News

These days, it can be tricky for an Italian filmmaker to make a movie about the city of Naples, considering that Italian filmmaking icon Paolo Sorrentino almost owns that turf. Sorrentino has focused on the city throughout his career, including two of his last three films, 2021’s Oscar-nominated “The Hand of God” and last year’s “Parthenope.” Sorrentino’s most recent, “La Grazia,” opened this year’s Venice Film Festival, the fest where fellow Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi premiered his own film set in Naples, “Below the Clouds,” on Saturday.

But Rosi is the kind of filmmaker who doesn’t get caught up too much in comparisons. A documentary specialist,...

For many years, the Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino couldn’t miss, making films that were widely embraced by critics and audiences, and, in two cases, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: 2013’s The Great Beauty won the best international feature Oscar and 2021’s The Hand of God was nominated for it.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that both of the aforementioned films, and five others directed by Sorrentino, have starred the great Italian stage-turned-screen actor Toni Servillo — or that Sorrentino’s least well-received film in years, 2024’s Parthenope, was the first one in years that he had without Servillo.

Sorrentino and Servillo have reunited on La Grazia, which opened the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday and then the Telluride Film Festival on Friday, and the good news is that the film — in the opinion of many, including THR’s film critic and myself — marks a return to form for Sorrentino,...

Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returned to the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday evening, opening the 82nd edition with his latest feature La Grazia. The in-competition drama about the final days of a fictional Italian presidency was greeted with an ovation that lasted 6 minutes and 20 seconds.

La Grazia stars Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzetti. Sorrentino directed the film from his own screenplay in his first film on the Lido since his 2021 Grand Jury Prize winner The Hand of God.

Related: Venice Film Festival 2025 In Photos: Arrivals, Opening Night, Red Carpets & More

After tonight’s screening, which had been preceded by a ceremony honoring Werrner Herzog with a Lifetime Achievement Golden Lion, the applause started as soon as the credits began, and paused briefly for a mid-credit scene. After the scene, the crowd, which included attendees Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett, was more enthusiastic.

Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘La Grazia’ receives a 6 1/2-minute...

Among historic piazzas and winding canals, the 82nd Venice Film Festival kicks off tonight on the Lido di Venezia with the Opening Ceremony and the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia.

The film’s red carpet event was a star-studded affair, with attendees including the film’s stars Anna Ferzetti and Toni Servillo, director Paolo Sorrentino, and guests such as Francis Ford Coppola, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton.

Plot details for the film are being kept under wraps, but it has been described as a love story set in Italy. The film stars Sorrentino’s frequent collaborator Toni Servillo, and the cast also includes Anna Ferzetti and Massimo Venturiello. La Grazia marks Sorrentino’s return to the Venice Film Festival after his film, The Hand of God, won the Grand Jury Prize in 2021.

This year, the festival will bestow its prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement upon two...

The movies of Paolo Sorrentino, like “The Great Beauty” and “The Hand of God,” have always been bursting with color and movement and emotional energy, with torn-up romantic and family passion, all rooted in a baroque flamboyance that can be compelling but also messy and overstated — which is why I blow hot and cold on him, and am usually in the middle. The most recent Sorrentino film, “Parthenope,” was, I thought, a disaster of florid loose ends that never came together.

But in “La Grazia,” the new Sorrentino movie that opened the Venice Film Festival tonight, this director who has long suggested (at least to me) a kind of made-for-tv version of Fellini in the ’70s pulls himself together in a surprising and ironically fastidious way.

The film’s central character is the president of Italy, Mariano De Santis — a fictional character played, in a performance of meticulous and weirdly domineering passivity,...

To appreciate the power and hope of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film La Grazia, which opened the 2025 Venice Film Festival in competition, it is important to have some context of some of the past collaborations of the Oscar-winning director and his frequent star Toni Servillo.

In 2008, both gained international fame with Il Divo, in which Servillo gave an award-winning performance as Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Christian-Democratic Party. This was a ruthless power player who dominated Italy’s political scene with an iron fist for the second half of the 20th century. Ten years later Sorrentino would cast Servillo in the flamboyant Loro as the Machiavellian Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, a businessman to whom corruption was not a stranger (sound like anyone we know?). In between, they made the wondrous The Great Beauty, which took the Foreign Language Film Oscar. More recently, Sorrentino has...

