Above: 1963 German re-release poster by Heinz Edelmann for Kind Hearts and Coronets.If you are near Berlin during the next four months there is a movie poster exhibition that you must not miss. It opens today at the Kulturforum and it is called Grosses Kino: Filmplakate aller Zeiten, which translates as The Big Screen: Film Posters of All Time.Grosses Kino has been curated by Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (the Art Library at the Berlin State Museum) in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek. The Kunstbibliothek has an extraordinary collection of over 5,000 film posters, 300 of which—dating from 1905 to 2023—have been selected for the exhibition. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 26 “film industry experts” from the fields of acting, directing, cinema management, film studies, art, and graphic design selected to choose one...
- 11/8/2023
- MUBI
Film actor of the 1950s and 60s who went from early Italian roles to become an international star
The actor Gina Lollobrigida, who has died aged 95, was one of the great film stars of the 1950s and 60s, and an icon of Italian cinema who became known as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.
The movie that launched her as a sex symbol was Altri Tempi, an anthology film directed by Alessandro Blasetti, in which Vittorio De Sica was the lawyer who defends the honour of a woman (Lollobrigida) accused of being too sexy. She was signed up the following year to play opposite Errol Flynn in Crossed Swords and in what was to become a cult movie, John Huston’s tongue-in-cheek adventure yarn Beat the Devil, in which she co-starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones.
The actor Gina Lollobrigida, who has died aged 95, was one of the great film stars of the 1950s and 60s, and an icon of Italian cinema who became known as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.
The movie that launched her as a sex symbol was Altri Tempi, an anthology film directed by Alessandro Blasetti, in which Vittorio De Sica was the lawyer who defends the honour of a woman (Lollobrigida) accused of being too sexy. She was signed up the following year to play opposite Errol Flynn in Crossed Swords and in what was to become a cult movie, John Huston’s tongue-in-cheek adventure yarn Beat the Devil, in which she co-starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones.
- 1/16/2023
- by John Francis Lane
- The Guardian - Film News
Academy Award-nominated actress Valentina Cortese died Wednesday in Milan. She was 96.
Cortese, born in 1923, was one of the leading ladies of Italian cinema of the 1940s, first gaining fame with the role of Lisabetta in the 1942 film La cena delle beffeby from Alessandro Blasetti.
Her screen presence earned her international acclaim. She starred as both Fantine and Cosette in the 1948 Italian version of Les Miserables, with Gino Cervi and a young Marcello Mastroianni. After starring in the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain, she starred in numerous American films of the time.
In 1948, she signed with ...
Cortese, born in 1923, was one of the leading ladies of Italian cinema of the 1940s, first gaining fame with the role of Lisabetta in the 1942 film La cena delle beffeby from Alessandro Blasetti.
Her screen presence earned her international acclaim. She starred as both Fantine and Cosette in the 1948 Italian version of Les Miserables, with Gino Cervi and a young Marcello Mastroianni. After starring in the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain, she starred in numerous American films of the time.
In 1948, she signed with ...
- 7/10/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
Academy Award-nominated actress Valentina Cortese died Wednesday in Milan. She was 96.
Cortese, born in 1923, was one of the leading ladies of Italian cinema of the 1940s, first gaining fame with the role of Lisabetta in the 1942 film La cena delle beffeby from Alessandro Blasetti.
Her screen presence earned her international acclaim. She starred as both Fantine and Cosette in the 1948 Italian version of Les Miserables, with Gino Cervi and a young Marcello Mastroianni. After starring in the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain, she starred in numerous American films of the time.
In 1948, she signed with ...
Cortese, born in 1923, was one of the leading ladies of Italian cinema of the 1940s, first gaining fame with the role of Lisabetta in the 1942 film La cena delle beffeby from Alessandro Blasetti.
Her screen presence earned her international acclaim. She starred as both Fantine and Cosette in the 1948 Italian version of Les Miserables, with Gino Cervi and a young Marcello Mastroianni. After starring in the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain, she starred in numerous American films of the time.
In 1948, she signed with ...
