2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier

To think about Italian cinema in the immediate postwar era is almost inevitably to conjure up heartrending images from the classic neo-realist films like Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Vittor...

The ever popular I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, Mario Monicelli, 1958) is a pivotal film in Italian cinema. It marks the end of 1950s “pink neo-realism”, which adapted neo-realist settings to the ...

Mainly, it’s a question of speed. Two characters, one sports car, and as much velocity as you can muster on Italian freeways. Yet, it’s also about the speed of life, of desire, of language and gestures, and lin...

While he may be most famous outside of Italy for co-directing Federico Fellini’s first feature Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950), Milan-born Alberto Lattuada had a long career spanning more than four deca...

Undoubtedly motivated by its poor performance at the box office, and the generally hostile critical reaction it received at the time it was released, Vittorio De Sica’s Il boom (1963) long remained one of the m...

To be anointed as the child of the nouvelle vague could be a burden for any actor to bear, but Jean-Pierre Léaud has carried it with grace, inventiveness and humility over more than half a century of cinema. In...

 “I lie... but only once in a while. At times, if I told the truth they wouldn’t believe me. So I tell lies.” - Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Les Quatre cents coups In the first scenes of François Truff...

Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le Départ (1967) was shot in three weeks on a budget of just $US100,000 – a low cost even in the mid-1960s (1). There was also a good deal of improvisation in this film, the first Skolimowsk...

Jean-Pierre Léaud strides down the middle of a narrow Parisian street, declaiming a few lines of nonsense poetry, which he repeats several times over in circular fashion, such that one soon loses track of any s...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 56, August 2010 With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behi...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 48, August 2008 La Maman et la putain/The Mother and the Whore (1973 France 215 mins) Prod Co: Elite Films/Ciné Qua Non/Les Films du Losange/Simar Films/V. M...

The central character in The Legend Maker (Ian Pringle, 2014) is an avuncular crook, a criminal type familiar to contemporary audiences from the recent Hollywood hit American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013) to ...