“Bureaucracy is meant to be slow,” the President of Italy (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. “That’s the point: to give people time to reflect.” But how much time is too much, and what good is reflection for a lame duck politician with six months left in his final term and a seemingly clinical inability to make any difficult choices before he leaves office?

So far as we can tell at the start of Paolo Sorrentino’s uncharacteristically sedate and sexless “La Grazia,” which feels like forced Catholic penance for the Neapolitan flesh parade of last year’s poorly received “Parthenope,” reflection is just about the only thing the unnamed President has done for most of the last seven years. A widowed jurist whose even-keeled — or completely dormant — personality convinced the people of Italy that he was the right man to rescue them from an economic crisis of some kind,...

Paolo Sorrentino shared a brief tribute to the veteran Italian actor and producer Claudio Vecchio, who died earlier this month in Rome, during this afternoon’s presser for his Venice competition title La Grazia.

Vecchio starred in Sorrentino’s 2013 feature The Great Beauty and has a brief role in La Grazia.

“Claudio was a friend of many of us. He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, in addition to being a dear friend,” Sorrentino said of Vecchio.

“He had a small role in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) that made me very proud, because he was one of the best Italian actors. But he always turned down a lot of parts. Other people wanted him to be an actor, but he turned down all those roles. He was a producer.”

Sorrentino added: “He was the most difficult actor to conquer in the history of...

The Venice Film Festival is upon us, and that means a lot of movies with awards season potential. But what to watch?!

THR‘s chief film critic surveys the Lido lineup for the films he’s most looking forward to.

After The Hunt

Luca Guadagnino’s latest gives Julia Roberts what reportedly is one of her most complex roles as Alma Olsson, a self-possessed Yale philosophy professor in a comfortable marriage, put in a difficult position when her PhD candidate protégée (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s colleague and friend (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. A thorny examination of contemporary morality ensues, as Alma is forced to wade through professional, political and personal issues stemming from her secretive past without bringing down her neatly structured world. Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny round out the ensemble cast.

Duse

The stirring large-canvas classical storytelling of Pietro Marcello’s 2019 literary adaptation Martin Eden snagged...

Academy Award-winning director Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) is readying the world premiere of his latest film, “La Grazia,” which will compete for the Golden Lion at this month’s Venice Film Festival.

But as for future plans, the Italian auteur was non-committal during a masterclass Sunday at the Sarajevo Film Festival — although he braced the audience to expect the worst.

“I don’t like to have objectives. I don’t love the idea that I have to do new things,” the director said. “I stay at home without doing anything, and then suddenly something comes up in my mind that becomes an obsession, and I say, ‘Ok, let’s do a movie about this obsession.’”

About where those obsessions might lead next, Sorrentino stayed mum. But his advice to moviegoers was simple: Don’t get your hopes up.

“Probably I am going to do worse, like many directors,” he said,...

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House Of Dynamite, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, and Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt are among the films selected for the 82nd Venice Film Festival (August 27 - September 6).

Scroll down for full line-up

The first two are among 21 Competition titles, with further Competition entries including Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly starring George Clooney, Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard Of The Kremlin starring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament Of Ann Lee, and Guillermo del Toro’sFrankenstein starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi.

The selection was announced by artistic director Alberto Barbera,...

[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a weekly rankings column from Tubefilter with data provided by GospelStats. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of YouTube channels based on statistics collected within a given time frame. Check out all of our Tubefilter Charts with new installments every week right here.]

Scroll down for this week’s Tubefilter Chart.

There’s a new leader in the Global Sub Top 50. MrBeast has dropped from the top spot down to #5, and the creator I once described as Argentina’s answer to MrBeast is sitting pretty.

Alejo Igoa is part of a new generation of creators who use Beast-approved editing tactics to captivate viewers across the globe. That approach brought in 7.7 million new subscribers during the first week of July, giving Argentina its only representative in the Global Sub Top 50.

Meanwhile, Argentina’s eternal football rival Brazil is also represented in the ranking, but those channels are not quite as MrBeast-coded.

One of the first major dominoes of the autumn festival season has fallen, as the Venice International Film Festival has announced Paolo Sorrentino’s new film “La Grazia” as its opening night selection.

Plot details have been kept under wraps, but the film stars Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzetti and is written and directed by Sorrentino.

