Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lina Wertmüller's The Basilisks is showing on Mubi starting January 2, 2021 in most countries in the series First Films First.In Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (2012) (“Everything in its right place and nothing in order”), the autobiography of Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich, the director recounts the fortuitous way her debut feature came to be. “It was 1961, I was going to visit Francesco Rosi on the set of Salvatore Giuliano with [Italian film critic] Tulio Kezich and on our way we decided to stop by Palazzo San Gervasio,” the director reminisced, “my father’s native village.” “For me,” Wertmüller continued, “it was the discovery of a world.” Struck by this corner of southern Italy seemingly untouched by the economic boom, where modernity was simultaneously coveted and repudiated, Wertmüller, exhorted by Kezich, wrote the screenplay for I basilischi in a week.
- 1/5/2021
- MUBI
Is Joseph Losey’s elusive, maudit masterpiece really a masterpiece? Stanley Baker’s foolish lout of a writer ruins his life pursuing the wanton Jeanne Moreau, and it’s hard to tell if she’s punishing him or he’s punishing himself. Losey’s directing skills are in top form on location in Venice and Rome for this absorbing art film. Pi’s overdue and very welcome disc sorts out the multiple release versions for the first time, and in so doing finally makes the show critically accessible. Co-starring (swoon) Virna Lisi and James Villiers.
Eve
Region B Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1962 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 126 109, 108 min. / Eva, The Devil’s Woman / Street Date October 19, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Riccardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Roberto Paoletti, Alexis Revidis, Evi Rigano.
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë
Film...
Eve
Region B Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1962 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 126 109, 108 min. / Eva, The Devil’s Woman / Street Date October 19, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Riccardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Roberto Paoletti, Alexis Revidis, Evi Rigano.
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë
Film...
- 9/26/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the American Society of Cinematographers has released a list of the 100 best shot films of the 20th century.
This list was released to "showcase the best of cinematography as selected by professional cinematographers.” Here's how the list was put together:
The process of cultivating the 100 films began with Asc members each submitting 10 to 25 titles that were personally inspirational or perhaps changed the way they approached their craft. “I asked them — as cinematographers, members of the Asc, artists, filmmakers and people who love film and whose lives were shaped by films — to list the films that were most influential,” Fierberg explains. A master list was then complied, and members voted on what they considered to be the most essential 100 titles.
Here's a little sizzle reel that was cut together showcasing some of the films on the list:
It's hard to argue with the Top 10 films,...
This list was released to "showcase the best of cinematography as selected by professional cinematographers.” Here's how the list was put together:
The process of cultivating the 100 films began with Asc members each submitting 10 to 25 titles that were personally inspirational or perhaps changed the way they approached their craft. “I asked them — as cinematographers, members of the Asc, artists, filmmakers and people who love film and whose lives were shaped by films — to list the films that were most influential,” Fierberg explains. A master list was then complied, and members voted on what they considered to be the most essential 100 titles.
Here's a little sizzle reel that was cut together showcasing some of the films on the list:
It's hard to argue with the Top 10 films,...
- 1/9/2019
- by Joey Paur
- GeekTyrant
Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on seven films featuring the music of Nino Rota.
Celebrate iconic Italian films in a new way: ears first, through the scores composed by this long-time collaborator of Fellini (and many others).
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
8 1/2
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.
Amarcord
This carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the fascist period, the most personal film from Federico Fellini, satirizes the director’s youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals,...
Celebrate iconic Italian films in a new way: ears first, through the scores composed by this long-time collaborator of Fellini (and many others).
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
8 1/2
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.
Amarcord
This carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the fascist period, the most personal film from Federico Fellini, satirizes the director’s youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals,...
- 1/5/2016
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
After finally securing 1961’s La Notte as part of the Criterion line-up, we’re treated to a new restoration and Blu-ray transfer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, which originally graced the collection back in 2005. The final chapter of the unofficial “Incommunicability Trilogy,” it is, perhaps, the most ‘sex positive’ chapter of the erotomania that partially defines the crumbling of the troubling social orders at hand, and it certainly has a more vibrant energy than the previous films, beginning with 1960’s L’Avventura. As far as narrative goes, however, this may possibly be the most oblique of the three films, meandering through possibilities before delivering a confounding final seven minutes that are as strikingly at odds with the rest of the feature as well as confoundingly, maddeningly riveting.
A beautiful woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), tiredly pads back and forth in her lover’s (Fernando Rabal) apartment, a fan providing the...
A beautiful woman, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), tiredly pads back and forth in her lover’s (Fernando Rabal) apartment, a fan providing the...
- 6/10/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
The Criterion Collection has just released a new filmmaker top ten and this time it's Martin Scorsese getting the honors and he has quite a lot to say about each. The list includes obvious titles such as The Red Shoes, 8 1/2, The Leopard, Ashes and Diamonds and others as they were all on his list of Top 12 Films of All-Time from back in 2012. Nevertheless, it remains fascinating to read his words and reasoning. For example, I find it interesting to see him placing Roberto Rossellini's Paisan at #1. So often Rome Open City is the most talked about of Rossellini's fabulous War Trilogy (read my review) and so infrequently you hear about Paisan or Germany Year Zero, the latter of which is an absolute stunner. I've never sen Jean Renoir's The River or Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, but the rest I've viewed. I'm not a huge fan of The Leopard,...
