ("We All Fall Down") as Luciano.

Hawke is a fascinating actor who always makes eclectic choices...

The post Ethan Hawke Gets Intense in New Clip From Abel Ferrara's Zeros and Ones [Exclusive] appeared first on /Film.

Abel Ferrara has never been much for salvation, at least not in the sense that it might be handed to us on a silver platter by someone who died more than 2,000 years ago; his “Bad Lieutenant” wasn’t exactly a self-portrait, but Harvey Keitel referring to Jesus Christ as a “rat fuck” didn’t come out of nowhere. In recent years, however, the grindhouse nihilism of Ferrara’s earlier work has been tempered by the personal acceptance of impending doom.

The scraggly Bronx-born filmmaker traded Catholicism for Buddhism around the same time as he relocated from New York to Rome, and movies like “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” “Tommaso,” and “Pasolini” — while still rank with the raw sewage that stops up human civilization — began to look inward for answers even as they confronted the end of the world. It’s as if the now-70-year-old Ferrara was steeling himself for...

Abel Ferrara on Willem Dafoe in Siberia: “That’s so Willem! He’s the darkness and I’m the dancer.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Abel Ferrara has kept himself active over the past 16 months, after presenting the world premiere (at the 2020 Berlinale) of Siberia, co-written with Christ Zois, shot by Stefano Falivene (Pasolini), scored by Joe Delia and starring Willem Dafoe with Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Laurent Arnatsiaq, Phil Neilson, Valentina Rozumenko, Fabio Pagano, and Ulrike Willenbacher.

Clint (Willem Dafoe) with his Inuit friend (Laurent Arnatsiaq)

Abel has Zeros And Ones, starring Ethan Hawke, Valerio Mastandrea, and Cristina Chiriac waiting to go and his must-watch Sportin' Life, sponsored by Saint Laurent, and shot by Sean Price Williams, which intimately documents the Berlin festivities, including musical performances, with Abel singing and playing guitar in clubs. The initial tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic in...

There’s a nice quote in Abel Ferrara’s 2014 film Pasolini: “The meaning of this parable is precisely the relationship of an author to the form he creates.” It’s an idea I’ve been quite taken with in the years since, and unsurprisingly Ferrara has only expanded upon it in his most recent two feature films, Tommaso and Siberia. I’ve been lucky enough to ask Mr. Ferrara about this, and while the films themselves offer a clarity that only art can provide, there are still things—not loose ends, but rather tangents and streams—one can gain a little perspective on through the nature of correspondence itself. Mr. Ferrara—a congenial, gentle, and kindly man—gives us a little insight on this relationship between art and the artist, how it’s informed what he’s doing now as opposed to what he used to do, and where he’s going next.

In Abel Ferrara’s films over the last 10 years, the apocalypse has been looming, waiting to infect everyone in its vicinity with darkness, death, and devastation. In Tommaso, there is doom impending even in an otherwise stable family unit, paralyzing its protagonist with anxieties and sufferings so intense that there’s no chance of a happy ending. In Pasolini, the apocalypse is made further personal. The inevitable death of the Italian filmmaker is built towards with cosmic sadness, the unfinished work of his being brought to life by Ferrara like half-remembered dreams before his violent murder. Within his masterpiece 4:44 Last Day on Earth, the apocalypse is literal, two people desperately trying to cling onto each other before time itself runs out in front of their eyes. All of Ferrara’s pursuits of understanding death and the horrors of it are present in his latest feature film Siberia, one that...

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage, and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

We’ve got a new feature from an American indie legend on tap for this week, along with fancy new disc releases for fans of Stanley Kubrick, Audrey Hepburn, Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, and Bob Hope.

Continue reading The 8 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘Tommaso,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ & More at The Playlist.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: The poster for Venice Critics' Week, illustrated by Fabiana Mascolo.The latest festival update comes from Venice Critics' Week, which has announced a lineup of seven debut features, including The Rossellinis by Alessandro Rossellini, the grandson of Roberto Rossellini. Until August 3, you have the opportunity to donate to the Online African Film Festival's crowdfunding campaign, which will help improve the festival's streaming platform and host new films of the African diaspora all year long. Recommended Viewing For those in the UK, Jonathan Glazer's short Strasbourg 1518 (about the hysteria-induced "dancing plague" that gripped the city) is now available on the BBC iPlayer.Between July 21 to August 18, Kino Klassika Foundation and the Centre of Contemporary Arts Tashkent are co-presenting Tashkent Film Encounters, an online program of classic films from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Chicago – Using safety-first precautions, the Music Box Theatre of Chicago has reopened as of July 3rd for limited seating (see link below for details). The Gene Siskel Film Center continues “Film Center From Your Sofa.”