Sorrentino has been a Venice regular for years, debuting projects like the 2021 film “The Hand of God” and TV shows “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope” at the festival. He won the festival’s grand jury prize for “The Hand of God.”

“I am very happy that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival will open with the new and highly anticipated film by Paolo Sorrentino,” festival director Alberto Barbera said in a statement. “Paolo Sorrentino’s return in competition comes with a film destined to leave its mark for its great originality and...

First still released from Paolo Sorrentino's La Grazia, which will open Venice Film Festival and play in competition Photo: Andrea Pirrello/Mubi Paolo Sorrentino's La Grazia has been announced as the opening film of the 82nd Venice Film Festival.

Paulo Sorrentino, who has a long association with Venice, since his feature debut One Man Up played there in 2001 Photo: Michael Avedon The latest film from the Oscar-winning writer/director - the plot of which has not yet been released - sees Sorrentino reteam with The Great Beauty and The Hand Of God star Toni Servillo, who will appear alongside Anna Ferzetti (Diamonds).

Venice's artistic director Alberto Barbera said: "I am very happy that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival will open with the new and highly anticipated film by Paolo Sorrentino. I like to recall that one of the most important and internationally acclaimed Italian auteurs made his debut...

This year’s Venice Film Festival will open with Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia.

As the Oscar-winning director re-teams with Toni Servillo, the opening night film — which translates to “Grace” in English — will get its world premiere in competition on the lido on Wednesday, Aug. 27. While plot details remain unknown, Diamonds actor Anna Ferzetti will also star.

“I am very happy that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival will open with the new and highly anticipated film by Paolo Sorrentino,” said fest director Alberto Barbera.

“I like to recall that one of the most important and internationally acclaimed Italian auteurs made his debut right here at the Biennale di Venezia in 2001 with his first film, One Man Up, in my early years as the artistic director.”

He continued: “The relationship with the Venice Film Festival became consolidated over the years with the presentation out of competition of the first episodes...

La Grazia, the latest feature from Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, will open the Venice Film Festival.

The film stars Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzetti will have its world premiere screening on Wednesday, 27 August in the Sala Grande.

La Grazia, written and directed by Sorrentino. Very little about the film’s plot is known, but sources close to the film have told Deadline that the film follows the final days of a fictional Italian Presidency.

The feature is a Fremantle film produced by The Apartment, Numero 10, and PiperFilm, which will distribute in Italy. Mubi owns worldwide rights, excluding Italy. The Match Factory is handling international sales.

“I am very happy that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival will open with the new and highly anticipated film by Paolo Sorrentino,” Venice head Alberto Barbera said in a statement, adding that Sorrentino’s career began at Venice in 2001 with first feature One Man Up.

Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia,” a love story that re-teams the Oscar-winning director with “The Great Beauty” actor Toni Servillo, has been set as opening film of the upcoming Venice Film Festival.

“La Grazia” – the title can be translated in English as “Grace” – will be launching from the Lido in competition.

Servillo stars in “La Grazia” opposite Italian actor Anna Ferzetti, who recently appeared in Ferzan Ozpetek’s smash hit “Diamonds.” Plot details of Sorrentino’s new film are being kept under wraps besides the fact that it is a love story set somewhere in Italy.

“La Grazia” will mark Servillo’s seventh collaboration with Sorrentino who has shot 10 feature films to date. They first teamed up in Sorrentino’s dazzling 2001 debut, “One Man Up” in which Servillo played an ageing cocaine-addicted crooner. Servillo is best known to international audiences for his memorable turn as Roman writer and socialite Jep...

Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature “Mad Bills to Pay” has been acquired by Paris- and Berlin-based company Salaud Morisset for festival, theatrical and non-commercial rights.

After premiering at Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Next Special Jury Award for ensemble cast, the film was picked up by the Berlinale for its Perspective section, and is now about to screen at Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The film follows Rico, whose summer is a wild mix of chasing girls and hustling homemade cocktails out of a cooler on Orchard Beach, the Bronx. But when Destiny, his teenage girlfriend, crashes at his place with his family, it’s only a matter of time before his rowdy, carefree days come spiraling down.

Vargas said: “’Mad Bills to Pay’ was born from memories of growing up in the Bronx: the hustler culture, the mad hot summers – of first loves. It was inspired by my...