- 2/28/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
(Federico Fellini, 1963; Argent Films, 15)
With La Dolce Vita, Fellini created a new, fantastical, personal, expressive style of film-making to succeed the fading neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema since the second world war. With Otto e Mezzo, he went even further. He made the most avant-garde movie ever to become a major international success, a film where dream, nightmare, memory and reality intermingle in the story of Guido Anselmi (Fellini's handsome cinematic alter ego), a successful director suffering a serious crisis. Guido has embarked on an expensive production, a science-fiction film with an enormous set already built of a spaceship launch pad. Unfortunately, he's suffering from the equivalent of a writer's block. Surrounded by a variety of people dependent on him – a beautiful, resentful wife (Anouk Aimée), a demanding mistress (Sandra Milo), numerous actors, increasingly anxious producers – he has no idea how to complete his ambitious, determinedly honest picture.
With La Dolce Vita, Fellini created a new, fantastical, personal, expressive style of film-making to succeed the fading neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema since the second world war. With Otto e Mezzo, he went even further. He made the most avant-garde movie ever to become a major international success, a film where dream, nightmare, memory and reality intermingle in the story of Guido Anselmi (Fellini's handsome cinematic alter ego), a successful director suffering a serious crisis. Guido has embarked on an expensive production, a science-fiction film with an enormous set already built of a spaceship launch pad. Unfortunately, he's suffering from the equivalent of a writer's block. Surrounded by a variety of people dependent on him – a beautiful, resentful wife (Anouk Aimée), a demanding mistress (Sandra Milo), numerous actors, increasingly anxious producers – he has no idea how to complete his ambitious, determinedly honest picture.
- 12/1/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
La Notte (1961) is the first film from Michelangelo Antonioni I've seen more than once. Outside of L'Eclisse and The Passenger, I've seen all of what I presume most would call his "classics" -- L'Avventura, Il Grido, Red Desert and Blow-Up -- though I'm no Antonioni scholar as much as I am a fan. His works aren't immediately approachable and must be left to their own devices, to reveal their secrets at their own pace and under those circumstances La Notte delivers a smashing finale. Explained simply, this is a story of a man and his wife (Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau) who appear to have fallen out of love with one another. Taking place over the course of less than 24 hours very little happens in this film in the way of "action" as so much of what is actually going on is taking place inside the heads of the film's two leads.
- 10/29/2013
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961; Eureka!, 12)
Cinematic trilogies have been all the rage since Pagnol's in the early 30s. But possibly the most influential was the trio that made Antonioni's beautiful, sceptical, ironic muse Monica Vitti the art house pin-up of the 1960s and created a new Italian cinema – cool, oblique, Marxist – to succeed neorealism. It began with L'Avventura, roundly booed at Cannes in 1960 by critics who thought it obscure, and concluded in 1962 with L'Eclisse, which some thought too explicit. Antonioni never made anything better than La Notte, the centrepiece of the trilogy, superbly shot in black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo, the key cinematographer of his time.
Set during a single day and night in a Milan where steel and glass skyscrapers are going up and old buildings being pulled down, it opens with a disillusioned novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his embittered wife (Jeanne Moreau) visiting their dying friend, a leftwing...
Cinematic trilogies have been all the rage since Pagnol's in the early 30s. But possibly the most influential was the trio that made Antonioni's beautiful, sceptical, ironic muse Monica Vitti the art house pin-up of the 1960s and created a new Italian cinema – cool, oblique, Marxist – to succeed neorealism. It began with L'Avventura, roundly booed at Cannes in 1960 by critics who thought it obscure, and concluded in 1962 with L'Eclisse, which some thought too explicit. Antonioni never made anything better than La Notte, the centrepiece of the trilogy, superbly shot in black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo, the key cinematographer of his time.
Set during a single day and night in a Milan where steel and glass skyscrapers are going up and old buildings being pulled down, it opens with a disillusioned novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his embittered wife (Jeanne Moreau) visiting their dying friend, a leftwing...
- 10/19/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
1. An Unassuming Man
We’Re At Comic-con.
Rian Johnson Sits At The Center Of A Press Table Before The Throngs Of Journalists. Joseph Gordon-levitt Sits To His Left, Emily Blunt Sits To His Right. A Journalist Stands Up In The Back And Proceeds To Ask Mr. Gordon-levitt About His Remarkable Year, Specifically All The Top Flight Directors He’S Worked With. It Is At This Moment That Joe, Who Has Spend Much Of The Conference Smiling And Joking In A Relaxed State, Suddenly Sits Up A Straight And Takes On A Tone Of Utmost Seriousness. He Says:
“I do think...
We’Re At Comic-con.
