Alternative Film Guide

The 1913 melodrama Ma l’amor mio non muore / Love Everlasting, starring super-diva Lyda Borelli, will be screened on Tuesday, May 13 at 7pm at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Why a silent movie screening at an academy of music, of all places?
Well, perhaps because Lyda Borelli (1884–1959) plays a singer in the [...]

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma / Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Direction: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti; inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s book. Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, Hélène Surgère, Sergio Fascetti, Bruno Musso, Antonio [...]

2008 David di Donatello - Italian Academy Awards
The 2008 David di Donatello: films released between April 27, 2007, and March 7, 2008.
2008 David di Donatello nominations: March 20, 2008.
2008 David di Donatello winners: April 18, 2008.
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

best film / miglior film
Caos calmo, produced by Domenico Procacci, directed by Antonello Grimaldi [...]

The first U.S. theatrical engagement for writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore’s mystery-drama The Unknown Woman, (previously known as — no pun intended — The Unknown) will finally take place on May 30, 2008, at New York City’s Angelika Film Center.
The Unknown Woman follows Irena, a mysterious Ukrainian woman (Xenia Rappoport) who finds work at the home of [...]

This year’s Berlin Film Festival will present the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement to the unabashedly political Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi, 85, on February 14, 2008.
Rosi’s work includes Salvatore Giuliano (above), which earned him a best director Silver Bear back in 1962; Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Mattei Affair (1972); and the Oscar [...]

Francis Ford Coppola, 68, on Youth Without Youth (see trailer below), his first film since the dreadful — and highly successful — 1997 courtroom melodrama The Rainmaker:
"When you venture into new territories … you know that it’s different than Spider-Man or Shrek or other films that are immediately met with success. So, part of being [...]

Il Grido / The Cry (1957)
Direction: Michelangelo Antonioni. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ennio de Concini. Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Dorian Gray, Betsy Blair, Lyn Shaw, Gabriella Pallotti
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
So much attention has been paid to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s later New Wave films that his earlier Neo-Realist efforts has been overlooked, [...]

Michael Walford in Kinoeye, in reference to the September 2007 DVD release of Luchino Visconti’s dramatic-comedy Bellissima, about a very devoted (sound)stage mother (Anna Magnani, as her usually Vesuvian self) and her young film-extra daughter, in the British DVD distributor Eureka’s "Masters of Cinema" series:
"It is a film which is sadly underwritten in English. [...]

The American Cinematheque has been screening a series of films — most of them rare, not on DVD, and in new 35mm prints — with fantastic/ghostly/spooky/creepy themes at their 7th Festival of Fantasy, Horror & Science-Fiction at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The series began on Aug. 2, but since it still has about ten [...]

Boyd van Hoeij reviews Francesca Comencini’s A casa nostra / Our Country at european-films.net:
"A casa nostra literally means ‘in our house’ or ‘in our home,’ and can be taken to refer to individual dwellings, whole cities or provinces as well as the country at large of the English title. In Italian, this ambiguity blurs the [...]

Martin Scorsese on Michelangelo Antonioni in "The Man Who Set Film Free" in the New York Times:
"Nineteen sixty-one … a long time ago. Almost 50 years. But the sensation of seeing L’Avventura for the first time is still with me, as if it had been yesterday.
"Where did I see it? Was it at the Art [...]

Derek Malcolm in The Evening Standard (via This Is London):
"The time when crowds rushed off to the Academy or the Paris Pullman art houses to mull over the latest masterpieces from Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni seem like an age ago. Now they are both dead, and within 24 hours of each other, too. The [...]

A.O. Scott discusses Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in the New York Times:
"By the time I entered my own phase of undergraduate cinephilia … [in the mid-1980s], Mr. Bergman’s greatness was beyond dispute, and Mr. Antonioni’s reputation was only slightly less secure. The two of them — along with the other masters whose work had [...]

Michelangelo Antonioni, the film master of modern alienation, despair, and ennui, was the third important personage of world cinema to die in the last three days — Ingmar Bergman and Michel Serrault were the other two. Antonioni, who had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985, died on Monday, July 30, in Rome. He was 94.
Italian [...]

The most famous — and most effective — sequence in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso is the film clip montage at the end.
In the 1950s, a small-town Catholic priest suffering from some serious sexual hangups and with way too much time — and power — in his hands had ordered that scenes [...]

Unsurprisingly, Giuseppe Tornatore’s dark drama La Sconosciuta / The Unknown Woman was the top winner at this year’s Nastri d’Argento (Silver Ribbons) presented by the National Union of Italian Film Journalists at the Teatro Antico di Taormina, Sicily, this past June 23. Even so, as was the case at the Italian Academy’s David di Donatello [...]

While accepting his title as Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic this past June 14, Pedro Almodóvar remarked that "Quentin Tarantino is simpatico and talented, but he sometimes suffers from a sort of verbal incontinence." Almodóvar was referring to the American director’s recent put-down of the new Italian cinema.
At the Cannes [...]

No particular film dominated the Italian Film Academy’s 51st David di Donatello Awards, presented this evening at the Gran Teatro di Tor di Quinto in Rome, though Giuseppe Tornatore’s La Sconosciuta / The Unknown Woman (above) came out as the top winner of the evening.
Tornatore’s dark drama about a mysterious Ukrainian woman (Ksenia Rappoport, [...]

Via Boyd van Hoeij’s european-films.net:
"The Italian Un certain regard title and local boxoffice hit Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is An Only Child) is a fun panoramic snapshot of politically engaged Italian youngsters in the 1960s and 70s that is not only a portrait of its time but also, be it in diluted [...]

51st David di Donatello - 2007 Italian Academy Awards
The 51st David di Donatello Awards were presented by the Italian Film Academy to films released between March 31, 2006 and May 31, 2007.
The 51st David di Donatello Award nominations were announced on May 8, 2007.
The 51st David di Donatello Award winners were announced at the Gran [...]

The two top nominees for the 61st Nastri d’Argento Italian Cinema Awards presented by the National Union of Italian Film Journalists (Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani) are Giuseppe Tornatore’s suspense drama La Sconosciuta / The Unknown Woman (above, lower photo) and Nanni Moretti’s anarchic political satire Il Caimano / The Caiman (above, upper photo), each [...]

61st Nastri d’Argento Italian Cinema Awards - 2006-2007
The 61st Nastri d’Argento (Silver Ribbons) were presented by the Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani (National Union of Italian Film Journalists) to Italian films — or, at times, to Italian talent in foreign films — released between Jan. 1, 2006, and March 31, 2007.
The 61st Nastri d’Argento Italian [...]

At european-films.net:
Boyd van Hoeij interviews director Saverio Costanzo, whose Private was Italy’s submission for the 2005 Academy Awards. (The ever finicky Academy, however, sent the film back because it was not spoken in Italian. Italy submitted another film, La Bestia nel cuore / Don’t Tell, which did get a nomination. Last year, the Academy changed [...]

Total Denial (2006)
Director: Milena Kaneva
 

By Rosemary Westwell
The destruction of democracy in Myanmar (or Burma) is well known. The brutal behavior of the military is equally familiar, but the extent and consequences of that behavior have rarely been shown to such chilling effect as in Milena Kaneva’s Total Denial.
Watching the personal accounts — clearly obtained [...]

Sure, the 2007 Berlinale, which has kicked off this evening, will offer a number of good — hopefully even a few great — new films. But for my money, the most interesting section this year is the Retrospective covering the roles of women in silent films of the 1910s and 1920s.
I’ve mentioned the Retrospective [...]