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The Wild West looks tame beside the lawless, senseless Continental plains and sierras of “Heads or Tails?,” an enjoyably off-kilter Euro-western that honors the stylistic and structural traditions of the genre while occupying its own reality entirely. The second feature from Italian directing duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis features a rogue outlaw cowboy, a gutsy, pistol-toting widow and Buffalo Bill Cody himself — all variously on the loose in a suitably parched stretch of northern Italy. But if those sound like standard ingredients for an old-school oater, or even a Leone-era spaghetti joint, this sui generis item takes a turn for the eccentric even before it pivots into outright surrealism.

One of the more irreverent titles at this year’s Cannes festival — where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard strand — “Heads or Tails?” is looser and loopier than de Righi and Zoppis’ cultish 2021 festival hit “The Tale of King Crab,...

Illustration by Franz Lang.No official competition title unveiled in Cannes this year spoke to our troubled times with the same full-throated urgency as Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or–winning It Was Just an Accident (all titles 2025 unless otherwise noted). It was a historic award for a groundbreaking film. Panahi, who had already received the Golden Lion in Venice for The Circle (2000) and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Taxi (2015), joins Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman as one of the four directors to have won top honors at all three festivals. And he completed the trifecta with a film that serves as an explicit, fearless response to the censorship and humiliations he has long suffered at the hands of the regime in his native Iran. In July 2022, the filmmaker was arrested by Iranian authorities for signing a petition against police violence, and subsequently spent several months in jail.

The Italian-u.S. co-production Heads or Tails? starts with a re-enactment of an actual historical event: Buffalo Bill (played here by John C. Reilly) and his traveling rodeo show’s early-20th-century visit to Italy. But this freewheeling neo-anti-quasi-western, with its fictional yarn about young lovers (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Alessandro Borghi) on the run from bounty hunters who encounter revolutionaries and train robbers, eventually goes well beyond printing the legend and wanders off into the realms of magical realism.

The project — directed by Matteo Zoppis and Alessio Rigo de Righi (whose previous effort was The Tale of King Crab) — is nothing if not ambitious, even if its big swings don’t always connect. Nevertheless, there’s a freshness in seeing this kind of horse opera set in Europe itself, as opposed to having southerly locations on the continent pretending to be American landscapes, like they did back in the spaghetti...

It’s almost impossible to have a thorough discussion about the myth of the American West and the way it permeated pop culture without turning one’s attention to Italy. Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci had a field day with cowboy iconography in the 1960s, churning out a series of violent Westerns that many enthusiasts would say rival or surpass the American Westerns made by the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawks. From their largely European casts and overtly Catholic imagery to their hot-blooded stories of violent revenge, the so-called Spaghetti Westerns were distinctly Italian products. But their existence was only possible due to the endless fascination that Italians had with America and the myths that Hollywood loved to perpetuate.

Italy’s love of American cowboys provides the backdrop for “Heads or Tails,” the new film from “The Tale of King Crab” directors Alessio Rigo de Righi...

Roughly a year after its launch, Italian state broadcaster Rai’s new sales unit for film is at Cannes with its first full-fledged slate headlined by surreal Western “Heads or Tails” starring John C. Reilly as Buffalo Bill during his stay in Italy that is launching in Un Certain Regard.

The Rai Cinema International Distribution slate also includes a new under-the-radar doc by prominent Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, known for “Gunda” and “Aquarela.” Kossakovsky is now making another ecology-themed doc titled “Tears for Firs” in collaboration with Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement who has written several best-selling books including “Tree Stories.” “It’s about the entire life cycle of trees and the correlation between plant life and the life of our planet,” said Rai Cinema chief Paolo Del Brocco.

“Tears for First” is being produced by Rome-based Be Water Film with Rai Cinema.

All’s fair in love, war, and the flip of a coin. Italian Western “Heads or Tails?” turns back time to capture the famed “Wild West Show,” hosted by Buffalo Bill (née William F. Cody), which brought the myth of the American frontier abroad. In a twist of divine casting, John C. Reilly plays the iconic Buffalo Bill. The feature premieres at Cannes this year in the Un Certain Regard section as a sales title; this is Reilly’s recent return to the festival, as the star was previously the president of the Un Certain Regard jury for the 76th edition in 2023. Watch an exclusive clip in the video above.

Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis co-direct “Heads or Tails?,” which centers on how Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show changes the perspective of Italian woman Rosa, who is trapped in a stifling marriage to a powerful and violent landowner.

John C. Reilly stars as Buffalo Bill in the surreal westerns- and heroes-deconstructing parable Heads or Tails? (Testa o croce?), the new feature from Italian writers-directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis (The Tale of King Crab), which world premieres in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.

French-Finnish actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island, The Crime Is Mine) and Italian actor Alessandro Borghi (Supersex, The Eight Mountains) lead the cast of the movie that dissects such themes as fame, myths, and storytelling.

The story, which the creator duo wrote with Carlo Salsa, begins with a documented 1890 Italy trip by frontiersman Buffalo Bill to bring his popular “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” to European audiences, and with it, the legend of U.S. frontier life.

At the show, Rosa (Tereszkiewicz), the young wife of a nobleman, falls in love with Santino (Borghi), an Italian cowboy, or buttero, who wins a contest...

Italian directorial duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who made a splash at Cannes in 2022 with “The Tale of King Crab,” are back with “Heads or Tails,” a surreal Western starring John C. Reilly inspired by a true event that took place during Buffalo Bill’s stay in Italy. The film unspools in Un Certain Regard.

Italian cowboys, hailing from the central Italian plains of northern Lazio up through the coastal Italian region of Maremma into southern Tuscany and known as “butteri,” have a long-standing connection to Buffalo Bill and the history of America’s Wild West.

“We’ve known this story since we were kids,” said Zoppis. “There was a rodeo between the American cowboys and the Italian butteri from Cisterna Latina, just south of Rome, where we actually shot the film. And legend has it that the Italians won, though there are different versions of the outcome.

This year’s Italian presence at Cannes – one entry in competition by veteran auteur Mario Martone and two by young directors that landed slots in Un Certain Regard – accurately reflects the current state of Cinema Italiano.

Broadly speaking, following a protracted growth spurt, there has been a slowdown in production activity caused by the fact that the government has been dithering with modifications on tax incentives for local film and TV productions, which has stalled the greenlight process, especially for bigger-budget Italian movies.

But even though getting films financed has gotten tougher, a new generation of directors is bubbling under, alongside well-known names such as Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino, Alice Rohrwacher and Nanni Moretti.

“I have the impression that once again we are seeing young [Italian] directors emerging and this is formidable,” Thierry Fremaux noted while announcing the lineup. The Cannes boss went on to add that “Italy is historically a...

It’s the most exciting time of the year for a cinephile: the Cannes Film Festival is set to kick off next week, running May 13th-25th. Ahead of festivities we’ve rounded up what we’re most looking forward to, and while we’re sure many surprises await, per every year, one will find twenty films that should be on your radar. Check out our picks below and be sure to subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest updates from the festival.

Alpha (Julia Ducournau)

Winning the Palme d’Or for your previous film is a pretty high bar to clear for your next. It’s also among the best problems any filmmaker could have. Four years after Spike Lee’s jury handed the coveted prize to the first female filmmaker in Cannes history––and one of the most violent films to ever take home a Palme––maverick...

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 on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSGoodbye, Dragon Inn.The Tamil Film Active Producers Association has filed a writ petition to ban social-media film reviews for the first three days of the theatrical release, claiming financial losses due to negative “review bombing.” Theater owners have likewise proposed banning YouTubers from recording audience reactions in cinema lobbies and parking lots.The McL Cinema in Hong Kong’s Diamond Hill district has shuttered after just two years of operations, the seventh theater in the city to have closed this year. Insiders are bracing for the hit to the local film industry’s reputation and financial stability that could follow. For the past decade, Hollywood executives believed that brief theatrical windows would boost subscriber numbers for their streaming services.

John C. Reilly will soon appear on the big screen as Buffalo Bill in “Heads or Tails?” a surreal Western by Italian directorial duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis (“The Tale of King Crab”). The film is inspired by a true event that took place during Buffalo Bill’s stay in Italy.

