Review: Sophia Loren returns with "The Life Ahead"

by Cláudio Alves

The Movie Star and Her Director Son

Even before we see her face in The Life Ahead, it's impossible to draw the eyes away from Sophia Loren. Following in the tradition of European realism, Edoardo Ponti's camera captures an Italian marketplace with shaky energy. However, no matter how shabby the framing might be, the colors depart from the standards of realism. Angus Hudson's cinematography makes everything a bit too bright, the sun shining on the streets like golden flames, every saturated color intensified. It's reality as if painted with crayons by an enthusiastic child. 

In this sunny landscape, a shot of bright blue, bluer than the sky, stands out, crowned by a mess of gunmetal hair. Dressed in azure, Loren may have lost some of the youthful glow of her heyday in the midcentury, but the star power is intact, her magnetism as strong as ever. Furthermore, the director, her son, knows how to pay reverence to the screen legend without making it too obvious or too elegiac…

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Anna Magnani in Hollywood

by Cláudio Alves

In 1957, the Italian actress Anna Magnani received her second and final Oscar nomination. She had won the Best Actress prize two years before thanks to her first Hollywood movie, the adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, in which she gives a volcanic performance that's still considered, by many, as one of the best winners in the category's history. Still, despite such a glorious start, her career in American pictures was short-lived, encompassing only four films made between 1955 and 1969.

On one hand, Hollywood's mistreatment of a great actress is heartbreaking. On the other, Magnani's tenure in the American film industry feels right for her legacy, reflecting how one of a kind she was and how this acting titan resisted any and all attempts of assimilating her into the model of traditional stardom…

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Sophia Loren Returns...

by Eric Blume

Variety recently announced that Netflix has acquired rights to an Italian remake of the 1977 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa. Now titled The Life Ahead, it stars Sophia Loren in the Simone Signoret role, who this time "forges a bond with a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant boy named Momo."

There's a lot to unpack here.  The original Madame Rosa movie is notoriously one of the worst winners of that Oscar category, and for good reason:  the movie is sentimental garbage.  This French film won over, among others, Luis Bunuel's challenging The Obscure Object of Desire and Ettore Scola's A Special Day, starring Marcello Mastroianni and...Sophia Loren...

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Fellini @ 100: "Amarcord"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Eric Blume...

 

Federico Fellini’s 1975 film Amarcord is considered the culmination of his style and artistry, the “most Fellini” of Fellini films, the one that won him his last (of four) Best Foreign Film Oscar, as well as prizes from the New York Film Critics and National Board of Review as director of the year.  And he never made a film afterwards that rivaled its success or connection with audiences... 

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Fellini @ 100: "La Strada"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Mark Brinkerhoff...

My first recollection of watching La Strada is in a class at school as a youth. Oddly though, I neither can recall which class nor at what age exactly I saw it. But Federico Fellini’s 1954 breakthrough is nothing if not a film that sticks with you, like a bracing force which leaves an imprint that lasts.

A masterwork in Italian neorealism, La Strada (“The Road”) is set largely against the backdrop of a traveling circus, centering on a triangle of sorts between a trio of street performers...

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