Author Joseph Sgammato

Consider the unique case of Roberto Rossellini. Despite his giant reputation as a founder of Italian neorealism, he is still the subject of divided critical opinion. The differences in judgment can be sharp: An...

A note to the audience about to watch L’Amour fou, the 1969 film directed by Jacques Rivette: the movie is over four hours long. Be prepared – find a soft seat, stock up on food and drink. Give your companion a...

Kaos unites the Taviani brothers with Nobel Prize-winning author Luigi Pirandello for an explosion of onscreen Siciliana. As they had done for Sardinia in Padre Padrone (1977) and Tuscany in La Notte di San Lor...

Among the many differences the widely acknowledged dean of Japanese film scholars in the Anglophone world, Donald Richie, likes to point out between Western and Japanese filmmakers is their response to the intr...

When Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami unexpectedly passed away in 2016, he was deeply mourned by lovers of cinema. Martin Scorsese gave voice to the world’s loss when he said, “He was one of those rare artists...

What are we to make of Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), Vittorio De Sica’s comic fantasy about postwar poverty produced within the artistic parameters of neorealismo? We all know the requirements ...

Among important Italian directors, Ermanno Olmi occupies a curious middle ground. Critics and fans alike may sense that his works offer more substance than many – indeed, perhaps even the majority of – films of...

Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys, 2008) was the fifth of the eight features that have so far been directed by Cannes favourite Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a leading Turkish filmmaker who has earned international respect for fil...

University courses on the history of film often begin with the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, most famously the 1878 sequence of still photographs of a galloping racehorse that showed all four ...

Maborosi (1995) launched the feature film career of Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, until then a maker of television documentaries only. Unlike many first efforts that must settle for “promising” status, Ma...