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Ridley Scott claims that his debut 1977 movie would have won one of the biggest film prizes had it not been for $50K bribery. The English director is perhaps best known for his iconic sci-fi films, Alien and Blade Runner, which were only the second and third films of his career. A few years earlier, he made his feature directorial debut in 1977 with a lesser-known historical drama, his first in the genre before directing many more in Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel, and Napoleon.

Scott's later historical epic Gladiator did win arguably the biggest prize in film, the Academy Award for Best Picture, in 2001, while his 2016 sci-fi film The Martian was also nominated for the honor. Additionally, Scott has received an Oscar nomination for Best Director three times for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down. The director has also competed for another one of the biggest prizes in film several times,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.Newsa Different Man.IATSE, Teamsters, and the Hollywood Basic Crafts unions began bargaining jointly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after a thousands-strong rally in Los Angeles. In Variety, IATSE president Matthew Loeb discusses the union’s priorities and the threat of another strike after the current contract expires on July 31.In an open letter, Carlo Chatrian, the outgoing artistic director of the Berlinale, and Mark Peranson, the festival’s head of programming, respond to the backlash that followed the closing ceremony, at which a number of award recipients called for a ceasefire in Gaza: “This year’s festival was a place for dialogue and exchange for ten days; yet once the films stopped rolling, another form of communication...

Paolo Taviani, the iconic Italian director who helmed numerous films with his brother Vittorio, has died. He was 92.

Taviani died in a clinic in Rome after suffering from a short illness, according to media reports. His wife and two children were at his bedside, according to Anasa news agency.

Roberto Gualtieri, the Mayor of Rome, made the announcement on X.

“With Paolo Taviani, a great master of Italian cinema leaves us,” Gualtieri wrote in Italian. “Together with his brother Vittorio, he made unforgettable, profound, committed films, which have managed to enter the collective imagination and the history of cinema. An affectionate hug to the family.”

Born in 1931 in Tuscany, Taviani formed a formidable directing duo with his brother Vittorio, who died in 2018.

The pair made films together for more than 50 years. Their most prominent was Palme d’Or winner Padre Padrone, an adaptation of Gavino Ledda’s autobiographical novel about...

The Locarno Film Festival is leading the tributes to Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani, who has died aged 92.

Alongside his brother Vittorio (who died aged 88 in 2018), the duo created numerous notable titles, including Sardinian countryside drama Padre Padrone, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in1977, and the Berlin 2012 Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die.

In a statement, Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said: “The story of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is also that of Italian cinema after the end of the Second World War. Their work, which marked a crucial moment in cinematic modernity, was paid tribute to...

The film-maker, who won the Palme d’Or for 1977’s Padre Padrone, was a towering presence for more than three decades, creating politically engaged works with his brother Vittorio

The Italian film-maker Paolo Taviani, whose gritty biopic Padre Padrone won top prize at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 92, Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, said on Thursday.

For more than three decades Taviani and his brother Vittorio formed one of cinema’s greatest directorial duos. “Paolo Taviani, a great maestro of Italian cinema, leaves us,” Gualtieri said on X. The brothers “directed unforgettable, profound, committed films which entered into the collective imagination and the history of cinema”, Gualtieri added.

Italian director Paolo Taviani, who with his late brother Vittorio formed the revered filmmaking duo that in 1977 won the Cannes Palme d’Or for “Padre Padrone,” has died at 92.

Taviani died on Thursday in a Rome clinic after suffering from a short illness, according to Italian media reports. “Paolo Taviani, a great maestro of Italian cinema, leaves us,” Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Taviani brothers “directed unforgettable, profound, committed films that entered into the collective imagination and the history of cinema,” Gualtieri added.

Vittorio was the youngest of the Taviani Brothers, who emerged in the 1970s as the prolific pair whose works blended neo-realism with more modern storytelling in works such as “Padre Padrone” (1977), “The Night of the Shooting Stars” (1982) and Luigi Pirandello adaptation “Kaos” (1984).

Born in the Tuscan town of San Miniato, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani soon moved to nearby Pisa where...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month, including a Béla Tarr double bill, with new 4K restorations of Damnation and Sátántangó, Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils, Radu Jude’s short The Potemkinists, and Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists.

