Author: Cinema Made In Italy

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The Last One for the Road Review

The Last One for the Road Review

On a superficial level, Francesco Sossai‘s “Last One for the Road” is about a boozy car trip with small-time criminals who are old and broke, sometimes pensive, but mostly still living for the moment. They are in an oxymoronic perpetual search for another “last” drink, life as a perpetual bar crawl. But beneath that is an existential story that is a less bleak and more scenic version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a psychological journey about connection, regret, memory, and meaning.

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Magnanimous!

Magnanimous!

Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy Bellissima is “a case study in maternal obsession, a comic opera with nonmusical solos, and a satire of the Italian movie industry,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times as a new restoration opens today at New York’s Film Forum. Anna Magnani delivers “a Pirandellian meta performance” as a working-class mother determined to get her young daughter cast in the lead role of a film director Alessandro Blasetti is setting up at Cinecittà. “Bellissima likely inspired two younger directors, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, to address the film industry in their movies The White Sheik (1952) and The Lady Without Camelias (1953),” notes Hoberman. “Neither delved as deeply as Visconti and Magnani into the nature of acting.”

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Under the volcano, a city converses with its past in the haunting ‘Pompei: Below the Clouds’

Under the volcano, a city converses with its past in the haunting ‘Pompei: Below the Clouds’

In Naples, Italy, the past isn’t relegated to what’s behind us. In its crumbled, ancient majesty, the past is quite visible. And when it comes to the legacy of Mount Vesuvius — able to change the sky and move the earth — history encompasses all that’s above and plenty that’s subterranean, too.

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Roger Erbert – Pompei: Below the Clouds

Roger Erbert – Pompei: Below the Clouds

In “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1913), a silent film directed by Eleuterio Rodolfi, the complicated love story of a couple in Pompeii unfolds in the fateful year 79 A.D. The people go about their daily lives, gossiping, shopping, and falling in love. These scenes of intimate life are haunted by what we know is coming. This love story will be buried in ash before nightfall.

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