Among the majority of the female-centric crime thrillers Netflix has recently produced, Sara: Woman in the Shadows is surely going to impress viewers the most. As the plot emphasizes the hefty cost of living a dual life in the profession of espionage, viewers find lead characters operating in the grey area of the moral spectrum. Such characterization only helps the narrative treatment to be quite grounded and realistic; it also contributes to evoking more of a genuine emotional expression among the viewers without resorting to any kind of sentimentality.

Sara Morozzi Played by Teresa Saponangelo

Italian actor Teresa Saponangelo started her acting career with stage performances at a young age. Later on, she received acclaim for her works with some of the most acclaimed Italian directors on stage and the silver screen. Some of Teresa Saponangelo’s performances on the silver screen include Sacred Silence, The Vesuvians, The Hand of God,...

Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is this year’s recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award to be bestowed upon him during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which will also feature a retrospective of his films that will be screened as part of the fest’s “tribute to” program.

The honor and tribute will be “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema,” Sarajevo fest organizers said on Tuesday. Sorrentino will also hold a masterclass and “share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience,” they noted.

“I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious recognition and grateful for the attention given to my filmography,” said Sorrentino. “I look forward to being with you in Sarajevo. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The fest highlighted the effect the Italian director and screenwriter’s oeuvre has had on audiences. “Paolo...

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino will be this year’s recipient of the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award and a retrospective of his films will be shown as part of the festival’s “Tribute To” program.

Sorrentino will also hold a Masterclass and share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience.

The award is in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to the art of cinema.”

Jovan Marjanović, director of the festival, said: “Paolo Sorrentino managed to do what every filmmaker dreams of – he left a global impact through local, personal stories. With visually luxurious, emotionally filled and intellectually insightful style, he won the hearts of audiences around the world, who saw his characters, no matter how eccentric or withdrawn, as a mirror of our world, often absurd, sometimes cruel, but always deeply human. The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo is a recognition of the...

It’s not generally a good sign when explanatory title cards at the start and end of a movie give you vital information missing from the movie itself. But that’s what happens with Fuori, a serviceable account of Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza’s years as both a prisoner and ex-con, during which she forged relationships with inmates that inspired some of her best literature. Directed efficiently if too tamely by Mario Martone (Nostalgia), and starring Cannes regular Valeria Golino (Rain Man), the film should find an audience in places where Sapienza’s books are popular, mainly Italy and France.

The author became famous in her homeland after her novel, The Art of Joy, was published in 1998. It was a critical and commercial success that turned Sapienza, who had died two years earlier, into a major voice in Italian literature. She had led a fascinating life before that, growing up in Sicily with socialist-anarchist parents,...

[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a weekly rankings column from Tubefilter with data provided by GospelStats. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of YouTube channels based on statistics collected within a given time frame. Check out all of our Tubefilter Charts with new installments every week right here.]

Scroll down for this week’s Tubefilter Chart.

For the second week in a row, the Global Subs Top 50 ranking was led by a pair of channels that finished far ahead of all others. MrBeast was up to his usual good business by adding three million new subscribers over a seven-day period.

As impressive as that total is, it’s not even half of the 6.8 million new subscribers that joined the Masters of Prophecy channel over the same period. We talked about that AI slop/synthwave hub last week, and it’s still going strong, but some other AI-loving channels are moving up quickly — and they have God on their side.

It’s easy to dismiss Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, as some critics have, reducing it to a sumptuous perfume ad à la Tom Ford. The same could be said about Celeste Dalla Porta’s eponymous character, who often finds herself being pigeonholed into certain archetypes due to her striking looks, which are only rivaled by the film’s sweeping shots of the Neapolitan jagged cliffsides that abut the surrounding cerulean sea.

In this personal, intimate three-decade-spanning epic — Sorrentino’s follow-up to 2021’s lauded The Hand of God — a young Parthenope comes of age amid the backdrop of family turmoil and tragedy, pursuing a life of education and wonder. A cinematic exploration of the limitations of and privileges afforded by beauty and youth, Parthenope cascades through ‘60s and ‘70s Italy as a loose orange scarf dances in the wind, digging into criminal underbellies, the papacy and the rise and fall of divadom.

Netflix produced its first non-documentary feature in 2015. It was called Beasts of No Nation, and it was fine. However, the film did not get nominated for an Academy Award. Lots has changed in the last decade.