They will also present a series on past Cannes Film Festival selections with films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Alice Rohrwacher, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Jeremy Saulnier, and more. Ana Vaz’s The Age of Stone and most recent work It is Night in America will arrive on the service, plus a Merchant Ivory series.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

May 1 – Blind Spot, directed by Claudia von Alemann | What Sets Us Free? German Feminist Cinema

May 2 – Heat and Dust, directed by James Ivory | Gilded Passions: Films by Merchant Ivory

May 3 – Damnation, directed by Béla Tarr | Béla Tarr: A Double Bill

May 4 – The Bostonians, directed by...

It’s no spoiler to say that Luigi Pirandello dies nine minutes into “Leonora addio.” This alternately playful and lugubrious work of reflection isn’t really about the controversial Italian writer’s life at all, but rather his legacy, and in a less literal yet ineluctable sense, that of film directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.

Over the course of half a century, the two cinematic siblings made movies together — including 1985’s “Kaos,” an omnibus-style collection of five Pirandello stories — bookending their career together by winning top prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. And then, in 2018, Vittorio died.

“Leonora addio” marks Paolo’s first solo feature. There’s almost no way not to read the film as a farewell by one sibling to another, or an even larger-aperture reflection on what becomes of an artist and his art after his passing — more relevant now than ever, with monuments being...

Two of the highlights of the 2021 virtual edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema presented by Film at Lincoln Center and Istituto Luce Cinecittà are Salvatore Mereu’s adaptation of Giulio Angioni’s Assandira, starring Gavino Ledda with Anna König, Marco Zucca, and Corrado Giannetti, and Daniele Luchetti’s The Ties (Lacci), adapted from the novel by Domenico Starnone, with co-screenwriter Francesco Piccolo, which stars Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Cascio with Laura Morante, Silvio Orlando, Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Adriano Giannini.

Starnone’s novel begins with Vanda’s letters to her husband Aldo. She writes about how she feels and how she sees what he is doing to their family, which includes two small children, Sandro and Anna. “You want to isolate me, cut me out completely. And what matters most, you want to...

When many directors make movies in rural settings, one invariably senses they’re depictions by an outsider, someone who imagines a way of life that ultimately remains beyond their grasp. Instead, throughout Salvatore Mereu’s career directing stories from the Sardinian countryside, the feeling is always that he’s a part of that world. His films, from “Three-Step Dance” to “Pretty Butterflies,” take narrative gambles that acknowledge what’s unknowable, because only images and their juxtaposition, rather than words, can convey the dignity of tradition and the substance of the land.

“Assandira” is Mereu’s riskiest film to date, castigating the commodification of rural heritage in a way that keeps revealing unexpected depths, muddying any attempt at easy conclusions. It’s structured like a classic detective story, with an inspector arriving at an “agriturismo” (essentially a farm catering to tourists) to investigate a suspicious fire and the death of the owner.

Paolo Taviani, of revered filmmaking duo the Taviani brothers, is back behind the camera — this time without his brother Vittorio, who died in 2018.

Taviani is shooting “Leonora Addio,” a surreal drama that takes its cue from a short story by great Italian playwright and author Luigi Pirandello. It’s a long-gestating project that Paolo says he and Vittorio had long intended to film together.

Italy’s Fandango Sales has taken international distribution for the film and will be kicking off world sales outside Italy during the Toronto International Film Festival’s online film market this month.

Co-produced by Donatella Palermo’s Stemal Entertainment and Rai Cinema with France’s Les Films d’Ici, “Leonora” started principal photography at the end of July at Cinecittà Studios and will also be shooting in Sicily. Production is expected to wrap in October and Taviani said he expects to complete the film by year’s end.

The German sales company unveils exclusive teasers for ‘New Order’, ‘Never Gonna Snow Again’ and ‘Assandira’.

Michael Weber’s The Match Factory is preparing for a very busy Venice Film Festival when it kicks off next week, with four features in official selection.

Michel Franco’s New Order, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Never Gonna Snow Again (co-directed with her regular cinematographer Michal Englert) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno are all screening in Competition, while Salvatore Mereu’s Assandira will play out of Competition.

Screen can reveal the exclusive first teasers here for New Order, Never Gonna Snow Again and Assandira. The...

