Italy
Demetrios Matheou
Italian director Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Happy as Lazarro), ploughs a charmingly idiosyncratic furrow that might be described as magical realism, combining as it does vivid depictions of rural communities with shafts of fantasy and fable.Her latest, La Chimera, again defies easy categorisation. Its difference is beguiling, the playfulness and mysteriousness accompanied by warmth and wisdom, and a performance by Josh O’Connor that, alongside his turn in the very different Challengers (directed by another Italian, Luca Guadagnino) confirms him as one of the most Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco Bellocchio was a Marxist firebrand when he made his iconoclastic debut with Fists in the Pocket (1965). Now aged 84, he makes intellectually and emotionally muscular, hit epics about abused Italian power.The Red Brigades’ fatal 1978 kidnap of former, reforming Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Good Morning, Night (2003) was followed by Mussolini’s persecution of his mistress and illegitimate son in Vincere (2009), a haunted turncoat’s survival of the Sicilian Mafia’s apocalyptic Eighties in The Traitor (2019), and a return to Moro in the six-hour Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Site-specific” performance locations rarely come more atmospheric, or evocative, than this one. Beyond the East India Dock basin, with the hedgehog-backed dome of the O2 looming just across the Thames on a gusty spring evening, a cavernous “chain store” abuts the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse. For the London Handel Festival, director Jack Furness transforms this haunting (and haunted) chunk of early-Victorian dockland architecture into the studios of “Cyclops Pictures”. Here the renowned (if moody) auteur Paolo Polifemo will rehearse and shoot a film based on Ovid’s story (from the Metamorphoses) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. One this new adaptation presumably had in mind was creating an even more in-depth portrait of Tom Ripley, played by Andrew Scott, over eight 50-minute episodes. It’s also a change of pace visually, shot in moody black and white, though updated to 1961. Netflix’s resources are on full show, notably in its writer-director Steve Zaillian (Moneyball, The Irishman, The Night Of) and his Oscar- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Io Capitano works on several levels. At first glance, it’s a ripping yarn – two optimistic Senegalese teenagers embark on a dangerous journey, across the Sahara, through the hell of Libya and on to an overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean – all inspired by the lads’ dream of Europe. It could be watched as a terrific, occasionally terrifying adventure movie, but its Italian director, Matteo Garrone, has greater ambitions. Flights of fantasy (pictured below) are occasionally woven into the naturalistic action. In interviews, Garrone has described Io Capitano as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.With some chronological sleight of hand, Ferrara splices the life of the titular Franciscan priest, a mystic visionary eventually beatified for receiving the stigmata in 1918, and the October 14 1920 massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo, where 14 villagers protesting landowners’ overturning of their first free Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Immaculate marks Sydney Sweeney’s complete takeover of the big screen. This year alone she has brought back the rom-com with Anyone But You, showed off her acting chops in whistle-blower drama Reality, and joined the Marvel universe with Madame Web. Immaculate is her headfirst dive into horror, and it’s a grisly convent story that aims for Rosemary’s Baby meets Suspiria, but sometimes feels like The Nun 2.We first meet Sweeney’s Sister Cecilia as she waits at immigration in Italy. She has travelled from Michigan to join My Lady Sorrows, a convent and hospice in the Italian countryside. Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of carnival and joy in a tragic trumpet solo – a composer who makes you think “Italy” in every phrase. Yet, in the dance adaptation that has just premiered at Sadler’s Wells, that strangest of road movies seems increasingly untranslatable.Not that the show doesn’t contain many pleasingly fluid sequences of dance, which sometimes soar. Choreographer Natalia Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme battle of the sexes, carried by extravagant pop art designs and its star Dagmar Lassander’s playful pertness.Dr Sayer (Philippe Leroy) is a wealthy head of a philanthropic institute who spends his weekends sadistically dominating prostitutes. Let down by a regular, he’s delighted when a previously unknown journalist in his press department, Maria ( Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Just as Napoleon may be Ridley Scott’s most autobiographical subject, so motor-racing potentate Enzo Ferrari’s mastery of streamlined speed seems made for Michael Mann. But where his best films’ cool control accelerates into calibrated mayhem, Ferrari mostly stays underpowered.Mann focuses on four months in 1957, when his company’s survival hinges on Enzo (Adam Driver) attracting investment with a win at the Mille Miglia, a daunting thousand-mile race around Italy’s public roads, while his domestic double-life with wife Laura (Penélope Cruz, pictured below) and long-term secret mistress Lina Read more ...
David Nice
Does “the practice of opera singing in Italy” need help from UNESCO, which has newly inscribed it on the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”? Italian opera is surely immensely popular worldwide. But when it comes to practising the art properly, its greatest senior exponent, Riccardo Muti, powerfully argues that Verdi and Bellini, his most recent special projects in the city where he lives, Ravenna, need as much respect and care as Beethoven or Schubert.Since 2004, the now 82-year-old Muti's long-term project for the future has centred around his Luigi Read more ...
David Nice
Singular in its variousness, this is a three-act ballet that need some unpicking. No wonder those hooked on first acquaintance in 2021, like theartsdesk’s dance critic Jenny Gilbert, have been back to see it more than once.So long as you accept that the interpretation by choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Thomas Adès and artist Tacita Dean of hell, purgatory and heaven isn’t always contingent with Dante’s and Virgil's descent through the ever-narrowing circles of the damned, up the magic mountain of Purgatory to the garden where Beatrice awaits, and then on in a rare celestial flight, you Read more ...