Your favorite streamer often gets nominated for major awards each year. 2025 is no different. Emilia Pérez has 13 nominations alone, including one for Best Picture. So far, Netflix has yet to get a win in that category, and Emilia Pérez is not the favorite this year, either.

In fact, Netflix has also almost been entirely shut out of wins in the acting categories. Only Laura Dern won, and that was for Best Supporting Actress in 2020. But the streamer does do well in some other categories. Those might not be part of the Big 6, but when it comes to documentaries, Netflix knows what it is doing. Just see below, and you'll know.

The 2025 Oscars will be held on Sunday,...

In the Greek poet Homer’s Mythological epic ‘The Odyssey’, Parthenope is one of the three alluring sirens Odysseus encounters, but unlike her fellow sirens, fails to seduce Odysseus’ crew and casts herself out into the sea for her failure. In Paolo Sorrentino’s newest film ‘Parthenope’ (2025), the titular character is metaphorically delivered from her mother’s womb in the water and taken out of the oceanic void that the mythological siren perished in. Parthenope is being taken out of the water and back into this new world that sees beauty far differently than in ancient Greek times. Beauty in all areas of life Parthenope is an exuberant young woman living in Naples who draws eyes from all around to her natural beauty. It is a set up for a character that has been seen in countless other movies, but ‘Parthenope’ turns it around and instead of having her remain an It girl,...

Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A shoestring-budget production” realized by a “minimal team,” Mad Bills to Pay is also a debut feature for producer Paolo Maria Pedullà, a UK National Film and Television School graduate whose previous work includes associate producing Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God as well as shorts and various high-end TV shows. Below, Pedullà discusses […]

The post “Only Four Weeks for Prep — Including Casting — and 16 Days to Shoot the Entire Film”: Paolo Maria Pedullà on Producing Mad Bills to Pay first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A shoestring-budget production” realized by a “minimal team,” Mad Bills to Pay is also a debut feature for producer Paolo Maria Pedullà, a UK National Film and Television School graduate whose previous work includes associate producing Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God as well as shorts and various high-end TV shows. Below, Pedullà discusses […]

The post “Only Four Weeks for Prep — Including Casting — and 16 Days to Shoot the Entire Film”: Paolo Maria Pedullà on Producing Mad Bills to Pay first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The 97th Academy Awards ceremony is fast approaching, with Conclave nominated in a number of prestigious categories. Edward Berger's latest film focuses on the Vatican's efforts to elect a new Pope, a process that was similarly addressed in HBO's hit series The Young Pope. Its creator, Paolo Sorrentino, has kept busy ever since the Jude Law show hit the masses to widespread critical acclaim. The beloved Italian auteur's latest film, Parthenope, is now playing in North American theaters. MovieWeb recently caught up with Sorrentino, alongside interpreter Lilia Pino Blouin, while he was promoting the film, and the Oscar-winning filmmaker also weighed in on his funny little connection to Conclave:

I haven't had a chance to see [Conclave] yet. I do know that they used my own Sistine Chapel, the one that I had built, but I haven't watched the movie yet.

And since the director created the...

Beauty, we’re told, is in the eye of the beholder. There are some types of beauty that go beyond the subjective, however — the kind that stops traffic, turns modest men into Tex-Avery-style wolves and have entire feature films centered around them. This is the category that the title character of Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope falls into. She is named after the beguiling siren of Greek and Roman mythology, as well as the ancient handle for Sorrentino’s hometown of Naples. She is introduced emerging from the sea as if...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A24 releases “Parthenope” on Friday, February 7.

It’s no secret that Paolo Sorrentino is profoundly obsessed with the topics of youth and great beauty. Such preoccupations — and several more! — are self-evident in films like “Youth” and “The Great Beauty,” two unbridled displays of Italian maximalism that are every bit as subtle as their titles suggest.

Following 2021’s achingly personal “The Hand of God,” in which the Neapolitan director filtered the agony and the ecstasy of his formative years through the same veil of Fellini-esque sacrilege that he’d previously cast over movies about Silvio Berlusconi and the fading splendor of Roman history, Sorrentino is back on his proverbial bullshit with another sprawling flesh parade that’s more consumed with abstract ideals than it is with the stuff of life itself. Once again, he returns with a rapturously...

At the outset of Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, a young woman gives birth in the Mediterranean Sea while her son looks on from the beach. “Let’s call her Parthenope,” the newborn’s godfather triumphantly bellows as he gestures toward Mount Vesuvius, invoking the mythological siren who lent the city of Naples its original name.