The Rome Film Festival has announced plans to hold a physical edition from Oct. 15-25, featuring several titles from the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, alongside a roster of other pics including David Bowie origin pic “Stardust” and local crowdpleaser “Mi Chiamo Francesco Totti” (“My Name is Francesco Totti”), a doc about the A.S. Roma soccer team’s iconic former captain.

Produced by Fremantle’s Italian units Lorenzo Mieli’s The Apartment and Mario Gianani’s Wildside and other partners including Vision Distribution, Rai Cinema and Amazon Prime Video, “Totti” is described in promotional materials as an intimate tale, told in first person, about both Totti the athlete and the man, a native Roman who spent his entire 24-year career with A.S. Roma before retiring in 2017. Vision is handling international sales.

“Totti” is directed by Alex Infascelli who previously made a well-received doc titled “S is for Stanley,...

Lyon, France – Attending the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon for the first time this week, Charles S. Cohen, chairman and CEO of Cohen Media Group, praised the event and its International Classic Film Market (Mifc).

A producer and distributor of independent and arthouse films and the biggest distributor of French films in the U.S., Cohen Media Group also releases restored and re-mastered editions of classic films through its Cohen Film Collection, which includes the Merchant Ivory library and the Buster Keaton catalog.

In town for the Festival premiere of his documentary, “The Great Buster,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Cohen described the market as “specialized and highly focused, which is really appealing to me because it allows me to focus on what we take great pride in, acquiring and licensing these wonderful film assets that are really the DNA of Cohen Media.”

The company partnered with the Festival this year...

‪Richard Peña‬ on the Taviani brothers who won the Palme d’Or for Padre Padrone: "Vittorio's passing is a terrible loss for his family, friends and for the cinema, but we can comfort ourselves knowing how much great cinema he and Paolo have given us."

Vittorio Taviani died in Rome at the age of 88 on April 15. He together with his brother Paolo directed more than 20 films over five decades, winning the Palme d’Or in 1977 for Padre Padrone. The Taviani brothers had seven films screened in the New York Film Festival, Padre Padrone, The Night Of The Shooting Stars (La Notte Di San Lorenzo), Night Sun (Il Sole Anche Di Notte), Chaos (Kaos), Fiorile, You Laugh (Tu Ridi), and Caesar Must Die (Cesare Deve Morire) in 2012.

Vittorio and Paolo Taviani's Chaos (Kaos) closed the New York Film Festival in 1985

The former New York Film Festival Director of Programming and...

Italian director Vittorio Taviani, of the multiple award-winning Taviani brothers, has died at 88.

His daughter Giovanna told media he died in Rome after a long illness.

Vittorio was the older of the prolific Taviani brothers who emerged in the 1970’s as the revered filmmaking duo whose works blended neo-realism with more modern storytelling in works such as “Padre Padrone,” which won the 1977 Cannes Palme d’Or, World War II drama “The Night of the Shooting Stars” (1982) and “Kaos” (1984) which is based on Pirandello.

Born in the Tuscan town of San Miniato, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani soon moved to nearby Pisa where as high-school students they became aspiring directors. “We walked into a movie theater called Cinema Italia, which no longer exists, and there was a film playing called ‘Paisà’ that we had never heard of,” they told Variety in unison in a 2016 interview. That experience “really blew our minds,” they said.

Award-winning Tuscan filmmaker Vittorio Taviani has passed at at age 88 after battling a long illness according to Italian media reports. He will be cremated in a private ceremony.

Vittorio worked alongside his brother in a unique partnership throughout his career. Known collectively as the Taviani Brothers, they won Europe's top cinema prizes, including the Palme d'Or in 1977 for <em>Padre Padrone</em>, the true story of Gavino Ledda, the son of a Sardinian shepherd who escaped a violent childhood by educating himself. 

In 1982 their film The Night of the Shooting Stars also received the Grand Jury Prize ...

Engel also co-founded UK distributor New Wave Films.

Art-house “trailblazer” Pamela Engel, known for co-founding distributor Artificial Eye and programming London cinemas including the Lumiere, Chelsea Cinema, Camden Plaza and the Renoir, has died aged 82.

A huge figure in the UK’s independent film business, Engel’s death has sparked messages of praise across the distribution and exhibition sectors.