Music Box Theatre Screens Vertigo, Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight and Relic at the Re-Opened Theater. Plus Virtual Films for At Home Continue.

Vertigo

Photo credit: MusicBoxTheatre.com

As of July 3rd, 2020, Music Box Theatre became on of the first movie houses in Chicago to re-open in compliance with Illinois State guideline Phase 4 protocol. The complete rules for coming to the theater can be accessed by clicking here.

For virtual cinema, Music Box Theatre will continue get a percentage of the proceeds from any screening. Click site link below for details.

Scheduled: Simultaneous with the open theater.

Description: In Theater: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 70mm. Tales From The Crypt: Demon brings the popular...

About 30 minutes into Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso comes a scene in which the title character, a sixtyish American filmmaker (and blatant Ferrara stand-in) who left New York to make a new life in Rome, sneaks out of his apartment at night. We follow him down a street, then an alley, then a set of stairs. The scene should…...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Lynn Shelton by Fred HayesFilmmaker Lynn Shelton, best known as a pioneer of the mumblecore movement and as a gifted director of television (including the series Glow and Little Fires Everywhere), has died at the age of 54.Luca Guadagnino is set to direct a reboot of Scarface, with a shooting script written by Ethan and Joel Coen that places the story in Los Angeles. Recommended VIEWINGThe official U.S. trailer for Abel Ferrara's Tommaso, which will be arriving to virtual cinemas starting June 5. The film follows Willem Dafoe as an American artist in Rome. Read our interview with Ferrara regarding the film as "personal cinema" here.Netflix has released a trailer for Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, the story of four African-American Vietnam war veterans who return to Vietnam in search of...

Less than a year after premiering “Tommaso” at Cannes — maybe the most grounded of movies that renegade auteur Abel Ferrara has made with long-time muse Willem Dafoe — the Bronxiest of filmmakers pivots in the exact opposite direction for . Set at the snowy end of the universe (and inspired by one of the latter writer’s manuscripts), “Siberia” is, in essence, a baffling attempt to project the human subconscious on screen.

“I want to see if we can really film dreams,” Ferrara has said of his ambitions for the project. “Our fears, our regrets, our nostalgia.” Putting aside the hundreds of other films that have previously tried to accomplish the same or similar (to varying degrees of success), the evidence here would suggest that we cannot. Then again, if Ferrara’s nostalgia involves lots of sex, his regrets include attending a death metal concert of some kind, and his fears hinge...

“Siberia” is the sixth film Abel Ferrara has made with Willem Dafoe, and by the end of it, were it not for vivid memories of past collaborations with Harvey Keitel and Christopher Walken, it would be hard to conceive of him ever having cast anyone else. Ferrara and Dafoe were always an obvious fit — both toughened, wily eccentrics happy to sit outside the system — though their previous pairings, including the surprisingly restrained quasi-biopic “Pasolini” and last year’s navel-gazing doodle “Tommaso,” never made the most of that kinship. You can’t say that about “Siberia,” a beautiful, unhinged, sometimes hilarious trek into geographical and psychological wilderness that will delight some and mystify many others. As a study of a rugged individualist looking back on long-withered connections — to others, to the mainstream world, and indeed to himself — it feels personally invested both as a star vehicle and an auteur piece. If it isn’t,...

Filmmaker Abel Ferrara and actor Willem Dafoe have a bit of an ongoing working relationship. For decades now, the filmmaker and actor have collaborated on a number of films including “New Rose Hotel,” “Go Go Tales,” “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” and “Pasolini.” However, his most recent collaboration, “Tommaso” has yet to hit theaters officially.

Continue reading ‘Tommaso’ Trailer: Abel Ferrara & Willem Dafoe Collaborate Once Again In This Drama From Last Year’s Cannes at The Playlist.

What to make of Carlo Chatrian’s first selection?

Berlin Film Festival has announced its Competition lineup for the 70th edition, which runs from February 20 - March 1.

Screen has picked out six key talking points to arise from the selection.

Berlin Film Festival unveils 2020 Competition line-up It looks pretty familiar

Carlo Chatrian’s first main competition selection does not look wildly different from the Dieter Kosslick years at first glance. Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel’s Dau, Natasha, Burham Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’s Delete Forever and Philippe Garrel’s The Salt Of Tears are...

Willem Dafoe has spent the last two awards seasons on the campaign trail. The actor earned back-to-back Oscar nominations for his work in 2017’s “The Florida Project” and for last year’s “At Eternity’s Gate.”

