The Italian

Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...

Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...

Jul 11, 2019 — When we think of Ingrid Bergman, we may immediately call up images of her “you deserve this!” smile, or the indecision on her face in Casablanca (1942). There is a rare kind of suspense in watching Bergman’s face in flux...

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Mar 31, 2017 — Like his famously enigmatic landscapes, the performances that anchor Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are integral to his vision of existentialist ennui. Among the most iconic is David Hemmings’s turn in the Italian master’s first English-language feature, Blow-Up, a psychological mystery that...

Oct 15, 2015 — Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against type—and funnyman director Ettore Scola gets serious—in this humane drama set in Fascist Italy.

Oct 14, 2015 — Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Add to that list of great on-screen duos the Italian movie legends Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, who appeared in more than ten films together. Their 1977 film, A Special...

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.