Born Pamela Balfry in 1934, the UK executive started out in the late 1950s as a secretary for then Sight and Sound editor Penelope Houston.

She would go on to work as an assistant to Richard Roud at the London and New York Film Festivals before joining Derek Hill’s art-house venue Essential Cinema in the late 1960s.

Odyssey

Balfry and first husband Andi Engel established distributor Artificial Eye in 1976, thus “beginning an odyssey of distribution and exhibition unlikely ever to be surpassed,” in the words of former London Film Festival director Sheila Whitaker.

Despite separating...

Biopics are best when focused on segmented portions of emotional turmoil, professional escalation or some perfect combination of the two, rather than trying to collapse entire lives into just a couple hours time. Hal Ashby’s 1976 retelling of Woody Guthrie’s popular ascent from dust bowl deadbeat to socially conscious folk music figurehead in Bound For Glory coolly pursues the latter with genuinely endearing, authentic feeling results. With David Carradine aptly filling the role of the humbly charismatic, musically driven drifter and a fully stocked catalog of Guthrie songs adapted for the screen by Leonard Rosenman, Ashby’s oddly conventional mid-period picture was in competition for the Palme d’Or, but ultimately lost to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone.

The film was shot by the late, great Haskell Wexler the very same year he took over principal photography from Néstor Almendros on Malick’s golden glazed Days of Heaven...

I Never Sang for My Father: The Taviani Brothers and the Prison of Patriarchy

For many, Italian directing duo Paolo and Vittorio Taviani are best remembered for their output from the late 70s to late 80s, coming to prominence on the international circuit and unveiling a string of notable titles before falling out of critical favor by the mid-1990s. In 2012, the brothers made a resurgence winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, which resulted in bringing their old classics back to new, contemporary audiences. A retrospective featuring new restorations of three important titles begins with one of their most lauded films, 1977’s Padre Padrone, which took home the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (notably, Roberto Rossellini was the jury president, whose 1946 film Paisan inspired the brothers as filmmakers). Based on a memoir (Gavino Ledda’s The One That Got Away) and originally intended for television,...

'Father of the Bride': Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams. Top Five Father's Day Movies? From giant Gregory Peck to tyrant John Gielgud What would be the Top Five Father's Day movies ever made? Well, there have been countless films about fathers and/or featuring fathers of various sizes, shapes, and inclinations. In terms of quality, these range from the amusing – e.g., the 1950 version of Cheaper by the Dozen; the Oscar-nominated The Grandfather – to the nauseating – e.g., the 1950 version of Father of the Bride; its atrocious sequel, Father's Little Dividend. Although I'm unable to come up with the absolute Top Five Father's Day Movies – or rather, just plain Father Movies – ever made, below are the first five (actually six, including a remake) "quality" patriarch-centered films that come to mind. Now, the fathers portrayed in these films aren't all heroic, loving, and/or saintly paternal figures. Several are...

Boccaccio's 14th century masterpiece has inspired artists for centuries, from Chaucer to Shakespeare and from Voltaire to Poe. His classic recounts how seven women and three men, who escaped from a plague-ravished Florence to the countryside, entertain themselves over two weeks, each telling ten stories a piece.

Some of the tales are bawdy, some tragic, numerous are of greed, and many flow forth with tears and laughter only true love can elicit. Here's an unvarnished view of a battered world that's soon to be rejuvenated by the Renaissance, but not yet.

In 1971, the often notorious Pier Paolo Pasolini captured the genius of the work in his Decameron. Licentious, slightly blasphemous, and always vital, his take throws you directly into the tales without the framing device of the narrators. Instantly, you find yourself in the midst of the mayhem of the Middle Ages with its steamy throngs of folks trying to...

The Taviani brothers' account of a prison production of Julius Caesar marks a profoundly moving return to form

Before the emergence of the Coens, the Farrellys, the Hugheses and the Wachowskis, there were the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, born in Pisa in respectively 1931 and 1929, the sons of a lawyer jailed for his anti-fascist activities. Coming out of Italian neorealism and the French new wave, adapting works by Tolstoy and Pirandello and much influenced by Brecht, they emerged in the late 60s. Theirs was a humanist cinema that reached out socially and chronologically, from an aristocrat disillusioned with revolution in early 19th-century Lombardy to the idealistic inhabitants of a Tuscan village standing up against the Nazis in 1944.