Along with the Oscar-nominated U.S. actor – who co-starred with Joaquin Phoenix in Jacques Audiard’s Western “The Sisters Brothers” – the top notch “Heads or Tails?” cast also comprises rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi, in lead roles, and Argentina’s Peter Lanzani.

Italian cowboys known as “butteri” –– and hailing from the central Italian plains of northern Lazio up through the coastal Italian region of Maremma into southern Tuscany — have a long-standing connection to Buffalo Bill and the history of America’s Wild West.

Buffalo Bill, born William F. Cody, was a...

Italian state broadcaster Rai’s new world sales arm is gaining traction in Cannes — following its soft launch in Berlin — with four new titles on its slate, including veteran auteur Roberto Andò’s historical drama “The Blunder” starring Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”).

In “The Blunder,” which is currently shooting in Sicily, Servillo plays a Sicilian colonel at the head of a ragtag unit trying to outsmart the enemy during the 1860 battle led by Giuseppe Garibaldi that resulted in the unification of Italy.

“The Blunder,” which also stars popular Sicilian comic duo Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone, is produced by Tramp Limited and Bibi Film with Rai Cinema and Medusa, in collaboration with Netflix.

Other titles added during Cannes on the Rai Cinema International Distribution slate include – as previously announced – “Of Dogs and Men,” the upcoming drama by Israeli director Dani Rosenberg (“The Death of Cinema and My Father Too...

A film over a decade in the making, Felipe Gálvez’s directorial debut The Settlers takes a formally thrilling look at the brutal genocide of the now-extinct Selk’nam people, who were native to the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile. Following its premiere at Cannes Film Festival and acquisition by Mubi, the film went on to play at TIFF, NYFF, BFI London, and AFI Fest, was selected as Chile’s Oscar submission, and will now arrive in theaters starting this Friday.

I said in my Cannes review, “Backed by Harry Allouche’s Morricone-inspired score, The Tale of King Crab cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo’s appreciation for vast Leone-esque vistas is apparent, albeit with a more inhospitable, bleak variety as the sun always seems to have just a few dying gasps of light left. It recalls Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja in more than just subject matter: D’Arcangelo shoots these...

Having recently shifted away from their one-film-a-day approach, Mubi has now unveiled their October lineup, which is headlined by Ira Sachs’ stellar drama Passages following its theatrical run this summer. The slate also features handpicked selections by Sachs, with work by Maurice Pialat, Luchino Visconti, Jack Hazan, Shirley Clarke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Also arriving in October is “Watch If You Dare: Horror Halloween,” a series featuring a trio of giallo classics, with The Fifth Cord, The Possessed, and Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, alongside Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and more. The service will also spotlight the work of underseen Japanese director Yasuzô Masumura, including his aching melodrama Red Angel, his biting workplace satire Giants and Toys, his thrilling noir Black Test Car, and more.

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

October 1

The Infiltrators, directed by Alex Rivera, Cristina Ibarra | National Hispanic Heritage Month

The Vanished Elephant,...

Writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s second feature, Sweet Dreams, follows a recent trend of arthouse films — including Zama, The Settlers and The Tale of King Crab — that explore Europe’s troubled colonial history through a postmodern mix of satire, surrealism and cinematic lyricism.

All of these elements are present in a story set in 1900 in the Dutch East Indies, where a family running a prosperous sugar plantation finds its status quo upended when their patriarch suddenly passes away. Left to deal with the fallout, the landowner’s wife and children are quickly exposed to the limits, as well as the terrors, of colonialism, in the face of Indigenous people who refuse to keep bowing down.

Shot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio and divided into chapters like a novella, Sendijarević’s movie maintains a certain distance from its subject, gazing at it through a contemporary prism that critiques the racism and exploitation of the epoch.

The barbaric, bloody sins of the past come to define what entities govern certain land today, carried out by conquistadors and colonizers who hide behind righteous religious falsities to denigrate an indigenous population. With his directorial debut, a hauntingly conceived Chilean western The Settlers (Los Colonos), Felipe Gálvez localizes an origin story of this horror vis-a-vis the brutal genocide of the now-extinct Selk’nam people, who were native to the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile. While spare early passages are narratively opaque and formally ornate to a distancing fault, the riveting second half––including a chilling reckoning with others occupying the desolate land and a well-executed structural gamble––brings profound expansion to this chilling story of atrocity.