Though there’s no clear allegorical parallel between the myth and the story that Sorrentino will leisurely spool out, the connection between the title character and the land of her birth makes explicit the film’s thematic agenda. As much a city symphony as was Sorrentino’s 2013 Roman odyssey The Great Beauty, Parthenope presents itself as a meditation on youth, beauty, and the passage of time but finally unfurls as an ode to Naples itself—the director’s own birthplace, and likewise the setting for his autobiographical The Hand of God from 2021.

“It is impossible...

Prolific Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek’s female-centric ensemble drama “Diamonds” is fast becoming Italy’s first standout title of 2025. The film has scored sales in some 40 territories while becoming the country’s No. 1 local box office draw so far this year.

“Diamonds,” which is set both in the present day and in the 1970s, revolves around the life and love affairs of a group of warmhearted women who work in a large Rome cinema costume company run by two sisters “who are as different as they are close,” as the synopsis puts it.

Hailed by Italian critics as a love letter to women, the art of costume design and the emotional power of cinema, “Diamonds” has been shining locally, pulling more than $15 million – and counting – at the Italian box office since its Dec. 19 theatrical release via Vision Distribution.

The film’s ensemble cast includes Luisa Ranieri, who played the emotionally...

Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has set his next feature and will re-team with his longtime collaborator Toni Servillo who has signed on to star.

The film will be titled La Grazia. Fremantle confirmed news of the project with us this morning. There are currently no details about the film’s plot, but we understand it will feature a love story. Sorrentino has penned the screenplay. Shooting will begin next spring with Annamaria Morelli producing for The Apartment alongside Sorrentino’s Numero 10 outfit in association with PiperFilm. Piper will release the film in Italy.

Servillo is perhaps best known internationally for his collaborations with Sorrentino. The pair have made seven films together. Their joint credits include Loro, Il Divo, The Hand Of God, and The Great Beauty, which won the Best International Feature Oscar.

Sorrentino’s latest film Parthenope is currently on release in Italy via PiperFilm. The film debuted at...

A healthy ecosystem and healthy competition is the biggest challenge for Netflix Emea, according to chief Larry Tanz.

Tanz threw the gauntlet down to competitors by urging: “We need all of us to develop the next generation of storytellers and want to get ahead on how we develop and upskill storytellers, writers, directors, producers and below the line talent.” He implied that Netflix is ahead of the game in this area, pointing to training programs the streamer has run across the world and an upcoming one at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

“We have been pretty consistent in terms of our investment and growth,” he went on to say at Content London. “We are seeing that our locally-oriented commissioning approach is working for our members and business. We want a healthy ecosystem and healthy competition – that is our biggest challenge.”

He was speaking after a year in which Netflix...

A panel of top Netflix executives touted 10 years of the global streamer in such key European territories as France, Germany and Italy on Tuesday.

At Content London, vp of content Emea Larry Tanz, vp of content France Pauline Dauvin and vp of content Italy Tinny Andreatta spoke during a fireside discussion celebrating big milestones for Netflix, with the 10-year anniversary this year in France and Germany and more dates to mark in 2025 in Italy and Spain.

During the session, Tanz shared that between 2020 and 2023, Netflix invested €6.5 billion ($6.8 billion) in European, non-English series and films, including some of the service’s most popular series and films, such as Society of the Snow (Spain), Troll (Norway), Borgen (Denmark), Under Paris (France), High Water (Poland), and The Hand Of God (Italy).

“That’s great for our members from films and series they get, but also for the industry,” Tanz said. “That has resulted in 60,000 jobs just in Europe.

Academy Award-winning director Paolo Sorrentino frequently makes love-letter dramas in his Italian home of Naples. And just like his last film, the Academy Award-nominated “The Hand of God,” the filmmaker returns to this territory with his new drama “Parthenope.”

Read More: 2024 Fall Film Preview: 50 Movies To Watch

A decades-spanning coming-of-age tale, Sorrentino once said the movie is about a woman “who bears the name of her city but is neither siren nor myth.”

In Greek mythology, Parthenope is the name of a siren who, having failed to entice Odysseus with her songs, cast herself into the sea and drowned.

Continue reading ‘Parthenope’ Trailer: Paolo Sorrentino’s Latest Stars Celeste Dalla Porta, Gary Oldman & Arrives Feb 2025 at The Playlist.