The Tavianis' finest film perhaps is Padre Padrone, the true story of a boy escaping from hard-scrabble peasant life in present-day Sardinia to be educated during his military service on the mainland. The...

Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have been unjustly overlooked for two decades. Now they're back with a prize-winning new film acted by a cast of prison inmates

The Taviani brothers are among the last titans of classic Italian cinema. They came of age in the era of Rossellini and Pasolini; they count Bertolucci among their contemporaries; they have been a nurturing influence on younger countrymen such as Nanni Moretti. They won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1977 for Padre Padrone, an odyssey of rural hardship shot through with transformative fantasy and theatricality. It begins with the Sardinian farmer's son, on whose memoir the film is based, handing a prop to the actor who will be playing him; another scene allows us access to the inner monologue of a goat with which a boy is having sex ("I am going to shit in your milk!"). That playfulness persists in the wartime...

The new Tavianni brothers picture, Caesar Must Die, refuses to fall neatly into any generic category. The sibling helmers, who have been supplying highly praised art-house fare for decades (e.g. Padre Padrone (1977); The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982)), have now adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with a brisk, stellar outcome.

Filming inside an actual Italian prison, Rebibbia, the incarcerated here play themselves portraying the Bard's historic creations. 

We see the cast of cons audition, rehearse, fall out of character, and even carp about being stuck in a group cell with five inmates suffering from diarrhea. Then somewhere between the scenes of Caesar refusing the crown offered him by Marc Anthony and the one of his demise, an inmate actor, lying in his bunk bed and staring at the ceiling of his cell, dwells upon the child he is not raising; another caresses a seat in the theater he will be...

Apart from some foreign items Lore (Music Box Films – 2/8/13) and Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love (Sundance Selects – 2/15/13), classic re-issue of Little Fugitive (Artists Public Domain – 2/1/13), a guilty pleasure in Soderbergh’s Side Effects (Open Road Films – 2/8/13) and experimental docu A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument (Factory 25 – 2/8/13), it’ll once again slim pickings in the month of February. Here our this month’s top 3 Critic’s Picks.

Caesar Must Die – Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Film Forum on Wednesday the 6th – Adopt Films

Festival Awards: Golden Berlin Bear & Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (Berlin Film Festival – 2012)

What the critic’s are saying?: Screen Daily’s Lee Marshall appears to be much impressed stating “now into their eighties, the Taviani brothers show with this remarkable, fresh and moving drama-documentary they have lost none of that mix of observational rigour and sympathy for the underdog that marked early films like Padre Padrone,...

Prison docudrama by octogenarian Italian film-makers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani wins Golden Bear award

The Italian docudrama Caesar Must Die from octogenarian sibling film-makers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani won the top prize at the Berlin film festival on Saturday. The film follows real-life inmates of a high-security jail as they rehearse for a performance of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Caesar Must Die had been among the favourites to win the Golden Bear, though the film was not universally praised. Filmed at the Rebibbia jail on the outskirts of Rome, it is the Tavianis' biggest festival triumph since Padre Padrone took the Palme d'Or at Cannes 35 years ago.

"We hope that when the film is released to the general public that cinemagoers will say to themselves or even those around them... that even a prisoner with a dreadful sentence, even a life sentence, is and remains a human being," said Paolo Taviani,...

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die Paolo Taviani, 80, and Vittorio Taviani, 82, were the big winners at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival. The Taviani brothers' documentary Cesare deve morire / Caesar Must Die, about a staging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Rome's maximum-security prison Rebibbia — with the actual inmates playing the various roles, was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at the 62nd Berlinale. (Caesar Must Die photo: © Umberto Montiroli.) “I hope that someone, going home, after seeing Caesar Must Die will think that even an inmate, on whose head is a terrible punishment, is, and remains, a man. And this thanks to the sublime words of Shakespeare,” Vittorio Taviani remarked. Through a translator, Paolo Taviani explained that "we chose Julius Caesar for one clear reason. We were working in a prison. That meant it was easy to get the message across with this play where actors are talking about freedom,...

