Tagged Italian cinema

Upon watching La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) by Paolo Sorrentino, the first two surfacing feelings are: what a stunning piece of work, and what a desperate country Italy has become. The film is fea...

How did Italian cinema manage to become so big when from Rossellini to Visconti and from Antonioni to Fellini, no one recorded sound with images? A simple answer: the language of Ovid and Virgil, Dante and Le...

Postwar neorealism is often and rightfully framed as the cinematic phenomenon that shaped the course of Italian film for the rest of the 20th century; it is not a coincidence that some of the major academic stu...

In the final shot of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975), the amateur detective/jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stares icily at his own reflection in a pool of still-warm blood. The killer...

Elio Petri’s death in 1982 at the age of only 53 robbed Italy, and the world, of one of the most eclectic and audacious directors to have emerged in the crowded jostle that was the golden age of Italian postwar...

The international marketing campaign for Gommora (Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone, 2008) described it as “the best gangster film since City of God”, a Brazilian film charting life in Rio de Janeiro’s deprived neighbou...

Jacopetti’s fame will always be tied to the phenomenal success of Mondo Cane; a ground breaking film in more ways than could have been anticipated at the time.