Berlinale #4: Reinate Rensve conquers Berlin

by Elisa Giudici

A DIFFERENT MAN © Faces Off LLC

Watching her in Norway's international hit The Worst Person in the World (2021), it was clear that Renate Reinsve was destined for great things. Three years later, we find her at the Berlinale starring in two international films and shining brightly in both. Is it finally becoming easier for non-native English-speaking actors to break through internationally? It certainly seems so!

A DIFFERENT MAN by Aaron Schimberg
The title is cleverly crafted and the film has the potential to go far internationally. Writer/director Aaron Schimberg tackles a Lynchian theme (a man's facial deformity reflecting his inner self), and adds a touch of Kafka in a contemporary key. Despite the influences and references, he makes it entirely his own...

Click to read more ...

TIFF '23: "The New Boy" and "Kidnapped"

by Cláudio Alves 

A boy contemplates Jesus on the cross, the figure's perpetual suffering a striking sight. Because he's not been raised Christian, the youth relates more to the depicted pain than the iconography's meaning. In a show of naïve empathy that others would read as sacrilegious, he frees Christ, ripping the nails out of the cross. Whether the son of god's body tumbles a wooden fall or walks away reborn depends on the film, but the basic premise of these scenes ties Warwick Thornton's The New Boy and Marco Bellocchio's Kidnapped together. 

Both films consider historical atrocities done in the name of good, unmoored children at the center of a religious storm. Thornton sees a fictional aboriginal boy as a synecdoche for his colonized people, while the Italian master dramatizes the real-life episode of a Jewish boy taken from his family…

Click to read more ...

Venice 2023: Roman Polanski's "The Palace" and more...

by Elisa Giudici

"The Palace"

Venice is experiencing an absence this year: the middle-ground movies. While there are some mind-blowing films and quite a few terrible ones, those good yet imperfect titles are notably missing. This 80th edition of the festival has been quite the rollercoaster, with moments of brilliance followed by real disappointments. Some movies have sunk so low that they become oddly memorable. Let's take a closer look at a few of the disappointments witnessed in Venice recently.

THE PALACE by Roman Polanski
It might be too early to pass judgment, but Polanski's latest film is a disaster of such magnitude that I hope the title of the worst movie in competition won't fall to an Italian entry...

Click to read more ...

Venice 2023: Opening film "Comandante" and the latest from Liliani Cavani

by Elisa Giudici

Edoardo De Angelis & Pierfrancesco Favino on the set of "Comandante"

Opening the Venice Film Festival is a daunting enough challenge. Now imagine being called in as a last-minute replacement for Luca Guadagnino’s new film starring Zendaya. Yet, Edoardo De Angelis managed to uphold the honor of Italian cinema admirably. His new film Comandante stands as a notable piece of filmmaking, injecting an interesting angle into the war subgenre of submarine films. To put it in perspective, it holds its own against the likes of The Wolf's Call, a recent European film of similar ambition from 2019, which boated a budget twice the size of Comandante.

A budget of 14 million euros isn't trivial within the national cinematic landscape, where the majority of yearly productions hover around the 1 to 2 million euro mark. This significant financial backing primarily went into meticulously recreating the interior and exterior spaces of the Cappellini submarine. Surprisingly, this endeavor was complicated by the scarcity of photographic references for the original ship or its close counterparts. De Angelis's film underscores a poignant historical reality: the majority of Italy's 120 submarines utilized during World War II met their demise, their crews were lost at sea, resting beneath coral crosses...

Click to read more ...

Queering the Oscars: Best Actor "A Special Day"

by Eric Blume

Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role.  Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.   

A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...

Click to read more ...