And if the critical reaction to “The Lighthouse” is any indication, he’ll be back on it soon.

“The Lighthouse” is director Robert Eggers’ black-and-white follow-up to his 2015 debut “The Witch.” Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as 1890s lighthouse keepers who slowly spiral into insanity as they tend to a lighthouse on a slab of rock in the middle of a brutal New England storm.

Oscar buzz began almost immediately after the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to ecstatic reviews for both Dafoe and Pattinson. Eggers is being hailed as the next big talent to look out for. “That’s good. I’ll take that,” Dafoe says when asked shortly after the premiere about the accolades.

Everyone knows that Willem Dafoe is one of our greatest actors. But because the film industry often shoehorns him into “character” roles, he is also one of our wiliest, most resourceful actors. Dafoe never just shows up — he’ll grab even the sketchiest part and burrow into it.

Take “Tommaso,” the first scripted drama in five years from the writer-director Abel Ferrara. (He’s been making off-the-cuff documentaries.) It’s in the genre of confessional autobiographical films about filmmakers, though this one is the shot-on-a-shoestring home-movie version. Dafoe, who also starred in Ferrara’s “Pasolini,” plays Tommaso, an American indie director living in Rome. The film was shot in Ferrara’s own apartment there, and it costars his wife, Cristina Chiriac, as Tommaso’s wife Nikki, and the couple’s real-life three-year-old daughter, Anna Ferrara , as three-year-old Deedee. Given the semi-scandalous details of life on the edge that have made Ferrara,...

Fatherhood and midlife doldrums are not the usual terrain for director Abel Ferrara, whose dark tales of angry urbanites have coalesced into a striking vision of despair across several decades, but everyone grows up sometime. In the scrappy and often endearing drama “Tommaso,” Ferrara casts regular muse Willem Dafoe as a fictionalized version of the filmmaker himself, a broken man still picking up the pieces from his prior misdeeds to find some measure of stability. Having found a new life in Italy with a much younger wife and child — both played by the real ones in Ferrara’s life — the eponymous Tommaso struggles to reconcile a new beginning with the stumbles of the past.

A microbudget “Birdman” about the travails of a once-successful artist losing his grasp on reality, “Tommaso” comes across as Ferrara’s most personal work on many levels. The lo-fi chamber piece is a messy, ruminative self-portrait,...

Cannes–Variety honored its 10 Producers to Watch for 2019 at a brunch on Monday morning at Cannes’ Plage des Palmes.

Launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, the annual event fetes 10 producers from the U.S. and the international film community who share a common commitment to bold, original, provocative storytelling.

The films produced by this year’s honorees have premiered on the Croisette and made waves in Sundance and Berlin, tackling challenging themes while offering a platform for diverse cinematic voices. Collectively they represent a dynamic community that is going to “regenerate, rejuvenate, revitalize cinema moving forward,” said Variety’s executive VP of content Steven Gaydos.

Katriel Schory, who is stepping down from the Israel Film Fund, was also honored with Variety’s Creative Impact Award. Under Schory’s stewardship of the fund, more than 300 feature-length films were produced in Israel, while the domestic audience grew from 100,000 to 1.5 million admissions per year.

For the first three decades of his career, Abel Ferrara was a seminal New York filmmaker whose gritty tales of furious pariahs, addicts, and rebels made Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” look like “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.” But Ferrara fled New York after 9/11 and found a new life abroad. On a recent evening in Rome, he stood on the porch of his home, thousands of miles from the city that put him on the map, and contemplated his history of battling for final cut.

“You can’t paint a mustache on a Mona Lisa just because you fucking buy it,” he said, wearing a pair of scruffy headphones as he stared into a Skype session on his laptop. His leathery features and wisps of long white hair gleamed against a shadowy backdrop. “You dig what I mean? I’m working in my own language.”

With Ferrara, meaning can be an elusive thing.

The 2019 Cannes Film Festival announced its official lineup of films on Thursday, April 18. The 72nd annual event is one of the most prestigious showcases for films from around the world, and this year’s selections include familiar festival names like Terrence Malick, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers. But what about women? Last year, 82 women, including Cannes jury president Cate Blanchett, protested the fest’s gender inequality. Women are better represented in 2019, but is it enough? Scroll down for the full list of titles.

There are 13 films from female directors scheduled for the festival, but only four out of the 19 films in competition for the Palme d’Or (21%) are by women: “Atlantique” by Mati Diop, “Little Joe” by Jessica Hausner, “Portrait of a Young Lady on Fire” by Celine Sciamma and “Sibyl” by Justine Triet. Despite making up less than a quarter of the competition, that actually ties...