Split into boldly conveyed chapters, The Settlers begins in 1901 in Chile’s Tierra de Fuego province. As commanded by the bloodthirsty José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), a trio of explorers are sent...

There’s been a recent trend in international arthouse cinema that dates roughly back to two Argentine movies of the past decade: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014).

Both films told dark tales of European colonization, and the massacres inflicted on South America’s Indigenous populations, in ways that felt altogether contemporary, eschewing traditional narratives in favor of something more enigmatic and modern. In such movies, the past was reflected through the lens of the present. The characters all wore period costumes and the sets were made to look like they dated from the epoch, but the stories being told, and the way they were being told, felt very much of our time, as if the horrors were still with us.

This trend continued, albeit in a more playful sense, in the Italian film The Tale of King Crab (2021), and in a more spiritual sense in the...

Exclusive: Wild Bunch International has made an eleventh-hour addition to its European Film Market slate, signing international sales on Swedish Morbius director Daniel Espinosa’s upcoming drama Madame Luna.

Inspired by real-life events, the film follows an Eritrean refugee who gets stuck in Libya and becomes a notorious human trafficker known as “Mama Luna” with deep ties to the Italian Mafia.

When she is forced to flee to Italy due to a change in fortunes, she experiences the same hardships endured by the people she exploited.

Desperate to find a way out of the situation before she is recognized and brought to justice, she forms a bond with a younger version of herself.

The film was shot in Sicily and Calabria last August and September and is now in post-production.

Wbi has teased a first image of newcomers Meninet Abraha and Hilyam Weldemichael, who are both of Eritrean origin, in...

“It’s been the great mystery in political history of the past 50 years,” said Slamdance Film Festival founder, writer and director Dan Mirvish of the eighteen-and-a-half minutes famously missing from the Nixon Tapes. His campy political thriller out this weekend takes a stab at what might have happened.

Adventure Entertainment opens 18 1/2 today on four screens in NY, LA, and Fort Lauderdale, expanding next week to about 60 including a special screening Wednesday at the Landmark Theatres E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Watergate. The National Archives is screening CNN documentary series Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal the same night at a dueling event with John Dean, who was President Richard Nixon’s counsel from July, 1970 to April, 1973. The mother of U.S. political scandals exploded in June of 1972 when five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex.

Not quite a musical, sort of a folktale, and almost but not entirely a hardscrabble hunk of post-war realism before all of a sudden changing gears, “Scarlet” – which opened the 2022 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight sidebar on Wednesday – is a tricky project to pin down. Of course, director Pietro Marcello wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shooting in French for the first time, the Italian filmmaker made his name with documentaries before working found and historical footage into the world of make-believe with 2019’s “Martin Eden.” With this more ambitious (if more uneven) follow-up, Marcello continues at a similar pace, folding fact into fiction as he explores both the landscapes of rural Normandy in the aftermath of the First World War and the plight of the working poor, all through the crags of his leading man’s brow.

That brow (and those crags) belongs to Raphael (Raphaël Thiéry...

Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” and Gabriele Mainetti’s “Freaks Out” lead the pack at the David di Donatello Awards this year with 16 nominations each.

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

Picture

“Ariaferma” (The Inner Cage), Leonardo Di Costanzo

“The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino

“Ennio,” Giuseppe Tornatore

“Freaks Out,” Gabriele Mainetti

“Qui Rido Io” (The King of Laughter), Mario Martone

Director

“Ariaferma” (The Inner Cage), Leonardo Di Costanzo

“The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino

“Ennio,” Giuseppe Tornatore

“Freaks Out,” Gabriele Mainetti

“Qui Rido Io” (The King of Laughter), Mario Martone

Debut Director

“The Bad Poet,” Gianluca Jodice

“Maternal,” Maura Delpero

“Small Body,” Laura Samani

“Re Granchio” (The Legend of King Crab), Alessio Rigo De Righi, Matteo Zoppis

“Una Femmina” (The Code of Silence), Francesco Constabile

Producer

“A Chiara,” Jon Coplon, Paolo Carpignano, Ryan Zacarias, Jonas Carpignano (Stayblack Productions) — Rai Cinema

“Ariaferma” (The Inner Cage), Carlo Cresto...

Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis's The Tale of King Crab is exclusively showing on Mubi in most countries starting April 20, 2022 in the series Undiscovered.The Tale of King Crab is the third chapter of a trilogy based on oral tales that we heard in a small hunting lodge in the province of Viterbo, in the Tuscia region of Italy. The hunters would gather together in this lodge after a hunt to eat, drink, and tell stories. Almost all of the people who play in this film are non-professional actors, laborers, hunters, and farmers from the town of Vejano.While the first two films, Belva Nera (2013) and Il Solengo (2015), were documentaries, this time the story went back too far in time for anyone to recall, so we didn't have many elements to work with and these only lead up to the protagonist's exile in Argentina. So we went to...

The bizarre tale of an Italian village drunk which switches to a crustacean-assisted treasure hunt aims for warped horror but doesn’t always get it right

A group of elderly Italian men sit around drinking red wine, eating spaghetti and trading local folk stories passed down by their parents and grandparents. It was different back then, explains one old boy; there was no TV, so people had to sit around talking of an evening (though sitting around talking is precisely what this lot are doing). He tells the tale of Luciano, the illegitimate son of a local doctor sometime in the 19th century. It’s a dark story, he warns. Though possibly not dark enough. What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.

Their...

“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” (Warner Bros.) fell short of its two prior entries with a 43 million weekend, but this weekend it was the biggest contributor to an estimate 110 million total domestic gross — on par with the same weekend three years ago, a rarity since theaters reopened.

From a franchise perspective, “Dumbledore” is a disappointment. Going into April, it joined “Morbius” (Sony) and “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” (Paramount) as one of three films this month that could open over 50 million. The J.K. Rowling adaptation seemed like a particularly strong candidate; not only did its predecessors open to 74 million and 62 million, but it also nabbed the potentially lucrative Easter weekend.

Like “Morbius,” it failed to reach that mark — but since “Sonic” beat projections with a 72 million start, the three films combined grossed over 150 million on their openings. This weekend take improves our four-week rolling comparison to the same dates in 2019 to 73 percent.

The Tale Of King Crab, a cinematically striking fable shot in rural Italy and Argentina, opened to a three-day gross of 5,120 at Film at Lincoln Center this weekend — the first in a string of Italian offerings set to arrive on the specialty scene through the summer.

“In today’s challenging arthouse market, we count this early result as a success and believe the film will continue to find a devoted audience as it rolls out nationally,” said Andrew Carlin, head of distribution for Oscilloscope Laboratories, which presents the film directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. Set in a remote 19th-century Italian village and the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, it expands to LA’s Landmark Nuart on April 29 and into top 50 markets throughout May.

“We saw this at Cannes last year on the biggest and best screen possible and found it equal parts beguiling and immersive.

“I see nothing happening on a major scale to try to get the older audiences back to theaters,” griped Sony Pictures Classics’ co-president Tom Bernard.

Ideally, Bernard wants NATO to trumpet cinema safety in a big public campaign. (A NATO rep says not in the cards.) He’d like that campaign alongside a creative marketing push by independent movie chains, combined with a steadier flow of specialty films with wider appeal. That could include SPC’s upcoming The Duke, Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story and The Phantom of the Open.

Focus Features’ bellwether Downton Abby: A New Era is the big test. If the Crawley family can’t rout lingering Covid jitters and force of habit to nudge older demos off home screens, then nothing can.

Hoping to prime the pump for this potential spring rebound, SPC and the Angelika Film Center this week unveiled “Bring A Friend Back To The Movies,...

In the Italian town of Vejano, local hunters gather to share stories rich enough to inspire movies. Over the past decade, filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis have been dutifully documenting these sessions — some fact-based, others blurring the lines of reality — translating them to screen via films that entertain, while also testing what audiences might believe. The first two, “Belva Nera” (about a black panther sighting) and “Il Solengo” (focused on an enigmatic recluse), were fashioned as nonfiction portraits, but the latest legend proved fanciful enough to call for a more narrative approach. And thus, “The Tale of King Crab” was born.

