Venice 2023: Opening film "Comandante" and the latest from Liliani Cavani

by Elisa Giudici

Edoardo De Angelis & Pierfrancesco Favino on the set of "Comandante"

Opening the Venice Film Festival is a daunting enough challenge. Now imagine being called in as a last-minute replacement for Luca Guadagnino’s new film starring Zendaya. Yet, Edoardo De Angelis managed to uphold the honor of Italian cinema admirably. His new film Comandante stands as a notable piece of filmmaking, injecting an interesting angle into the war subgenre of submarine films. To put it in perspective, it holds its own against the likes of The Wolf's Call, a recent European film of similar ambition from 2019, which boated a budget twice the size of Comandante.

A budget of 14 million euros isn't trivial within the national cinematic landscape, where the majority of yearly productions hover around the 1 to 2 million euro mark. This significant financial backing primarily went into meticulously recreating the interior and exterior spaces of the Cappellini submarine. Surprisingly, this endeavor was complicated by the scarcity of photographic references for the original ship or its close counterparts. De Angelis's film underscores a poignant historical reality: the majority of Italy's 120 submarines utilized during World War II met their demise, their crews were lost at sea, resting beneath coral crosses...

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Elisa hits Venice once again!

Our favourite Italian journalist Elisa Giudici has arrived at the Lido for the 80th annual Venice Film Festival. I had the pleasure of attending with Elisa two years ago and though I couldn't make it this year, Elisa will do her usual wonderful job of filling us in on the details. Elisa's first review will be up tonight. In the meantime do follow Elisa on Instagram. 

Once Elisa is done at Venice, the festivals continue across the ocean. This year Claudio will be our man on the ground at TIFF for the first time, so stay tuned. 

Queering the Oscars: Best Actor "A Special Day"

by Eric Blume

Marcello Mastroianni’s 1977 Best Actor Oscar nomination for Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day was one of the first examples of a straight actors being recognized for playing a gay role.  Prior to that, we’d only had Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and neither of those actors had such an entrenched persona of the “macho lover” as did Mastroianni.   

A Special Day gives us not just one Italian cinema icon playing against type, but two...

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Venice 2022: The "Tár" Tease and the Competition Lineup

by Nathaniel R

Cate Blanchett in TÁR

Most sites just give you a list of film titles but we always aim to provide you with more information which is one of the (several) reasons we're slower with the news! Over 50% of the competition titles at Venice this year come from just three countries: France, Italy, and the US and a lot of titles are connected to Netflix. Outside of those countries we get one film from Asia, one from the Middle East, two from South America, and two from UK/Ireland. If you include the Out of Competition titles there's more variety with Canada, Denmark, Ukraine, The Phillipines, and Estonia entering the chat.

After the jump a little bit about each of the 22 films competing for the Golden Lion, and a few of the Out of Competition films including the new Lars Von Trier. Plus that bewitching teaser to Tár, Todd Field's first film in 16 years...

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Ranking the International Feature Film Winners

by Juan Carlos Ojano

From De Sica to Hamaguchi, the past two years of hosting the podcast The One-Inch Barrier has allowed me to watch all that films that were selected by the Academy for its International Feature Film category - 74 winners and 337 nominees (all but one title). While this category has had its issues over the years, it has also put an international spotlight on non-English language cinema on Hollywood’s biggest night. While the category has  always been far from a perfect encapsulation of world cinema, it's a great jumping off point as noted in the series finale.  (Cláudio Alves did a beautiful summary of our discussion - video included!). 

Here is my personal not-that-definitive ranking of the winners of the category. Things are very fluid especially in the midsection... 

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