SFFS NEW ITALIAN CINEMA Nov. 13-17, 2013

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San Francisco Film Society
NEW ITALIAN CINEMA
Nov. 13-17, 2013

Festival Coverage thread here. There are ten reviews. Links to the reviews below.

Garibaldi's Lovers
Silvo Soldini (Il comandante e la cicogna, Italy/Switzerland 2012)
The director of 2007’s hard-hitting Days and Clouds takes a more comedic, though similarly pointed and critical, look at contemporary Italian society with this dual story of a Genoan plumber trying to raise his two kids after the death of his wife and a starving artist who is hoping for a lucrative new commission.
Wednesday, November 13, 6:15 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Napoli 24
Multiple Directors (Italy 2010)
Over three years in the making and completed with great difficulty during the infamous garbage crisis, this omnibus film pays tribute to one of the world’s most magnificent and complicated metropolises.
Wednesday, November 13, 9:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Balancing Act
Ivano De Matteo (Gli equilibristi, Italy 2012)
The financial precariousness of middle-class life is thrown into dramatic relief in this powerful drama about life, love and family.
Thursday, November 14, 6:30 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

There Will Come a Day
Giorgio Diritti (Un giorno devi andare, Italy/France 2013)
After a tragic personal event, a young woman named Augusta (Jasmine Trinca) flees Italy for the Brazilian Amazon to give medical assistance to the indigenous population and to try and restore meaning to her life.
Thursday, November 14, 8:45 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Steel
Stefano Mordini (Acciaio, Italy 2012)
With the downward-slanting economy as a backdrop and fraught sexual tensions in the forefront, Steel delves deeply and expertly into the vagaries of interpersonal, small-town relationships.
Friday, November 15, 6:30 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Cosimo and Nicole
Francesco Amato (Cosimo e Nicole, Italy 2013)
This drama about an obsessive relationship that takes a dark turn is grounded by two powerhouse performances by Riccardo Scamarcio and Clara Ponsot and directed with urgency by Francesco Amato.
Friday, November 15, 9:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

We Believed
Mario Martone (Noi credevamo, Italy/France 2010)
Made to coincide with Italy’s 150th anniversary celebration, this epic 19th-century costume drama tells the story of the country’s path to independence.
Saturday, November 16, 12:15 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Ali Blue Eyes
Claudio Giovannesi (Alì ha gli occhi azzurri, Italy 2012)
Working with a non-professional cast using incidents from their lives, Claudio Giovannesi paints a revelatory picture of existence for the various cultures trying to live together in present-day Italy.
Saturday, November 16, 4:15 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Out of the Blue
Edoardo Leo (Buongiorno papà, Italy 2013)
A slick ladies’ man learns new responsibilities in this warm crowd-pleaser from the director of 18 Years Later (NIC 2010).
Saturday, November 16, 6:30 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

The Interval [reviewed earlier in ND/NF 2013]
Leonardo di Costanzo (L’intervallo, Italy/Switzerland/Germany 2012)
Inside the walls of an abandoned Naples boarding school, a 17-year-old street vendor must spend the afternoon watching over a pretty 15-year-old who is being sequestered for reasons unknown to him.
Saturday, November 16, 9:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Gorbaciof
Stefano Incerti (Italy 2010)
Returning to film’s visual essence, cowriter/director Stefano Incerti depicts the life of a Neapolitan prison cashier named Marino with sparseness and immediacy, bolstered by Toni Servillo’s impeccable performance
Sunday, November 17, 1:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

The Ideal City
Luigi Lo Cascio (La città ideale, Italy 2012)
Actor Luigi Lo Cascio’s (The Best of Youth) directorial debut is a wonderfully unclassifiable work, rich with philosophical ideas and punctuated by the increasing precariousness of his protagonist's situation.
Sunday, November 17, 3:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