Debuting in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last summer, this surprising account of a curious cross-continental quest already feels timeless, like one of Pasolini’s classic allegorical films (“The Arabian Nights”) or Alice Rohrwacher’s more recent, loosely fact-based “Happy as Lazzaro.” It’s an old-fashioned literary fable,...

Shellfish People: Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis Craft Unique Narrative Steeped in Oral Tradition

For their directorial debut The Tale of King Crab, directors Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis fashion a framed tale about a legendary drunk as relayed by a tavern full of modern day bar flies reminiscing about their collective nostalgia. With a certain essence of plot holes being filled in along the way, the two part odyssey of an unfortunate ruffian switches tone and style for its second half, jumping from tragedy to bizarrely humorous. Like a spaghetti western, it hits a definite genre groove which feels uniquely self aware without seeming arch, a narrative crafted collaboratively for its own meandering, maximum effect.…...

One of the highlights of the new release calendar this month is Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ Cannes and NYFF selection The Tale of King Crab. The film follows a wandering outcast in a remote, late 19th-century Italian village. He embarks on an odyssey after being exiled to the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way toward redemption. Courtesy of Oscilloscope, who will release this Friday, April 15 starting at Film at Lincoln Center, we’re delighted to premiere an exclusive clip that shows off the beginnings of this dreamy odyssey.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab, a story of a 19th-century vagabond who falls in love with the daughter of a local farmer only to run afoul of a prince.

Oscilloscope Laboratories has snagged North American rights to Helmut Dosantos’ documentary “Gods of Mexico,” an exploration of the rich diversity of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities across Mexico.

The film had its world premiere at this year’s True/False Film Festival.

Hailed as “a tribute to those who fight to preserve their cultural identity amidst the shadows of modernization,” Dosantos transports audiences “through salt pans, deserts, highlands, jungle, and underground mines, in both richly saturated color and black-and-white melodic interludes.”

The “ethnographic portrait offers a critical consideration of values and challenges structures that breed displacement,” the synopsis reads.

Commented O-Scope’s Dan Berger: “’Gods of Mexico’ is inarguably one of the most astonishing filmic experiences I’ve had.” “The imagery is beyond stunning and the dialogue-free (but far from silent) soundtrack is utterly immersive,” he said, adding: “And this says nothing about the access that Helmut was able to...

"A man who kills, where does he go?" Oscilloscope Labs has revealed an official US trailer for a peculiar, fascinating little Italian film called The Tale of King Crab. This one originally premiered in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and it also stopped by the Karlovy Vary, New York, and Vienna Film Festivals last year. When this begins, elderly hunters are reminiscing about the local tale of Luciano. Luciano lived as a wandering drunkard in a remote village. Spiteful actions ensue between him and the prince of the region over passage through an ancient gateway. Fueled by passions and jealousy, these actions result in a horrible misdeed. Now an unfortunate criminal, Luciano is exiled to the distant Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way towards redemption. However, in these lands, only greed and insanity can prevail.

One of the most transportive, transfixing discoveries of last year’s festival circuit was the Cannes and NYFF selection The Tale of King Crab. Coming from Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who have mostly dabbled in on-fiction, the film follows a wandering outcast in a remote, late 19th-century Italian village. He embarks on an odyssey after being exiled to the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way toward redemption. Picked up by Oscilloscope, it’ll now get a release on April 15 beginning at Film at Lincoln Center and the gorgeous trailer and poster have arrived.

Rory O’Connor said in his review, “A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab, a story of a 19th-century vagabond who falls in love with the daughter of...

Part Herzogian ecstatic ethnography, part Pasolinian picaresque, “The Tale of King Crab” finds directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis traveling from Italy to Argentina in a two-pronged folktale. The film, which has strands of ’70s arthouse in its DNA — including its immersive shot-on-film imagery — world-premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in summer 2021 and enjoyed a solid run on the festival circuit, including at the New York Film Festival.

Now, Oscilloscope Laboratories will open the film April 15 in New York exclusively at Film at Lincoln Center, followed by a Los Angeles opening April 29. Exclusively on IndieWire, you can watch the trailer for the film below ahead of its stateside release.

