Italy Archives - Page 2 of 8 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Tenebrae (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2018****/****, 1980s, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Tenebrae1

Tenebre
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anthony Franciosa, Christian Borromeo, Mirella D’Angelo, Daria Nicolodi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Dario Argento is a stylist and a fan who pays attention. His films are shrines to Hitchcock in the way that Tarantino’s are shrines to grindhouse exploitation: imitations that transcend imitation by understanding what made the originals work. Argento’s movies invite you to engage with them at a meta-level to appreciate them intellectually, yet are so engaging on a visceral level that it’s hardly a requirement. At their best, they’re phantasmagorias mashing up stuff like Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, and Edgar Wallace with Antonioni and, of course, Hitchcock. At their worst, Argento’s films either perilously discard the gialli pillars that provide touchstones for him in favour of gothic horror (his truly abominable takes on Phantom of the Opera and Dracula), or desperately try to recapture old glory (The Card Player, Sleepless, and, alas, Mother of Tears).

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

October 24, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie–like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably–no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

TIFF ’18: Dogman

September 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Thriller, TIFF

****/****
starring Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Nunzia Schiano, Adamo Dionisi
screenplay by Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Walter Chaw About four scenes into Matteo Garrone's Dogman, I wondered if he was going to be able to keep it up: the invention, the escalating tension, the breathless feat of being something entirely novel. I've never seen anything like Dogman. It's a crime film, a tender picture about a father and his daughter, a look at poverty, a look at addiction and maybe mental illness, a critique of masculinity at its terminal extremities, and a withering conversation about what friendship can look like between two men. It's a film that feels like a fable sometimes; like neorealism at others. It's shockingly violent and then surpassingly tender. There's a monster in Dogman, too, and while it's easy to hate and fear him, there are moments where I felt myself hoping that someone could reach him. I could even feel myself wanting his approval. The picture is unusually smart about the human condition, even though its intelligence appears to be alien in nature. It's impossible to know from one minute to the next what's going to happen in Dogman, which isn't to say it makes no sense but rather that it makes perfect sense, once it happens. It's brilliant.

Madhouse (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “…life differs from the play only in this…it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.” In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed “middle-finger to my haters” moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis’s 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you’ve just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn’t make sense, it’s because living doesn’t make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it’s sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it’s rare that we truly do.

TIFF ’16: Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life

September 23, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Italy, TIFF

Acqua e Zucchero: Carlo Di Palma, i colori della vita
***/****
diretced by Fariborz Kamkari

by Bill Chambers This is an illuminating if less than revolutionary documentary about a cinematographer who’s more of a DP’s DP than a consensus Great among film buffs. (Google “greatest cinematographers” and Carlo Di Palma doesn’t even number among the sixty thumbnails in the banner at the top.) Perhaps the reason is because he spent so long in the weeds with Woody Allen (from 1986 until his retirement from fiction features in 1997), whose movies are statistically ephemeral; perhaps it’s because Di Palma is a key figure specifically in Italian cinema, which seemed to exhaust its cultural cachet as art films became outmoded there. Inspired by an exhibit devoted to Di Palma curated by his widow, Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life–a title derived from a late-film anecdote about Carlo as a young boy that packs an emotional punch I wasn’t quite expecting–sees Adriana poring over his papers and videos, interviewing her husband’s colleagues and admirers, and wistfully recalling their marriage. Surprised herself by the vitality of his contribution to the cinematic arts (it sounds like he didn’t talk shop much at home), she makes for an ideal entrée into the filmmaker’s oeuvre: she knows the titles and the people involved (sometimes personally), but not well enough to be disenchanted with them.

Bitter Rice (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 10, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Riso amaro
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vittorio Gassmann, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone
screenplay by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani,Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini
directed by Giuseppe De Santis

by Bryant Frazer Bitter Rice is a heck of a film. It’s the story of a couple of refugees from an American film noir who stumble into a grindhouse showing an Italian social-issues drama. The beautiful losers are Walter and Francesca (Vittorio Gassman and Doris Dowling), a pair of small-time crooks on the run following the heist of a lifetime. The social conscience is personified by a class of peasant women who have for hundreds of years travelled from all over the country to work hard days in the rice fields of northern Italy, and also by, to some degree, ethical, committed soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), who lingers in the rice fields after his discharge because he has come to care about the fate of the women there. And the sex appeal is provided, in spades, by Silvana Mangano, a bombshell and a half. When producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis cast the 18-year-old in the role, she had already appeared in a few films and had been the teenaged girlfriend of young Marcello Mastroianni. But her performance in Bitter Rice–a role that had her shaking her tits, swinging her hips, and hiking her skirt up to here–made her an overnight sensation.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler

October 1, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Italy, Japan

**½/****directed by Andrew Seklir & Tim Kinzy by Walter Chaw This is a well-mounted documentary about videogame geek Tim McVey (no, not that Tim McVeigh), who, as a carbuncular teen, once scored a billion points on little-known stand-up game Nibbler--a symbolic victory for its marathon nature (typically a 40-hour run is required for such a feat) and for the rarity of having a machine that would actually tally a ten-digit score. Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler is ultimately best when it diagrams the essential decency of Tim and especially his impossibly kind and supportive wife, Tina. The film…

Hungry Hearts (2015)

June 4, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Thriller

**/****
starring Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell
written and directed by Saverio Costanzo

by Walter Chaw Not the sequel to the Bruce Springsteen song I was hoping for, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts is instead the moment at which I completely understand the appeal of Adam Driver. He’s Jude; one night, after a particularly unfortunate biological episode, he meets-cute peculiar Mina (Alba Rohrwacher), who’s forced to suffer the olfactory fallout with him. They move in together. She gets pregnant, and later we think back on the moment of conception with something like dread. Mina becomes increasingly difficult. She becomes the acolyte of various new-age schemes and trends, finding gurus to follow in the garbage she reads while their son fails to grow. Jude, frantic, sneaks away three times a day on various pretexts to feed his son meat. He’s afraid the boy will die. One night, Mina wakes Jude, in a scene Costanzo shoots with a fish-eye lens, and says, “My son threw up meat. Do you know anything about this?”–and then she shrinks out of frame like that giant fish in that one Faulkner story about the bear. Hungry Hearts is a bit of the Naturalism of the Faulkner. It’s a bit of the Gothic, too.

StageFright (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Thriller

Deliria
StageFright: Aquarius
Bloody Bird
***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov, John Morghen
screenplay by George Eastman
directed by Michele Soavi

by Walter Chaw After years spent working alongside such luminaries as Joe D’Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with 1987’s StageFright (onscreen title: StageFright: Aquarius)–not an update of Hitchcock’s underestimated Jane Wyman vehicle, but a carrying of the giallo torch from one generation ostensibly into the next. For the uninitiated, giallo, when done right, is a perpetual-motion machine that runs off its own mysterious energy. Taking its name from the yellow covers of lurid Italian paperbacks, films in this genre split, broadly, into two sub-categories: the ones that give a passing nod to ratiocination; and the ones that don’t bother to make any rational sense at all. StageFright is of the latter school, aligning it with stuff like Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy over something like his Tenebrae (on which Soavi served as second assistant director). Sense is antithetical to StageFright. It’s a vehicle for atmosphere and delivers it in spades.

The Night Porter (1974) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 28, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Nightporter1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti
screenplay by Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati
directed by Liliana Cavani

by Bryant Frazer The Night Porter is one of the most bizarre psychodramas in the history of film, using the Holocaust as a dreamy, abstract backdrop for a toxic romance between a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the “little girl” (Charlotte Rampling) he isolated, humiliated, and raped in a Nazi concentration camp. If that sounds absolutely outrageous, that was surely part of the design. This wasn’t Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or another in the short-lived cycle of Nazi-themed exploitation pictures. This was Italian director Liliana Cavani’s first English-language feature, and Bogarde and Rampling were English-language stars. In order to recoup, The Night Porter would need to be provocative. Cavani delivered on that score. European critics are said to have taken the movie’s sociopolitical context seriously, but upon arrival in New York its outré imagery generated a mix of critical scorn and mockery that, ironically, helped earn it big returns at the box office. (Vincent Canby’s pan deriding it as “romantic pornography” was highlighted in the advertising.) If you know nothing else about the film, you probably know its signature image–Rampling, wearing black leather gloves and an SS officer’s cap, her bare breasts framed by the suspenders holding up a pair of baggy pinstriped trousers, tossing a Mona Lisa smile at the camera. That key art has kept The Night Porter in demand for more than forty years now, from arthouses and VHS tapes to DVD and now Blu-ray releases under the Criterion imprimatur.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, France, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Spain, Zombie

Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O’Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats – Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It’s quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I’ve not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the “blood-soaked double feature” assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei’s oeuvre–which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style “documentaries”–they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you’re willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei’s reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

La Notte (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Lanotte1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing–some would say brutal–Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L‘avventura, L‘eclisse, and Red Desert. I’d even go so far as to call it Antonioni’s best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker’s worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He’s at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American ’70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it’s among the most influential films of all time), it’s La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

Dracula2

Dario Argento’s Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn’t? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento’s work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he’s riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he’s lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn’t really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he’s made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento’s Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all time. Until you’ve endured it, I can’t quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it’s a fucking tragedy.