- 7/10/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
ZamaThe programme for the 2017 edition of the Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Darren Aronofsky, Lucrecia Martel, Frederick Wiseman, Alexander Payne, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Abdellatif Kechiche, Takeshi Kitano and many more.COMPETITIONmother! (Darren Aronofsky)First Reformed (Paul Schrader)Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton)The Leisure Seeker (Paolo Virzi)Una Famiglia (Sebastiano Riso)Ex Libris - The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman)Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu)The Whale (Andrea Pallaoro)Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)Ammore e malavita (Manetti Brothers)Jusqu'a la garde (Xavier Legrand)The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda)Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche)Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)L'insulte (Ziad Doueiri)La Villa (Robert Guediguian)The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)Suburbicon (George Clooney)Human Flow (Ai Weiwei)Downsizing (Alexander Payne)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesOur Souls at Night (Ritesh Batra)Il Signor Rotpeter (Antonietta de Lillo)Victoria...
- 7/27/2017
- MUBI
On the heels of the Toronto International Film Festival announcement earlier this week, Venice Film Festival have now delivered their full lineup and while there’s no Terrence Malick as rumored, there’s a plethora of highly-anticipated titles. Along with the previously-announced opener Downsizing and the expected Suburbicon, mother!, The Shape of Water, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, there’s Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color follow-up Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, and Brawl In Cell Block 99, the latest film from Bone Tomahawk director S. Craig Zahler.
Also in the lineup is Errol Morris’s Netflix crime drama Wormwood, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris – New York Public Library, Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Third Murder, Takeshi Kitano’s closing night film Outrage Coda, Michaël R. Roskam’s Racer and The Jailbird, the Kirsten Dunst-led Woodshock,...
Also in the lineup is Errol Morris’s Netflix crime drama Wormwood, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris – New York Public Library, Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Third Murder, Takeshi Kitano’s closing night film Outrage Coda, Michaël R. Roskam’s Racer and The Jailbird, the Kirsten Dunst-led Woodshock,...
- 7/27/2017
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Venice Announces 2017 Lineup, Including ‘The Shape of Water,’ ‘Suburbicon,’ ‘mother!,’ and Many More
Will 2017 be the year that Venice gets its king-making mojo back? After a steady run of debuting recent best picture winners — from “Spotlight” to “Birdman” — the festival missed out on last year’s big winner, “Moonlight,” which bowed at Telluride. This year’s lineup is a promising one, and while it’s still very early in the process, it’s difficult not to pick through today’s announcement of the festival’s slate and not search for the big contenders.
As was previously announced, the festival will open with Alexander Payne’s social satire “Downsizing,” starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig. The festival will also play home to the premiere of the Netflix original “Our Souls at Night,” as part of their planned tribute to stars Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Annette Bening will lead the competition jury, ending an 11-year succession of male jury chiefs.
Read MoreIndieWire Fall Film...
As was previously announced, the festival will open with Alexander Payne’s social satire “Downsizing,” starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig. The festival will also play home to the premiere of the Netflix original “Our Souls at Night,” as part of their planned tribute to stars Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Annette Bening will lead the competition jury, ending an 11-year succession of male jury chiefs.
Read MoreIndieWire Fall Film...
- 7/27/2017
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.
No movie made in the 1940s is quite like The Iron Crown, Alessandro Blasetti’s sumptuous fantasy epic of one-eyed barbarians, glittering suits of spiky armor, and pseudo-medieval exotica. It’s sort of a blockbuster avant la lettre, very violent and lovably cheesy, closer in aesthetics and spirit to the likes of Krull and Conan The Barbarian than to the costume and fairy-tale movies of its era. In the context of film history, one might call it the midpoint between the spectacular epics of the golden age of Italian silent film and the wondrously corny Italian sword-and-sandal cheapies of the early 1960s—or perhaps an attempt by Blasetti, a student of Soviet film, to outdo Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Alexander Nevsky. But it’s much stranger than that. The...