The film centers on Luciano (Gabriele Silli), a meandering outcast in a far-off, late-19th-century Italian village. His life is marred by all manner of conflict, from the dangers of drink to forbidden love, as well as unrest with the...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2021, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

Music docs, Memoria, and more music docs: welcome to my top ten. There are some non-music-docs, but only seven. It was almost six. And in a rare moment of clarity I exercised restraint. I’ll probably regret it. Themes are disparate between the rest. From unseen masterwork to global phenomenon, Chile to Romania, nautical myth to coming of age in the ’70s––they run the gamut.

To the point of showing there’s no such thing as a “bad year” in cinema, my list of honorable mentions is insufferable. Barely edging out the top ten is The Power of the Dog, The Worst Person in the World, The Velvet Underground, and Drive My Car, any of them a likely 9 or 10 spot were I writing this on a different day.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2021, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

It goes without saying that the past two years have been a lot for everyone to deal with. There were plenty of films released in 2021, but every aspect of the industry suffered through it. Productions dealt with new, costly protocols, festivals had to navigate physical and / or virtual events, distributors chose between theatrical exclusives or hybrid releases, exhibitors did everything they could to stay afloat, and everyone lost a ton of money in the process. There is no easy way out of this pandemic, but that’s not stopping anyone from burning through everything they can to find one.

Still, there were lots of things to see in 2021, and the spread of great to good to bad wasn’t particularly different from any other year. Some films...

Samuel Theis’ “Softie” won the top prize at the 62nd Thessaloniki Film Festival, which wrapped Sunday night with a ceremony in Greece’s second city.

The film, which premiered in Cannes’ Critics’ Week section, was awarded the Golden Alexander and a €10,000 cash prize by a jury comprised of writer-director Nanouk Leopold, sound designer Roland Vajs and actor Michelle Valley.

The Special Jury Award was given to “Clara Sola,” by Natalie Álvarez Mesén, while the Special Jury Award for best director went to Lorenzo Vigas for “The Box.”

The award for best actress went to Sofia Kokkali for her performance in “Moon, 66 Questions,” by director Jacqueline Lentzou. Aliocha Reinert won the prize for best actor for his role in Golden Alexander winner “Softie.” The award for best screenplay went to Laurynas Bareiša for his film “Pilgrims,” while a special mention was given to Alexandre Koberidze for “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?...

A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab, a story of a 19th-century vagabond who falls in love with the daughter of a local farmer only to run afoul of a prince. (Tough luck.) Later on, astonishingly, he finds himself on the other side of the world.

With that kind of spatial and temporal scope, it’s remarkable that Crab is only the first narrative feature from Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, a duo whose output, while ostensibly non-fiction to this point, has often played on the boundary of fable. Small traces of both Black Beast (their 2013 short about a legendary animal) and Il Sonengo (their 2018 feature documentary about a lone hermit) can be located in Crab, a film with all the texture of a folktale—one passed through generations, the facts blurring and embellishments only growing more ethereal with each retelling.

China’s Pingyao International Film Festival got under way on Tuesday with the gala screening of Zhang Lu’s new drama film “Yanagawa.” The festival will unspool Oct. 12-19 with a familiar package of competition screenings a work in progress section, a film lab, a project market and a tribute section dedicated to Tsui Hark.

Organizers announced an ambitious twelve-title competition section (“Crouching Tigers”) for first second and third films from around the world.

These include: “Amparo,” directed by Simón Mesa Soto; “As Far As I Can Walk,” directed by Strahinja Banovic; “Feathers,” directed by Omar El Zohairy; “Mama, I’m Home” directed by Vladimir Bitokov (Russia); “Pedro” directed by Natesh Hegde (India); “Playground” (Un Monde) directed by Laura Wandel (Belgium); “Prayers for the Stolen” (Noche de Fuego) directed by Tatiana Huezo; “Rehana” (Rehana Maryam Noor) directed by Abdullah Mohammad Saad; “The Tale of King Crab” (Re Granchio) directed by...

Festival, which opens today, also annouced its Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons competition sections.

This year’s Pingyao International Film Festival (Octobner 12-19) will open with Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Yanagawa and close with Xu Lei’s The Great Director.

