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The first film in Fernando Di Leo’s so-called Milieu trilogy, Caliber 9 explores the criminal underbelly of Milan, a city more typically associated with the modish institutions of high finance and haute couture. The film’s full Italian title, Milan Caliber 9, emphasizes the centrality of location, while also referring to a collection of stories by crime writer Giorgio Scerbanenco, several of which Di Leo loosely adapted for the film. Generically, Caliber 9 is a fascinating mashup of the gritty poliziotteschi genre and stylish neo-noirs in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville. Its tight-lipped protagonist certainly seems patterned after Alain Delon’s buttoned-down hitman in Le Samouraï, right down to the brown trench coat.

Di Leo’s film opens with a brilliantly executed pre-credits sequence that details a laundered currency handoff gone wrong, as well as the mob’s violent reprisals, along the way providing a handy cross-section of Milan’s criminal demimonde,...

Kino Lorber has unveiled a brand new 4K restoration trailer for the classic 1970 Italian Fascism film The Conformist, made by iconic director Bernardo Bertolucci. The film originally opened 51 years ago in US theaters, after screening at the New York Film Festival. Set during Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s, the film follows a weak-willed Italian man that becomes a fascist flunky and travels abroad to Paris to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a Leftist political dissident. The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, with Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clémenti. Restored in 4K by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Minerva Pictures, entirely overseen by the Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci, at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original camera negative. Critics have raved about how it is "a dazzling movie" with "the most striking and baroque images you're ever likely to see," featuring impressive Art Deco production design. As always,...

[This October is "Gialloween" on Daily Dead, as we celebrate the Halloween season by diving into the macabre mysteries, creepy kills, and eccentric characters found in some of our favorite giallo films! Keep checking back on Daily Dead this month for more retrospectives on classic, cult, and altogether unforgettable gialli, and visit our online hub to catch up on all of our Gialloween special features!]

Clue and Knives Out. Those were the two movies that immediately came to mind after my first viewing of Michele Lupo’s The Weekend Murders, aka Concerto per pistola solista. The film’s zany, anything-goes murder mystery reminded me of the former, while the comedic family strife reminded me of the latter, not to mention that the film revolves around a group of people staying at the same mansion where the rooms seem almost as endless as the rising body count.

To be honest, these similarities were as much a surprise to me as the untimely ends of the slain victims in The Weekend Murders. My previous experiences with gialli have been more somber and bleak viewings. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the gialli that I have seen, and find them to be enthralling in their execution and engrossing in their storytelling, but I’ve never seen...

The Turin Film Festival on Saturday announced it will hold a day of tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci, the Oscar-winning Italian director who died Nov. 26.

The 36th edition of the event will conclude Sunday with a day of screenings dedicated to the master in Turin's Cinema Massimo.

The fest will screen three of Bertolucci’s works, including 1900, the 1976 historical drama starring Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland); 1970's The Conformist, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda and Gastone Moschin; and 1996's Stealing Beauty, starring Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons, Sinead Cusack and Rachel ...

The Turin Film Festival on Saturday announced it will hold a day of tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci, the Oscar-winning Italian director who died Nov. 26.

The 36th edition of the event will conclude Sunday with a day of screenings dedicated to the master in Turin's Cinema Massimo.

The fest will screen three of Bertolucci’s works, including 1900, the 1976 historical drama starring Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland); 1970's The Conformist, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda and Gastone Moschin; and 1996's Stealing Beauty, starring Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons, Sinead Cusack and Rachel ...

Writer-director Sergio Sollima gives us one of the best 'political' Italo westerns from the pre- May '68 era... with two top stars in great form, Gian Maria Volontè and Tomas Milian. This two-disc German import has both the long and short versions of the movie in HD, with full language options for each. Face to Face (Faccia a faccia; Von Angesicht zu Angesicht) Region A+B Blu-ray Explosive Media (Alive) 1967 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 93, 112 min. / Street Date April 29, 2016 / available at Amazon.de / E 21,93 Starring Gian Maria Volontè, Tomas Milian, William Berger, Jolanda Modio, Gianni Rizzo, Carole André Ángel del Pozo, Aldo Sambrell, Antonio Casas, Lidia Alfonsi, John Karlsen, Gastone Moschin, G&eacutge;rard Tichy. Cinematography Raphael Pacheco Film Editor Eugenio Alabiso Original Music Ennio Morricone Art Direction and sets Carlo Simi Written by Sergio Donati, Sergio Sollima Produced by Arturo González, Alberto Grimaldi <Directed by Sergio Sollima

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Wow,...

Stars: Gastone Moschin, Mario Adorf, Barbara Bouchet, Frank Wolff, Luigi Pistilli, Ivo Garrani, Philippe Leroy, Lionel Stander, Mario Novelli, Giuseppe Castellano, Salvatore Arico, Fernando Cerulli | Written and Directed by Fernando Di Leo

One of the things I love about Arrow Video releases is the ability they give me to extend my exposure to movies that are harder to find, especially world cinema releases. Fernando Di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 is the latest Italian gangster film to be released by the company and brings on the gritty ultra-violence to the gangster movie.