A24 has dropped an eye-catching new trailer for Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” ahead of the February U.S. release of the Oscar-winning director’s lavish love letter to his native Naples.

The U.S. trailer focuses on the film’s titular character, a young woman born in Naples – Neapolitans in Italy are also known as “Parthenopeans” – played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta. In his review, Variety critic Siddhant Adlakha praised Dalla Porta for delivering “a beguiling performance,” he said, as “a woman of such stunning beauty that people stop and stare.”

Adlakha called “Parthenope” as “an exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty.” But it is also, as Sorrentino put it in an interview with Variety, a film about “missed youth” that comes as a follow-up to his autobiographical “The Hand of God” and has elicited comparisons with his 2013 love letter to Rome, “The Great Beauty,” which won the Academy Award for best international feature film.

Paolo Sorrentino is immersing himself in the land of milk and honey for his latest ode to intangible beauty, “Parthenope.”

Titled after the myth of Greek sirens who lured men to their deaths at sea, “Parthenope” stars Celeste Dalla Porta in the lead role. While the literary legacy of Parthenope had the character drowning herself after her songs failed to seduce Odysseus, Sorrentino’s version centers on a wealthy woman who slowly drives her family insane by her beauty.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where A24 acquired it. The distributor describes “Parthenope” as a “monumental and deeply romantic story of a lifetime.”

The official synopsis reads: “Parthenope, born in the sea of Naples in 1950, searches for happiness over the long summers of her youth, falling in love with her home city and its many memorable characters.”

Oscar winner Sorrentino writes and directs the feature, which also stars Gary Oldman,...

A24 knows sex sells, so it’s no surprise that the first U.S. trailer for Parthenope is full of seduction.

Newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, playing the titular Parthenope, appears in various stages of undress throughout, emerging dripping from the sea in a bikini, draped in religious jewelry that barely covers her modesty, tangled up in what looks like a pre-threesome foreplay with co-stars Dario Aita and Daniele Rienzo.

It’s all sun, sea, and sex. Only one line, from Gary Oldman, playing a boozy John Cheever, to Parthenope: “Are you aware of the destruction your beauty causes?” suggests some darkness lurking beneath.

Parthenope

The film is Paolo Sorrentino’s love letter to Naples — his second, following 2021’s The Hand of God — and Parthenope, a mysterious, irresistible beauty, is the stand-in for the enigmatic pull the city has over him. It’s hard not to fall for the version seen on screen,...

Look out, Challengers; another scorcher of a love triangle film is coming for your crown. Only instead of just two guys, this is about a woman who's managed to capture the hearts and minds of an entire city's worth of men. She and Zendaya should form some sort of Avengers-esque squad.

Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” is doing gangbuster business at the Italian box office, where the director’s lavish love letter to his native Naples has surpassed the €5 million ($5.3 million) mark less than two weeks after going on full release. These numbers have made it the country’s top local draw – excluding commercial comedies – of the year to date.

For its first theatrical outing since bowing at Cannes in May, new Italian distributor PiperFilm came up with a smart release strategy for “Parthenope” that involved marketing the film to youth audiences. “Parthenope” was teased with some midnight premieres in select Italian cinemas – between Sept. 19 and 25 – to stoke excitement prior to its full launch on Oct. 24.

On Wednesday, “Parthenope” reached $5.5 million in cumulative grosses from roughly 500 Italian screens, according to national box office compiler Cinetel. The film, which is Sorrentino’s 10th feature, could now become his personal best in terms of local returns.

When director Paolo Sorrentino’s hit series The Young Pope debuted in 2016, it took the Vatican a year to grudgingly bless his imagined and occasionally blasphemous portrayal of the pope. Not so for Sorrentino’s latest film Parthenope, which has gotten an early thumbs-down from Italy’s Catholic Church.

That has only seemed to pique interest in the film, driving it to the top of the box office here for Italian films since its release in theaters last month.

Set in Sorrentino’s native Naples, the film is a lush meditation on beauty, love and death, drawn from the Greek myth of the siren Parthenope, who throws herself into the sea after she fails to entice Odysseus with her song. Parthenope is closely affiliated with Naples, such that the city is sometimes called “Partenope” and its people “Partenopei” in Italian.

The film is by no means about the church, but toward the end,...

Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” is and will always be cherished by cinephiles. After all, it beautifully captures their deep love for cinema and the art of filmmaking in the most heartfelt way. It shows a child from a small Italian town falling in love with cinema, because of his friendship with a local film projectionist. He gets to watch all kinds of movies and experiences the madness and chaos it entails. “Cinema Paradiso” opens in an era when people exclusively used film reels to make movies. The child protagonist sees the film’s material change from flammable to fire-resistant as the art advances into different eras.

The kid, Toto, grows up witnessing the changes in censorship in cinema and builds a personal connection with both sublime and obscene. Back then, films were integral to the social fabric of a community. So, he learns cinema’s importance as a medium...

Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist who penned “The Four Seasons,” will be portrayed in “Primavera,” the feature debut of Damiano Michieletto, a leading opera director. Memento International has boarded the film which begins shooting this month in Rome and Venice.

“Primavera” was penned by Ludovica Rampoldi, the award-winning screenwriter of movies such as “The Traitor” and “Gomorrah – the series,” among others. The script is loosely adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s critically acclaimed novel “Stabat Mater.”

Set in 18th century Venice, “Primavera” follows Cecilia, a 20-year-old violin virtuoso who lives at the Pièta orphanage. Despite her talent, Cecilia remains confined within the orphanage, knowing that marriage is the only way out. Yet, her life takes a turn after she meets Antonio Vivaldi, a brilliant and ambitious composer who becomes the new violin teacher. Guided by Vivaldi and his music, Cecilia “finds the strength to challenge the destiny that once seemed inevitable,...

Italy has selected Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio as its entry for the best international feature Oscar.

Vermiglio won the Grand Jury Prize in Competition at Venice earlier this month. Set in 1944 in the Italian alpine village after which the film is named, it sees the arrival of a deserter soldier disrupt the life of the village teacher and his family, as the eldest daughter falls in love with him.

Producers on the film are Francesca Andreoli, Santiago Fondevila, Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli and Delpero, for Italy’s Cinedora with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France’s Charades...

Italy has selected Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio as its entry for the best international feature Oscar.

Vermiglio won the Grand Jury Prize in Competition at Venice earlier this month. Set in 1944 in the Italian alpine village after which the film is named, it sees the arrival of a deserter soldier disrupt the life of the village teacher and his family, as the eldest daughter falls in love with him.

Producers on the film are Francesca Andreoli, Santiago Fondevila, Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli and Delpero, for Italy’s Cinedora with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France’s Charades...

Veteran producer-distributor David Kosse has set up a development deal with Prime Video for the UK under his new production outfit Rockwood Pictures.

Kosse was most recently the London-based head of international film at Netflix.

The company’s development deal sits with the streamer’s UK licensing team under Chris Bird, managing director of Prime Video UK. It will cover the development and production of films, Prime Video confirmed to Screen.

The London-based Kosse set up Rockwood in 2023 and has kept a tight lid on his strategy so far, but is known to be quietly developing a slate of film...

Veteran producer-diistrbutor David Kosse has set up a first-look development deal with Prime Video for the UK under his new production outfit Rockwood Pictures.

Kosse was most recently the London-based head of international film at Netflix.

The company’s development deal sits with the streamer’s UK licensing team under Chris Bird, managing director of Prime Video UK. It will cover the development and production of films, Prime Video confirmed to Screen.

The London-based Kosse set up Rockwood in 2023 with former Netflix colleague Claire Willats, who led the Nordics team at the US streamer and produced films such as Troll,...

British director Joe Wright, who helmed Winston Churchill drama “Darkest Hour,” is at the Venice Film Festival with another historical piece, high-end TV drama “M. Son of the Century.” The series chronicles Benito Mussolini’s rise to power and is particularly timely as populist leaders are sprouting up all over the world.

Based on Italian author Antonio Scurati’s eponymous bestselling novel which traces the birth of Fascism in Italy, “M” reconstructs Mussolini’s ascent with an innovative approach. Luca Marinelli plays the despotic leader during the period between 1919, when he founded the fascist party in Italy, and 1925 when – having gained power with the 1922 March on Rome – Mussolini made an infamous speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies declaring himself a dictator.

“M” is produced by Sky Studios and Lorenzo Mieli for Fremantle-owned The Apartment Pictures in collaboration with Pathé and Small Forward. The show, which was largely shot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios,...