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“Visual geometry” might not be the first phrase that comes to mind when thinking of Michelangelo Antonioni, but a new video essay published by Fandor makes a strong argument for it being among the Italian master’s essential tools. (Well, that and Monica Vitti, of course.)

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The minute-long video offers a brief rundown of Antonioni’s recurring visual motifs, from showing characters looking through windows (“L’Avventura,” “The Passenger”) and walking through doorways (“The Mystery of Oberwald,” “Identification of a Woman”) to being shown through fences (“Red Desert,” “Zabriskie Point”) and traversing vast landscapes (“La Notte,” “Blowup”). It also takes note of his geometric compositions, namely his frequent use of straight, vertical and converging lines.

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“Creating depth,...

Cannes already has a standout movie: the horrific new Renaissance fairytale from Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone. Features scenes of flea-petting, heart-eating and a right royal nightmare

Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is fabulous in every sense: a freaky portmanteau film based on the folk myths collected and published by the 16th-century Neapolitan poet and scholar Giambattista Basile – Garrone worked on the adaptation with Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso.

It is gloriously mad, rigorously imagined, visually wonderful: erotic, hilarious and internally consistent. The sort of film, in fact, which is the whole point of Cannes. It immerses you in a complete created world.

Ovid is mulched in with Hansel, Gretel, the Beauty, the Beast, the Prince, the Pauper, in no real order. At times, Garrone seemed to have taken inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s own fabular tale The Mystery of Oberwald – at others, it felt like he had deeply inhaled the strange and unwholesome odour still emanating from Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. But there’s also a bit of John Boorman’s Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Blackadder, The Company of Wolves, the Tenniel illustrations for Alice in Wonderland… and Shrek.

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Cannes already has a standout movie: the horrific new Renaissance fairytale from Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone. Features scenes of flea-petting, heart-eating and a right royal hag-shagger

Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is fabulous in every sense: a freaky portmanteau film based on the folk myths collected and published by the 16th-century Neapolitan poet and scholar Giambattista Basile – Garrone worked on the adaptation with Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso.

It is gloriously mad, rigorously imagined, visually wonderful: erotic, hilarious and internally consistent. The sort of film, in fact, which is the whole point of Cannes. It immerses you in a complete created world.

Ovid is mulched in with Hansel, Gretel, the Beauty, the Beast, the Prince, the Pauper, in no real order. At times, Garrone seemed to have taken inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s own fabular tale The Mystery of Oberwald – at others, it felt like he had...

Dracula 3D

Directed by Dario Argento

Written by Dario Argento, Enrique Cerezo, Stefano Piani, Antonio Tentori

Italy, 2012

More than his fellow giallo maestros (Bava, Fulci, Martino, and others), Dario Argento has had to live and work in the burdensome shadow of his earlier successes. After nearly two decades of exceptional films boasting glorious cinematic artistry and blood-soaked thrills, Argento established quite the reputation. In recent years, though, since 1993′s Trauma, these prior landmarks of genre perfection have become a distressing caveat added to nearly every negative criticism of his newest release: “Ah, Argento, how far he’s fallen. Remember when….” His latest offering, Dracula 3D, now available on an American-issued 3D Blu-ray (an Italian disc, still playable in the Us, has been out for while), is no exception. Does it rank with Suspiria, Tenebre, Deep Red, or Opera? No. But is it as bad as some detractors would suggest? Certainly not.

Riffing on Terek Puckett’s terrific list of director/actor collaborations, I wanted to look at some of those equally impressive leading ladies who served as muses for their directors. I strived to look for collaborations that may not have been as obviously canonical, but whose effects on cinema were no less compelling. Categorizing a film’s lead is potentially tricky, but one of the criteria I always use is Anthony Hopkins’s performance in Silence of the Lambs, a film in which he is considered a lead but appears only briefly; his character is an integral part of the story.

The criteria for this article is as follows: The director & actor team must have worked together at least 3 times with the actor in a major role in each feature film, resulting in a minimum of 2 must-see films.

One of the primary trends for the frequency of collaboration is the...

The Italian master's challenging and difficult L'Avventura was booed at its premiere in Cannes. But nowadays the director gets something far more hurtful: indifference

This is the centenary year of Michelangelo Antonioni. He was born on 29 September 1912 and died in 2007 at the age of 94, having worked until almost the very end. As well as everything else, he gave us one of the founding myths of postwar cinema: The Booing of L'Avventura. For film historians, it's as pretty much important as the audience riots at the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

At the Cannes film festival on 15 May 1960, Antonioni presented his L'Avventura, a challenging and difficult film and a decisive break from his earlier work, replete with languorous spaces and silences. This was movie-modernism's difficult birth. The film was jeered so ferociously, so deafeningly, that poor Antonioni and his beautiful star Monica Vitti burst into tears where they sat. There...

In conjunction with La Furia Umana, Notebook is very happy to present Ted Fendt's original English translation of Luc Moullet's "Rockefeller's Melancholy," on Michelangelo Antonioni. Moullet's original French version can be found at La Furia Umana. Our special thanks to Mr. Moullet, La Furia Umana and Ted Fendt for making this possible.

Above: "John D. Rockefeller" (1917) by John Singer Sargent.

Drifting is the fundamental subject of Antonioni’s films. They are about beings who don’t know where they are going, who constantly contradict themselves, and are guided by their momentary impulses. We don’t understand what they feel or why they act as they do.

Psychological cinema could be defined in this way: it is psychological when you don’t understand the motivation of emotions and behaviors. If you understand, it means it’s easy, immediately, at a very superficial level... The filmmaker must therefore let it be...

Screenwriter and poet who co-scripted films with Fellini, Antonioni and Tarkovsky

The Italian poet, novelist and screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who has died aged 92, brought something of his own poetic world to the outstanding films he co-scripted with, among others, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi, but also many non-Italian directors including Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky. Perhaps his most creative contribution was to Fellini's colourful account of life in a small coastal town in the 1930s, Amarcord (1973), of which he was truly co-author, because the film reflected their common experiences growing up in Romagna.

The two were born in the region a couple of months apart – Fellini in Rimini and Guerra in Santarcangelo, in the hills above the Adriatic resort, the son of a street vendor father.

Guerra's own "amarcord" ("I remember" in dialect) is scattered over many books of poetry and short stories. He first started writing...