Angelina leads the obligatory Hollywood posse this year but tales about Brits in America, explorers in Africa, Nazis in space and the life of Bob Marley offer more interesting viewing

A big beast with a split personality, the Berlinale likes to parade big Hollywood names while playing films of serious political intent. In that sense, Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey is exemplary – what could be more Berlin than a directorial debut by a major movie star with the Bosnian war on its mind? Suffice to say here that Jolie's gauche portrayal of a Night Porter-type relationship between a Serb soldier and his Bosnian captive strains for significance. But it does illustrate Berlin's main problem: how to stay relevant when the better films are all held back for Cannes.

Any event that can line up Jolie, Jake Gyllenhaal (on the jury), Christian Bale (in Zhang Yimou's...

Nina Hoss in Christian Petzold's Barbara

"An additional ten world premieres will be screening in the Competition program of the Berlinale 2012," the festival's announced today:

Aujourd'hui

France/Senegal

By Alain Gomis (L'Afrance, Andalucia)

With Saül Williams, Aïssa Maïga, Djolof M'bengue

"What goes on inside the head of a man who knows he has only 24 hours to live?" begins a report from the Afp. "Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis takes viewers through this final day."

Barbara

Germany

By Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Dreileben)

With Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld

The synopsis from The Match Factory: "East Germany. Barbara has requested a departure permit. It is the summer of 1978. She is a physician and is transferred, for disciplinary reasons, to a small hospital far away from everything in a provincial backwater. Her lover, a foreign trade employee at Mannesmann that she met on a spring night in East Berlin, is working on her escape.

The 2012 Berlinale has announced ten additional films as part of its Competition lineup, including Billy Bob Thornton's "Jayne Mansfield's Car." In addition, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut "In the Land of Blood and Honey" will screen as a Berlinale Special screening. The ten films announced today join the ten announced in December and the opening night film "Farewell My Queen" from Benoit Jacquot to round out the festival's competition slate. The ten competition titles announced today: "Aujourd´hui" France/Senegal By Alain Gomis (L´Afrance, Andalucia) With Saül Williams, Aïssa Maïga, Djolof M'bengue World premiere "Barbara Germany" By Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Dreileben) With Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld World premiere "Cesare deve morire" (Caesar Must Die) Italy By Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone, La notte di San...

Mary Badham, Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird Taviani Brothers' Padre Padrone: Father's Day Movies Gregory Peck's compassionate, liberal-minded attorney Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is one of Hollywood's iconic film characters. Adapted by Horton Foote from Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the best-known movies of the 1960s. Atticus is notable not only because of his defense of a black man (Brock Peters) accused of rape in the deeply racist American South of the 1930s, but also because he takes the trouble to affectionately teach his children that bigotry should not be a family value. Peck won [...]...

Omero Antonutti, Saverio Marconi, Padre Padrone John Gielgud, Charles Laughton The Barretts Of Wimpole Street: Father's Day Movies Based on Gavino Ledda's autobiography, Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani's father-son drama Padre Padrone (1977) portrays the difficult, complex relationship between a young Sardinian man (Saverio Marconi) and his reactionary, ruthlessly domineering father (Omero Antonutti). The setting is 20th-century rural Italy, but it might as well have been the Italy of the Middle Ages or earlier. The film's title literally translates as "Father Proprietor/Boss." Padre Padrone won both the Palme d'Or and the International Film Critics' Fipresci Prize at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, it [...]...

Italy has fallen over itself to welcome back its new favourite son - Cannes film festival winner Nanni Moretti. Moretti, 57, won the Palme D'Or at the 54th Cannes festival on Sunday for The Son's Room, a tragic story of a family torn apart by the death of a child. "Nanni Moretti has won, Italian cinema has won", declared a front-page editorial in Rome daily La Republica. "It is a victory for all those in Italy who share Moretti's love for culture, intelligence, zeal and intellectual honesty." It is the first time Italy has won the coveted prize in 23 years, since it saw back-to-back victories with Padre Padrone and The Tree Of Wooden Clogs in 1977 and 1978. "Long live Moretti," announced Milan's Corriere Della Sera. "Simplicity and profundity, sincerity and artistic maturity are what have made The Son's Room a point of reference in modern cinematography," wrote one of Italy's foremost film critics Tullio Kezich, on the front page of Corriere. "This is resounding confirmation that the big screen can be a mirror on life, touching everyone's conscience."...