The Great Beauty
Paolo Sorrentino (La grande bellezza, Italy/France 2013)
Employing elegant cinematography and a brilliantly wide-ranging score, director Paolo Sorrentino has created a phantasmagoric feast for the senses, a tribute to the Eternal City that will surely have a long life of its own
Sunday, November 17, 6:00 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

One Man Up
Paolo Sorrentino (L'uomo in più, Italy 2001)
With surreal dream sequences and potent ideas about destiny and morality, One Man Up is a dark and ambitious (and rarely screened) film that heralded the brilliant careers of director Paolo Sorrentino and star Toni Servillo that were to come.
Sunday, November 17, 9:30 pm
Landmark's Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore (Sacramento/Clay)

Silvio Soldini: Garibaldi's Lovers (2012)

Statues of Garibaldi, Leonardo, and Leopardi chat and pontificate disapprovingly about today's Italy while a plumber, his two kids, and a young woman artist behind on her rent run about in this comedy that seeks to combine whimsy with social commentary. There's a crane named Agostina. Though warm-hearted and very Italian, this movie fails to live up to the standards Soldini set in his well-known Bread and Tulips and interesting Days and Clouds (about a well-off Italian professional who loses his job), both of which got US distribution and good reviews. Shot in Turin.

More cultural film reviews...you are a boon Mister Knipp...

The last great Italian film I saw was the one you mentioned in your review: Gommorah, one of the most real and riveting movies I've ever seen. It's interesting what you say about Italian cinema and how they are making them these days. Swiss funding too?

Why didn't Berlusconi put his money into filmmaking instead of a soccer team? He'd still be in power! :P

I guess maybe Berlusconi isn't into culture in any real sense, I don't know. The trouble is the Italians don't care much for their own film culture at the moment, mostly. And these semi-promotional series are not the best view of what they're doing sometimes either, though watch for Sorarentino's LA GRANDE BELLEZZA/THE GREAT BEAUTY: that promises to be a good one and is their Best Foreign entry this year too. I'll see a screening of it tomorrow.

Ivano de Matteo: Balancing Act (2012)

Mostly too much of a downer, this film shows what happens when a wife kicks her husband out of the house for an infidelity. With two kids to support and now two rents, he starts going under. And under, and under. A vague feel-good ending shows not much sense of structure, all focus on the devolution process.

Giorgio Diritti: There Will Come a Day (2012)

Again i as in his Forties war drama The Man Who Will Come (SFIFF 2010) Diritti uses documentary material with a meandering narrative structure, plus this time a constant oscillation between Italy and the Brizillian Amazon, in a sort of Italian art house "Eat Play Love" journey of self-development that is brilliant, interesting, pretentious, and self-indulgent. Many love it, and this third film confirms Diritti as one of Italy's most highly regarded Italian directors -- to some Italian critics, anyway, and Variety and Hollywood Reporter gave it good reviews too. I found it interesting but overlong and unconvincing. Watchable though. Some of the Brazil footage is amazing and the photography is beautiful.

Paolo Sorrentino: The Great Beauty (2013)


D'Angelo is probably right that it would be wiser to follow the lead of La Dolce Vita, of which this is obviously a cynical and lush modern technicolor version, and call this by its Italian name, La grande bellezza. I am partly perhaps a bit overenthusiastic because it's so exciting to see world-class filmmaking from Italy whose cinematic production of late tends to be so lackluster, but I am pretty much in agreement anyway with what Catherine Shoard of THE GUARDIAN says in an interview with Toni Servillo: "The movie is a masterpiece, a grand swooning epic, lush to the point of insanity, Fellini turned up to 11. "

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I'm always looking for films like La Grande Bellezza.

Thanks for the great review.

Thank you Johan. I hope you get to see it. It's an amazing film. I'm very glad I saw it -- and under ideal circumstances, in the restored, posh theater with a small audience. But why so small? The Italian consulate person said she sent out hundreds of invitations.

