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Name and focus changes for every section, which are now all competitive, resulting in the festival’s structure being “slimmer’.

The ninth Rome Film Festival (Oct 16-25) has revealed a diverse line-up including the Italian premieres for potential awards contenders including David Fincher’s Gone Girl. the world premiere of Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will and Burhan Qurbani’s We are Young, We are Strong and European premiere of Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind, Toronto hit Still Alice and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

This year for the first time the award-winners in each section of the programme will be decided by the audience on the basis of votes cast after the screenings.

Each section has changed name and focus for 2014 and are all competitive, resulting in the festival’s structure being “slimmer’.

Italian comedies Soap Opera and Andiamo a Quel Paese bookend the line-up.

Full line-up

Cinema D’Oggi

World premiere

• Angely...

With a career spanning almost four decades, it's about time we put the "Nanni Moretti is the Italian Woody Allen" descriptor to rest. Though ultimately a flattering praise, it doesn't exactly paint an accurate picture. Generally composing movies with a perfect blend of comedic and dramatic elements, most of the humor in a Moretti film comes from cleverly written lines delivered in sincere dryness unlike the self-deprecating rambling/witty quips that live in Allen's scripts. Aside from maybe the Italian director's two diary-form films "Caro Diario" & "Aprile," it's hard to see either's output as even remotely interchangeable. While they definitely write from a very personal place (well, Allen maybe not so often now), Moretti's films explore various feelings such as becoming a father ("Aprile"), contemporary politics ("The Caiman"), religion ("We Have a Pope"), and even his old favorite past-time, water polo ("Red Lob"). Similarities exist, but their voices are very much their own.

Nanni Moretti, "perhaps the leading cinematic satirist of our time," as Andrew Sarris once wrote, will preside over the Jury of the 65th Festival de Cannes just a few short weeks after We Have a Pope, which premiered in Competition at Cannes last year, opens in the Us on April 6. This Friday at 7 pm, the IFC Center in New York presents a sneak preview of Pope — and Moretti will be there.

This special event is part of La Vita e Cinema: The Films of Nanni Moretti, a complete retrospective running from today through Thursday, April 5. Moretti will also be present at the following screenings:

Friday, March 30

Ecce bombo (1978), 9:30 pm.

Saturday, March 31

Aprile (1998), 5:30 pm.

The Son's Room (2001), 7:30 pm.

Sunday, April 1

The Caiman (2006), 3:25 pm.

Caro Diario (1993), 5:45 pm.

The IFC Center is generously offering two pairs of tickets to each of these showings (they'd have loved to offer...

"A billion people are waiting for you." IFC Films and Sundance Selects have unveiled an official trailer (via Deadline) for Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope, an Italian indie dramatic comedy that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, as Moretti is a Palme d'Or winning director. The film, starring French actor Michel Piccoli and Nanni Moretti, is about an elderly cardinal elected to be the new Pope, but can't handle taking on the job, so they bring in a psychiatrist. It plays like a very lighthearted and amusing comedy about the extraordinary task of becoming the Pope. Looks like a good watch if this intrigues you, take a look below. Watch the official Us trailer for Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope, embedded from YouTube: In his latest comedy, We Have a Pope (aka Habemus Papam), Palme d'Or-winner Nanni Moretti (Aprile, The Son's Room, The Caiman...

Critics hoped Nanni Moretti's new film would be a fierce attack on the Catholic church – instead, it's an amiable farce. Has the scourge of the Italian establishment gone soft? Xan Brooks meets him in Cannes

Nanni Moretti's new film takes us behind the scenes at the Vatican, down darkened corridors and beyond closed doors. Look: there's an aged cardinal on his exercise bike, another dosing his water with Rescue Remedy, a third puffing ecstatically on a sly cigarette. At its Cannes screening, where Moretti is in contention for this year's Palme d'Or, I mentally urged the director to take us further, show us more. What I'm really after, I think, is the arrival of an altar boy.

But Moretti moves in mysterious ways. When it was announced that the puckish Italian film-maker was shooting a comedy about the Catholic church, the critics readied themselves for a major scandal,...

[The Torino Film Festival just wrapped up - naming Tony Manero it’s big winner, a choice that both surprises and pleases me to no end - and our very own Paolo Gilli was present throughout. He weighs in now with his take on events.]

The Torino Film Festival (21-29 November), that closed this past weekend, is probably Italy’s finest Festival, always equally divided between the old and the new, American, Asian and European cinema. This year’s edition, the second under the supervision of actor-director and Cannes favourite Nanni Moretti (Ecce Bombo, Caro Diario, Aprile and La Stanza del figlio), had again an impressive line up, including W (Oliver Stone), Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson), Somers Town (Shane Meadows), The Escapist (Rupert Wyatt), festival-winner Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain), Die Welle (Dennis Gansel), Made in America (Stacy Peralta), Religulous (Larry Charles), Hunger (Steve McQueen), Dream (Kim Ki-duk), United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu) and many more.

But Torino wouldn’t be complete without its traditional retrospectives, covering this time the complete filomgraphies of noir-master Jean Pierre Melville and Roman Polanski (including all of his acting roles). Besides those, there was a third retro,...