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This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network: vampire slayers, secret agents, the Marx brothers and much more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

TV’s Greatest Seasons

Following a comprehensive primer episode featuring all of the series guests asking what makes a great season of television, Baz Greenland is joined by Matt Latham for the first of this new series to discuss Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer…

At the Movies in the Noughties

It’s not mission difficult for Dev Elson this week, it’s Mission Impossible 2, so it should be a walk in the park for he and guest Craig McKenzie to dig into John Woo’s 2000 sequel…

The Rest of Us

Ahead of the season finale and what is sure to be a monster of a cliffhanger, Maria Lattila joins forces with James Harvey to discuss Joel and Ellie’s tragic final conversation in...

Producer is France’s Ts Productions, whose credits include Golden Bear-winner ’On The Adamant’.

France TV Distribution has taken worldwide rights to Giulio Callegari’s debut feature Robot T-0 now in production in France. It is selling the film at Rome’s Mia film market this week.

Callegari is best known in France for co-writing and co-creating Canal+ hit series All the Way Up (Validé) and as a co-writer on French anthology film Selfie that explored humans’ relationship with technology.

Robot T-0 is set in a near future where robots have replaced humans in every household. The film follows a...

Tarak Ben Ammar has big plans for Italy. The Franco-Tunisian film and TV mogul is already a major player in the Italian industry thanks to Eagle Pictures, the production and distribution group he acquired in 2007 that is now Italy’s largest independent distributor due to exclusive distribution deals with Paramount and Sony Pictures for the territory. Ben Ammar joined Tom Cruise on the Rome red carpet for the June 19 world premiere of Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and later introduced Cruise to new Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. “The meeting [between Cruise and Meloni] was very interesting. The prime minister knows a lot about cinema,” says Ben Ammar about the far-right leader.

Alongside Eagle’s distribution deals, the company has also partnered with Sony to co-produce six films together, including The Equalizer 3, the latest in Antoine Fuqua’s action franchise starring Denzel Washington that was shot entirely in Italy.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

30 Years of The Film Foundation

Equally impressive as his towering career is Martin Scorsese’s dedication to restoring previously lost classics and championing underseen gems with The Film Foundation. Now celebrating 30 years, they’ve been given the spotlight on The Criterion Channel, featuring a wealth of highlights as well as a conversation between Scorsese and Ari Aster. The lineup of essentials includes The Broken Butterfly (1919), Trouble in Paradise (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), L’Atalante (1934), The Long Voyage Home (1940) The Chase (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), The River (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Bigamist (1953), Ugetsu (1953), Senso (1954), The Big Country (1958), Shadows (1959), The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Primary (1960), The Connection (1961), Salvatore Giuliano (1962), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Once Upon a Time in the West...

Reel-Important People is a monthly column that highlights those individuals in or related to the movies who have left us in recent weeks. Below you'll find names big and small and from all areas of the industry, though each was significant to the movies in his or her own way. Peter Baldwin (1931-2017) - Actor, Director. He appears in the movies Stalag 17, The Ten Commandments, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, The Mattei Affair,The Tin Star and in addition to directing mostly television he helmed the movie Meet Wally Sparks. He died on November 19. (THR) Peter Berling (1934-2017) - German Actor. He co-starred in the Werner Herzog movies Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as well as Martin...

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Top brass at the 42nd edition of the Colorado event have announced the roster of 27 films, with surprises to come over the September 4-7 run date.

The line-up is as follows:

Carol (Us), Todd Haynes

Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack

Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson

Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga

He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim

Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle

Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante

Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis

Room (UK), Lenny Abrahamson

Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper

Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron

Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy

Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson

Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop

Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach

Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada

Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono

Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson

45 Years (UK), Andrew Haigh

Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,

Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag

Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones

Time To Choose...

Top brass at the 42nd edition of the Colorado event have announced the roster of 27 films, with surprises to come over the September 4-7 run date.

The line-up is as follows:

Carol (Us), Todd Haynes

Amazing Grace (Us, 1972/2015), Sydney Pollack

Anomalisa (Us), Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson

Beast Of No Nation (Us), Cary Fukunaga

He Named Me Malala (Us), Davis Guggenheim

Steve Jobs (Us), Danny Boyle

Ixcanul (Guatemala), Jayro Bustamante

Bitter Lake (Us), Adam Curtis

Room (England, pictured), Lenny Abrahamson

Black Mass (Us), Scott Cooper

Suffragette (UK), Sarah Gavron

Spotlight (Us), Tom McCarthy

Rams (Iceland), Grímur Hákonarson

Mom And Me (Ireland), Ken Wardrop

Viva (Ireland), Paddy Breathnach

Taj Majal (France-India), Nicolas Saada

Siti (Indonesia), Eddie Cahyono

Heart Of The Dog (Us), Laurie Anderson

45 Years (England), Andrew Haigh

Son Of Saul (Hungary), Lázló Nemes,

Only The Dead See The End Of The War (Us-Australia), Michael Ware, Bill Guttentag

Taxi (Iran), Jafar Panahi

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Us), Kent Jones

Time To...