No movie made in the 1940s is quite like The Iron Crown, Alessandro Blasetti’s sumptuous fantasy epic of one-eyed barbarians, glittering suits of spiky armor, and pseudo-medieval exotica. It’s sort of a blockbuster avant la lettre, very violent and lovably cheesy, closer in aesthetics and spirit to the likes of Krull and Conan The Barbarian than to the costume and fairy-tale movies of its era. In the context of film history, one might call it the midpoint between the spectacular epics of the golden age of Italian silent film and the wondrously corny Italian sword-and-sandal cheapies of the early 1960s—or perhaps an attempt by Blasetti, a student of Soviet film, to outdo Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Alexander Nevsky. But it’s much stranger than that. The...
- 4/11/2017
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Vittorio de Sica's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) is playing January 8 - February 6, 2017 in the United States.Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), winner of the 1965 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a trio of stories directed by Vittorio De Sica in the omnibus fashion so popular at the time (just the year prior, he had contributed to the similarly structured Boccaccio ‘70, alongside Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, and Luchino Visconti). Spearheaded by international super-producer Carlo Ponti—helping to ensure global distribution and award-worthy prestige—the film is, first and foremost, a collaborative compendium of what partially defined the popular perception of its versatile director and its two leads, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.The first short, “Adelina,” was written by Eduardo De Filippo and Isabella Quarantotti, the second, “Anna,” by Bella Billa, Lorenza Zanuso, and one of Italian neorealism’s founding fathers,...
- 1/8/2017
- MUBI
Danièle Delorme and Jean Gabin in 'Deadlier Than the Male.' Danièle Delorme movies (See previous post: “Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 Actress Became Rare Woman Director's Muse.”) “Every actor would like to make a movie with Charles Chaplin or René Clair,” Danièle Delorme explains in the filmed interview (ca. 1960) embedded further below, adding that oftentimes it wasn't up to them to decide with whom they would get to work. Yet, although frequently beyond her control, Delorme managed to collaborate with a number of major (mostly French) filmmakers throughout her six-decade movie career. Aside from her Jacqueline Audry films discussed in the previous Danièle Delorme article, below are a few of her most notable efforts – usually playing naive-looking young women of modest means and deceptively inconspicuous sexuality, whose inner character may or may not match their external appearance. Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (“Open for Inventory Causes,” 1946), an unreleased, no-budget comedy notable...
- 12/18/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
It had been so long since I last saw Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves—the last time being long before I started to become involved with movie posters—that I had forgotten that Antonio Ricci’s job at the start of the film, the job he so desperately needs a bicycle for, is pasting up movie posters.Researching De Sica posters to coincide with the current month-long restrospective at New York’s Film Forum I discovered that De Sica’s most famous film centers—as does the Shawshank Redemption, coincidentally—on a poster of Rita Hayworth. I had hoped that it would be a poster by Anselmo Ballester, who painted Hayworth gloriously many times, but the signature on the top right of the poster is clearly that of one T. Corbella. Tito Corbella (1885-1966) was an artist known for his sensuous portraits of Italian divas since the 1910s. Dave Kehr...
- 9/19/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Maximilian Schell dead at 83: Best Actor Oscar winner for ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ (photo: Maximilian Schell ca. 1960) Actor and filmmaker Maximilian Schell, best known for his Oscar-winning performance as the defense attorney in Stanley Kramer’s 1961 political drama Judgment at Nuremberg died at a hospital in Innsbruck, Austria, on February 1, 2014. According to his agent, Patricia Baumbauer, Schell died overnight following a "sudden and serious illness." Maximilian Schell was 83. Born on December 8, 1930, in Vienna, Maximilian Schell was the younger brother of future actor Carl Schell and Maria Schell, who would become an international film star in the 1950s (The Last Bridge, Gervaise, The Hanging Tree). Immy Schell, who would be featured in several television and film productions from the mid-’50s to the early ’90s, was born in 1935. Following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Schell’s parents, Swiss playwright Hermann Ferdinand Schell and Austrian stage actress Margarete Schell Noé,...