Sfefano Mordini: Steel (2012)

A documentary fimmaker makes a film from a novel about a steel factory on the Mediterranean coast southwest of Siena. The scenes oscillate between two sexy 14-year-old girls and the factory and the brother of one, and family life. The almost soft-core sex photography of male and female bodies detracts from whatever authenticity Mordini achieves with the environment and the film is scattered and without a center. Maybe Mordini should stick to documentaries.

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Bruce Dern and Will Foote in Nebraska

RELEASE NOTE: NEBRASKA, THE GREAT BEAUTY AND FAUST OPENING IN NEW YORK Friday, 15 Nov. 2013

Paolo Sorrentino's THE GREAT BEAUTY will be released in Landmark Theaters in a week or two, but it opens today in NYC, Friday, 15 November, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Metacritic rating 82.

Alexander Payne's NEBRASKA, reviewed as part of NYFF 2013, one of the year's best American films, was released in NYC 15 November too at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and Angelika Film Center. Its Metacritic rating is 83.

Aleksandr Sokurov's FAUST, reviewed here as part of Film Comment Selects 2012, opened in NYC 15 November at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Metacritic rating 69.

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Johannes Zeiler and Anton Adasinsky in Faust

Francesco Amato: Cosimo and Nicole (2012)

A French-Italian romance with a vibrant young actress and an Italian heartthrob. Set in Genoa where the couple work for a rock impresario, the action is derailed by an accident involving an illegal African immigrant. Amato's film has nice music and a strong forward thrust, but seems blind to the racial and political insensitivity of exploiting a political exile's plight to enliven a white European love story.

Claudio Giovannesi: Ali Blue Eyes (2012)

Giovannesi focuses on a week in the life of 16-year-old Nader, a boy of Egyptian desent in conflict with his conservative family in Ostia, a working-class suburb of Rome, and his best friend Stefano. The director uses material and subjects from a documentary he made, writing in events from the boys' own lives and using their own family and friends as cast members, a risk that paid off with a fine film. A surprise. Jay Weissberg of Variety truly writes: 'Italian neorealism has an impressive proponent in Claudio Giovannesi, whose sophomore feature, "Ali Blue Eyes," reinvigorates the form with exacting honesty.' This is a good one.

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Nader Sarhan in Ali Blue Eyes

Edoardo Leo: Out of the Blue (2013)

A slick ladies man nearing forty is forced to grow up and start caring for somebody else when a sixteen-year-old daughter appears. A very conventional Italian romantic comedy where everybody is pretty much hugging everybody else by the end. Muccino is truer and Verdone is funnier but this does no harm. But wait: does a film comedy have to obey the Hippocratic Oath?

Luigi Lo Cascio: The Ideal City (2012)

Lo Cascio of THE BEST OF YOUTH and GOOD MORNING, NIGHT has directed and starred in a crafty ironic Hitchcockian noir about an environment nut in Siena (his ideal city; he never quite says why) who encounters a world of trouble when he rescues a man in a coma on a roadway. The suspenseful plot doesn't quite deliver but Lo Cascio deserves credit for something thoroughly original in this directorial debut that's a Kafkaesque tale with a Tuscan (and sometimes Sicilian) accent.

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San Francisco Film Society
NEW ITALIAN CINEMA
Nov. 13-17, 2013


LINKS TO REVIEWS:
Ali Blue Eyes (Claudio Giovannesi 2012)
Balancing Act (Ivan De Matteo 2012)
Cosimo and Nicole (Francesco Amato 2012)
Garibaldi's Lovers (Silvio Soldini 2012)
Great Beauty, The (Paolo Sorrentino 2013)
Ideal City, The (Luigi Lo Cascio 2012)
Interval, The (Leonardo Di Costanzo 2012) ND/NF 2013
Out of the Blue (Edoardo Leo 2013)
Steel (Stefano Mordini 2012)
There Will Come a Day (Giorgio Diritti 2012)