Rian Johnson Sits At The Center Of A Press Table Before The Throngs Of Journalists. Joseph Gordon-levitt Sits To His Left, Emily Blunt Sits To His Right. A Journalist Stands Up In The Back And Proceeds To Ask Mr. Gordon-levitt About His Remarkable Year, Specifically All The Top Flight Directors He’S Worked With. It Is At This Moment That Joe, Who Has Spend Much Of The Conference Smiling And Joking In A Relaxed State, Suddenly Sits Up A Straight And Takes On A Tone Of Utmost Seriousness. He Says:
“I do think...
- 9/26/2012
- by FILMCRITHULK
- EW.com - PopWatch
Chicago – The remarkable photography in Francesco Rosi’s 1965 bullfighting drama is, alas, its sole redeeming feature. Nearly everything that unfolds in front of Rosi’s lens is flat-out appalling and borderline unwatchable. Critics have hailed the picture for its artful depiction of the action, but all I see is vicious animal cruelty cloaked in crowd-pleasing machismo.
Rosi is, of course, a celebrated Italian filmmaker who’s no stranger to controversy, and his gambles have often paid off tremendously in films such as 1962’s “Salvatore Giuliano” and 1972’s Palme d’Or-winner, “The Mattei Affair.” I don’t believe Rosi was attempting to glorify bullfighting in “Truth,” but aside from its appropriately cautionary finale, the film devolves into a repellent series of ritual slaughters that are as numbing as they are repellant.
Blu-ray Rating: 2.0/5.0
The instantly familiar story centers on a bored farm boy (played by Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín’) with aspirations to...
Rosi is, of course, a celebrated Italian filmmaker who’s no stranger to controversy, and his gambles have often paid off tremendously in films such as 1962’s “Salvatore Giuliano” and 1972’s Palme d’Or-winner, “The Mattei Affair.” I don’t believe Rosi was attempting to glorify bullfighting in “Truth,” but aside from its appropriately cautionary finale, the film devolves into a repellent series of ritual slaughters that are as numbing as they are repellant.
Blu-ray Rating: 2.0/5.0
The instantly familiar story centers on a bored farm boy (played by Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín’) with aspirations to...
- 2/8/2012
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953; 1955, PG, Eureka!)
These invaluable additions to Eureka!'s admirable Masters of Cinema series help us understand the continuity between Michelangelo Antonioni's early work and what followed the controversial 1960 breakthrough of L'Avventura at Cannes. La signore senze camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) belongs in an important tradition of movies about the film industry (it was preceded and followed in Italy by Visconti's Bellissima and Fellini's Otto e mezzo) and stars Lucia Bosè as a movie star trapped between her culturally ambitious husband and her exploitative producers.
In Le Amiche (aka The Girlfriends), his first fully achieved masterpiece, the empathy for and attraction to women join a socialist critique of modern society as the dominant elements in Antonioni's work. Eleonora Rossi Drago plays a working-class beauty returning to her native Turin to open a branch of a Rome couturier. She becomes involved with four local women from the city's haute bourgeoisie and four weak,...
These invaluable additions to Eureka!'s admirable Masters of Cinema series help us understand the continuity between Michelangelo Antonioni's early work and what followed the controversial 1960 breakthrough of L'Avventura at Cannes. La signore senze camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) belongs in an important tradition of movies about the film industry (it was preceded and followed in Italy by Visconti's Bellissima and Fellini's Otto e mezzo) and stars Lucia Bosè as a movie star trapped between her culturally ambitious husband and her exploitative producers.
In Le Amiche (aka The Girlfriends), his first fully achieved masterpiece, the empathy for and attraction to women join a socialist critique of modern society as the dominant elements in Antonioni's work. Eleonora Rossi Drago plays a working-class beauty returning to her native Turin to open a branch of a Rome couturier. She becomes involved with four local women from the city's haute bourgeoisie and four weak,...
- 3/27/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) proved a transitory work in Michelangelo Antonioni’s long career as a filmmaker. It not only signalled new intentions and experiments in form, but the characters began to emerge into what would become the iconic existential figure.
Although not as openly modernist as the later films from which he cultivated an international reputation and staked his claim in history, it’s a very modern and outstanding work. Especially given Antonioni’s unusual place in Italian cinema.
It should also be noted Le Amiche derives from a literary source; a novella by Cesare Parvese. Only three of Antonioni’s films came from such origins. There’s a lot to enjoy in Le Amiche, even if the narrative isn’t as beguiling as some of the later, more famous pictures.
Eleonora Rossi-Drago plays Clelia, a Roman living in Turin who is accidentally drawn into the lives of Signora...
Although not as openly modernist as the later films from which he cultivated an international reputation and staked his claim in history, it’s a very modern and outstanding work. Especially given Antonioni’s unusual place in Italian cinema.
It should also be noted Le Amiche derives from a literary source; a novella by Cesare Parvese. Only three of Antonioni’s films came from such origins. There’s a lot to enjoy in Le Amiche, even if the narrative isn’t as beguiling as some of the later, more famous pictures.
Eleonora Rossi-Drago plays Clelia, a Roman living in Turin who is accidentally drawn into the lives of Signora...
- 3/19/2011
- by Martyn Conterio
- FilmShaft.com
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