- 2/2/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Anna Magnani in (what looks like) Luchino Visconti's Bellissima At the end of Giuseppe Tornatore's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner Cinema Paradiso, small-town projectionist Philippe Noiret has died and the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso has become a pile of rubble. The bratty Italian boy Salvatore Cascio has grown into the classy Frenchman Jacques Perrin (like Noiret, dubbed in Italian), a filmmaker who sits to watch a mysterious reel of film the deceased projectionist had left him. It turns out the reel contains clips from films censored by the prudish local parish priest, whose family values found kisses, embraces, and bare breasts and legs a danger to society. Now, who's doing all that kissing, embracing, and breast/leg-displaying in that film reel? (Please scroll down for the Cinema Paradiso clip.) Here are the ones I recognize: Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman in Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949); Mangano...
- 2/14/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
With a filmography boasting some of the most important and entertaining films of the last forty years, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to The Departed and Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese could be forgiven for resting on his laurels or at least taking a nice relaxing holiday. Yet this doesn’t seem to be in his make-up. A dedicated cinephile and music lover, the director has been an equally prolific documentarian over the years and the results are rarely less than spellbinding, with his chosen subject matter always deeply personal.
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999) – which is released on DVD tomorrow – are among the best of these movies, with Marty himself narrating – passionately sharing his thoughts on the films which have inspired him in an accessible, unpretentious style. Aided by his own touching reminiscences as well as...
With a filmography boasting some of the most important and entertaining films of the last forty years, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to The Departed and Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese could be forgiven for resting on his laurels or at least taking a nice relaxing holiday. Yet this doesn’t seem to be in his make-up. A dedicated cinephile and music lover, the director has been an equally prolific documentarian over the years and the results are rarely less than spellbinding, with his chosen subject matter always deeply personal.
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999) – which is released on DVD tomorrow – are among the best of these movies, with Marty himself narrating – passionately sharing his thoughts on the films which have inspired him in an accessible, unpretentious style. Aided by his own touching reminiscences as well as...
- 9/25/2011
- by Robert Beames
- Obsessed with Film
Producer of Pier Paolo Pasolini's early films
Though an enterprising film producer, often ahead of his times, Alfredo Bini, who has died aged 83, is best remembered for having given the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini the chance to make his debut as a film-maker with Accattone (1960), when no other film company was prepared to back it. Bini produced more than 40 films, including all the features made by Pasolini up until 1967, including Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964). Among his other films were many starring his wife, Rosanna Schiaffino.
Bini was born in Livorno, Tuscany, and, during the second world war, ran away from home to join the army. He was wounded and got a medal, but went back to finish his studies in biology. He soon gave up the idea of a scientific career and in 1945 moved to Rome, where, after taking on various jobs, he managed a theatre group.
Though an enterprising film producer, often ahead of his times, Alfredo Bini, who has died aged 83, is best remembered for having given the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini the chance to make his debut as a film-maker with Accattone (1960), when no other film company was prepared to back it. Bini produced more than 40 films, including all the features made by Pasolini up until 1967, including Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964). Among his other films were many starring his wife, Rosanna Schiaffino.
Bini was born in Livorno, Tuscany, and, during the second world war, ran away from home to join the army. He was wounded and got a medal, but went back to finish his studies in biology. He soon gave up the idea of a scientific career and in 1945 moved to Rome, where, after taking on various jobs, he managed a theatre group.
- 11/2/2010
- by John Francis Lane
- The Guardian - Film News
Lamberto Maggiorani in Vittorio de Sica‘s Bicycle Thieves (aka The Bicycle Thief) Suso Cecchi D’Amico, the only top female screenwriter in the post-war Italian cinema, died today in Rome. She had turned 96 on July 14. According to reports, no cause of death was given. Chiefly among Cecchi D’Amico’s screenwriting contributions — nearly 120 of them — are those for Vittorio de Sica‘s Oscar-winning neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Cannes Film Festival co-winner Miracle in Milan (1951), and for numerous films directed by Luchino Visconti, among them Bellissima (1951), Senso (1954), Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Il Gattopardo / The Leopard (1963), Ludwig (1973), and Conversation Piece (1975). Additionally, Cecchi D’Amico collaborated with a number of other celebrated Italian filmmakers, including Michelangelo Antonioni (Le Amiche / The Girlfriends), Alessandro Blasetti (La fortuna di essere donna / Lucky to Be a Woman), Luigi Zampa (L’onorevole Angelina), [...]...
- 8/1/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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