Starring Ni Ni, Zhang Luyi and Xin Baiqing, Yanagawa revolves around two brothers who travel to Japan in search of the woman they both loved in their youth. The film, which is receiving its world premiere at Busan in the Icons section, is produced by Midnight Blur Films and sold internationally by Hishow Entertainment. The Great Director is described...

Below you will find an index of our coverage from the Cannes Film Festival, Directors' Fortnight, and Critics' Week in 2021, as well as our favorite films.Awardstop 10Leonardo GOI1. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)3. The Souvenir: Part II (Joanna Hogg)4. Titane (Julia Ducournau)5. Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams)6. The Tale of King Crab (Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis)7. Ahed's Knee (Nadav Lapid)8. Unclenching the Fists (Kira Kovalenko)9. A Hero (Asghar Farhadi)10. Red Rocket (Sean Baker)Coverageleonardo GOICannes 2021: Festival PreviewNadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee, Arthur Harari’s Onoda, and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part IIPaul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Kogonada’s After Yang, Andrea Arnold’s CowHamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, Anderson’s The French DispatchDucournau’s Titane, Rigo de Righi and Zoppis’s The Tale of King Crab, Williams and Uzeyman’s Neptune FrostApichatpong’s Memoria, Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists,...

After a pandemic-forced cancellation last year, Cannes Film Festival made a triumphant return this year, featuring some premieres pegged for the 2020 edition as well as a new crop of work. While our coverage will continue over the next week or so, and far beyond as we provide updates on the journey of these selections, we’ve asked our contributors on the ground to share their favorites from this year’s festival.

See their picks below and explore all of our coverage here.

Rory O’Connor

1. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

2. Vortex (Gaspar Noé)

3. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

4. Titane (Julia Ducournau)

5. Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen)

6. Red Rocket (Sean Baker)

7. Annette (Leos Carax)

8. The Tale of King Crab (Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis)

9. Great Freedom (Sebastian Meise)

10. Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid)

Honorable Mention: The Hill Where The Lionesses Roar (Luàna Bajrami)

David Katz

1. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

3. In Front of Your Face...

Exclusive: Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up North American rights to Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s first fiction feature film The Tale Of King Crab.

The Pic recently had its world premiere in Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section. Oscilloscope said it was planning a theatrical release on a yet-to-be-determined date.

Story follows Luciano, who lives as a wandering drunkard in a remote Italian village of the region Tuscia. Spiteful actions ensue between him and the prince of the region over the right of passage through an ancient gateway. Fueled by passions and jealousy, these actions result in a horrible misdeed.

The deal with Oscilloscope was negotiated by Shellac’s Thomas Ordonneau and Egle Cepaite. This is the second Directors’ Fortnight title the company has bought this year, following Clara Sola.

Filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis said, “We are very excited to present our...

A Hero Don’t let the now infamous mishap cloud Saturday night’s historic achievement: with the Palme d’Or handed out to Titane, Julia Ducournau is only the second female director to win Cannes’s top prize in the festival’s history, twenty-eight years after Jane Campion did so with The Piano. It’s a towering achievement, whose surprise was spoiled thirty minutes earlier than planned by Jury President Spike Lee, who began the awards ceremony by reading out the big winner, effectively putting the whole Moonlight vs La La Land Oscar debacle to shame. It was an astonishing finale worthy of this very unusual year, and as I type these last words—no longer in a press lounge besieged by paparazzi and fellow journalists, but from the comforts of home—I’m still genuinely baffled by it all.Running a fest in the midst of a pandemic was no small feat.

Titane A few days ago, on the eve of the fest, I wrote about how excited I was at the prospect of catching a number of films from directors who’d screened works in previous Cannes editions, but had only now found a spot in the official competition. Such was the case for Julia Ducournau, who’d first travelled to Cannes in 2016, when her cannibal coming-of-age thriller Raw nabbed the Fipresci award in the Critics Week. Watching her second feature, Titane, felt like treading into a familiar turf. The film features motifs Ducournau’s debut pivoted on, chiefly an interest in our bodily urges, in the fluidity and unpredictability of our desires. Much like Raw, it’s a gross-out peppered with stomach-churning moments, but one that swims between tenderness and brutality to complicate the distinction between humans and the objects we fetishize. It’s in that miraculous, unstable balance that...