Umberto D. (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 20121950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova
screenplay by Cesare Zavattini
directed by Vittorio De Sica

by Walter Chaw Though he's best known for The Bicycle
Thief, Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. is, to my mind, the superior film, and ultimately one of the few pictures I've ever revisited from
the era of Italian Neo-Realism–a movement I've never particularly understood nor,
indeed, liked. It's possible that there's not much to understand, that as a
reaction to the execution of Mussolini and during that brief "Italian
Spring," Italian cinema, freed by necessity from the studio and looking to
present a more authentic representation of the country's broken cities (film critics
were to blame for the movement, of course, as they would later be for the
French Nouvelle Vague), found non-professional actors to play out social melodramas. I wonder if I've always bristled at the notion that the
Giuseppe De Santises and Luchino Viscontis produced during this time were
anything like "realism" as I understood it; when I was first introduced to American films noir, I had no idea they were
as stylized as they were because of an attempt at "realism," too.
Whatever the case, I see Umberto D. as something like an early
Fellini, like La Strada or even 8½: There's something that feels very much like a humanistic solipsism at its
middle. Which is so much more interesting than the cries for social equality that
inevitably turn to plaintive keening in my ear. Sometimes liberals damage their
own cause–long-held close-ups of crying children have a way of doing that.

Torso (1973) + Maniac Cop (1988) – Blu-ray Discs

October 21, 20121970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Suzy Kendall, Tina Aumont, Luc Merenda, John Richardson
screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi and Sergio Martino
directed by Sergio Martino

MANIAC COP
**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Larson, Sheree North
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

by Jefferson Robbins Slasher movies are concerned with not just murder, but with its root cause–not motive, really, but motivation. There has to be a detonator, or else stalker-horror is what its most strident critics accuse it of being: all body-count, no brains. The films have leeway to be less concerned with motive than, say, those Ustinov-as-Poirot adaptations, where the whole cast learns whodunit while seated for tea and cakes in the third act. (I sort of miss those; I wish "mystery" hadn't been usurped by "thriller" in the moviemaking lexicon, and in part I blame Jonathan Lynn's 1985 Clue.) But they have to successfully allude to a trigger point, some match to the killer's keg of gasoline.

TIFF ’12: Reality

September 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 20, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo–the flip-flop heard 'round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962's poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who's also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni's canonical films are stamped by their era; L'Avventura's downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism–which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies–as it does about the film itself.

Barbarella (1968) – Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 20121960s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, France, Italy, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi
screenplay by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim, based on the comic by Jean Claude Forest and Claude Brulé
directed by Roger Vadim

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Barbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don't quit.

The Rite (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

August 1, 20122011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Hungary, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O'Donoghue, Alice Braga, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Michael Petroni, suggested by the book by Matt Baglio
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Though it's not particularly surprising that The Rite isn't scary or innovative, it is a bit of a surprise that The Rite doesn't completely suck. It's not good, but there's some ambition in its tale of a tortured seminarian. Michael (Colin O'Donoghue) is dealing with his odd childhood at the knee of his dad, a widower and overzealous mortician (Rutger Hauer), as well as a crisis of faith handily addressed by the traumatic, traffic-related death of an innocent whom God, the picture suggests, throws in front of a truck to get Michael to reconsider leaving the priesthood. In the same stroke, God cripples Michael's mentor, Father Matthew (Toby Jones), leading one to revisit Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" for a dose of non-Scriptural skepticism and rage if one were so inclined. No matter, as Michael, because of his lack of squeamishness, is packed off to The Vatican to attend a modern exorcism school. Which is also something of a surprise, I guess–that said exorcism school really exists and is alive and well, well into the 21^st century. Although that surprise is ameliorated a little by the fact that Catholicism also still believes in a literal transubstantiation of the host. Small wonder that Catholicism is my favourite Christian sect.

To Rome with Love (2012)

July 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Italy, Music, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King's Speech. I can't say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That's a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works–but it's also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.