Italian director and screenwriter died on Saturday.

The 65th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 5-15) is to pay homage to Francesco Rosi, one of one of Italy’s most-celebrated and influential filmmakers from the 1950s to the 1990s.

The director and screenwriter, who inspiring the likes of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese with his Italian post-war neo-realist style, passed away on Saturday (Jan 10) at the age of 92.

In homage, the Berlinale has added Many Wars Ago (Uomini Contro) to the upcoming programme, Rosi’s 1970 anti-war drama set on the mountainous Austrian-Italian front during the First World War.

Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said: “The loss of Francesco Rosi is the loss of an outstanding filmmaker. With their explosive power, Rosi’s films are still persuasive today. His works are classics of politically engaged cinema.”

Rosi’s films often examined corruption and criminality and some of his best-known films told the stories of real events and real people in order...

Italian director Francesco Rosi had died, aged 92.

Rosi was one of Italy's most-celebrated and influential filmmakers, working throughout the 1950s to the 1990s.

He was known for his Italian post-war neo-realist style of filmmaking, inspiring the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963 for Hands Over the City, and the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1972 for The Mattei Affair.

Two years ago, he was awarded an honorary Golden Lion for his lifetime achievement.

Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino said in tribute: "There are directors, and they are few and far between, who are capable of constructing worlds, and they do it by the invention of methods and styles. Rosi was one of the very few."

Among his other films were Salvatore Giuliano, Carmen and his last project The Truce in 1997.

Watch a trailer for Salvatore Giuliano below:...

(Francesco Rosi, 1963; Eureka!, PG)

In the 1960s, serious Italian cinema led by Fellini, Antonioni and Visconti moved decisively from neorealism into a new phase of more formal and personal movies with a wider social focus. Alongside them was Francesco Rosi, a former lawyer and one-time assistant to Visconti and Antonioni, who made an immediate impression with his film Salvatore Giuliano. A sort of Marxist Citizen Kane, it used the career of the eponymous bandit to anatomise Sicilian society and the role of the Mafia. It was the beginning of a series of political dramas about crime, corruption and exploitation in Italy that occupied Rosi for the next decade. The next one, Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City), took him back to his native Naples and a collaboration with an old friend, Raffaele La Capria.

Most films in this series (Salvatore Giuliano, The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano, Christ Stopped...

Venice -- Michael Jackson was the talk of the town on the Venice Lido on Friday, with the world premiere of Bad 25, Spike Lee’s documentary celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jackson’s megahit Bad. Also on the agenda Friday was the festival’s top career prize, the Golden Lion, presented to Italian filmmaker Francesco Rossi following a screening of a restored version of his 1972 Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), and the Lido arrival of director Paul Thomas Anderson and actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix a day ahead of the world premiere of their much-

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Francesco Rosi

Italian director and screenwriter Francesco Rosi will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 69th Venice International Film Festival which will take place from 29 August – 8 September 2012.

Rosi’s Le mani sulla città(Hands over the City) won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 1963, Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair) won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1972, and Salvatore Giuliano won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1961.

Francesco Rosi, who will turn 90 on November 15th this year, will be given the award on August 31st, on the occasion of the screening of the restored copy of his masterpiece Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972), a restoration completed by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation.

The Director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, has stated: “In his long though not very prolific career, Rosi has left an indelible mark on the history...

The legendary Italian scriptwriter and novelist, who died yesterday, worked with a host of Europe's greatest auteurs. Here we pick the highlights of his extraordinary oeuvre

It was Tonino Guerra's fate to become the scriptwriter of choice for a string of master directors whose status as auteurs – "authors" of their films – tended to diminish the status of the writers involved. Nevertheless, Guerra established himself as a major figure in Italian cinema during its golden period in the 1960s and early 70s, as well as venturing further afield to collaborate with the likes of Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos.

But it is the amazing string of films he made with Michelangelo Antonioni for which he will primarily be remembered. After spending time as a schoolteacher in his 20s, he broke into the film industry in his 30s, receiving his first credit aged 37 for Man and Wolves, by Bitter Rice director Giuseppe de Santis.

COLOGNE, Germany -- Francesco Rosi, one of the giants of Italian cinema, will be honored with a lifetime achievement Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival.

The upcoming Berlinale also will feature an homage of 13 Rosi films, including Salvatore Giuliano, the film that won the best director Silver Bear in Berlin in 1962 and marked Rosi's international breakthrough.

In his long career, the 85-year-old Rosi has returned repeatedly to Italian economic and political history. Whether it is the history of the Mafia in films such as the Palme d'Or-winning The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973); the tension between Italy's rich industrial north and its poor agricultural south in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979); or the fate of Italian post-World War II immigrants to West Germany in The Magliari (1959).

In addition to the Palme d'Or and the Silver Bear, Rosi won Venice's Golden Lion in 1963 for Hands Over the City, an expose of building scandals in his hometown of Naples.