When Ugo Piazza (Gastone Moschin) is released from jail he looks to lead a straight, the last thing he wants is to return to his life of crime. This is soon out of the question though when psychopathic hoodlum Rocco (Mario Adorf) informs him his former boss wants to see him. With $300,000 missing from a previous job all...

The Conformist

Written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Italy, 1970

When first introduced to the improved quality of Blu-ray technology, there were about a dozen films I couldn’t wait to see in the format. These were movies of extraordinary beauty that I knew would surely benefit from the enhanced visual resolution. Now, with the arrival of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist on a stunning new Raro Video edition, another one of those titles can be scratched off the list. What makes this an exciting release, however, goes beyond the look of the picture (though that is paramount). This is, in every regard, one of the greatest films ever made.

The Conformist is a complex chronicle of the tormented, ruthless, and devious Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a rising-through-the-ranks Fascist enforcer. The film is a fascinating look at the extent to which one will go to escape the past, fit in with the present,...

With the run of classics that American filmmakers churned out in the studio system during the '70s, it's easy to forget that Italian master Bernardo Bertolucci also delivered some of his finest work during the decade. Across those ten years he delivered "The Spider's Stratagem," "Last Tango In Paris," "1900," and, for many of us here around the office, a personal favorite, "The Conformist." Now that it's been freshly restored for home video, we've got a few copies to share with you. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, Gastone Moschin, Pierre Clementi, Enzo Tarascio, and José Quaglio, the film follows a secret police agent, Marcelo Clerici, who is dispatched to assassinate his old professor, Quadri. Clerici uses his honeymoon with his new wife Giulia as the perfect cover under which to carry out his assignment. While on his mission, however, he becomes obsessed with the professor's wife...

The Italian director's 1970 expressionist masterpiece offered a blueprint for a new kind of Hollywood film, which is why Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese and co owe him a huge debt

Bernardo Bertolucci's expressionist masterpiece of 1970, The Conformist, is the movie that plugs postwar Italian cinema firmly and directly into the emerging 1970s renaissance in Hollywood film-making. Its account of the neuroses and self-loathing of a sexually confused would-be fascist (Jean-Louis Trintignant) aching to fit in in 1938 Rome, who is despatched to Paris to murder his former, anti-fascist college professor, was deemed an instant classic on release.

It was, and is, a highly self-conscious and stylistically venturesome pinnacle of late modernism, drawing from the full range of recent Italian movie history: a little neo-neorealism, a lot of stark and blinding Antonioni-style mise-en-scène, some moments redolent of Fellini. And it was all framed within an evocation of the frivolous fascist-era film-making style derided...

On Saturday, March 26th, the Directors Guild of America hosted another event in celebration of their 75th Anniversary. Last month, they honored George Lucas with a screening of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) and discussion between Lucas and Christopher Nolan. This time, the DGA hosted a panel honoring Lucas's benefactor, Francis Ford Coppola. Unlike the Lucas event, the DGA did not screen one of Coppola's many feature films, but asked three directors, David O'Russell (Three Kings, The Fighter), Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen), and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) to prepare short reels of some of their favorite scenes as a spring board for discussion. Each director's selections were fairly classical while also featuring some oddities: Hardwicke picked ten minutes from Apocalypse Now (1979), P.T. Anderson chose a selection from The Conversation (1974), my personal favorite of Coppola's films, and an odder choice, Youth Without Youth...

70s Italian gangsters! It's a world where men speak with their glares and their fists and their bullets, and women do well to stay out of the way, preferably in bed, eager for sex. It's the world of Fernando Di Leo, and it's captured in a four-disc set coming to Region 1 DVD from Raro Video USA on Tuesday. Entitled Fernando Di Leo: The Italian Crime Collection, the set features fine-looking transfers of Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, The Boss, and Rulers of the City, all directed by Di Leo and starring a handful of American stars (Lionel Stander, Henry Silva, Woody Strode, Richard Conte, Jack Palance) alongside stalworth Italian actors (Mario Adorf, Gastone Moschin, Gianni Garko) and stark raving beauties (Barbara Bouchet, Antonia Santilli,...

Curious to know what frightful films and devilish discs will be available to view in the privacy of your own digital dungeon this week? Fango's got you covered.

Below the jump you'll find the full list of titles arriving in-stores this Tuesday, August 11, 2009 in our weekly version of the famous Fangoria Chopping List - updated with all the last-minute additions and deletions.

Note: Clickable links lead to Amazon.com

Alien Tresspass - Image DVD & Bd

A flying saucer, ray guns, body snatching and a one-eyed monster from outer space! It’s all here in this action-packed sci-fi adventure! Eric McCormack stars as an astronomer who gets possessed by a friendly alien bent on saving our humble planet. But even with the help of a lovely diner waitress, is he any match for the Ghota, a one-eyed evil alien on a murderous rampage?

Bad Boy Bubby (Bd)

L.A. Weekly called it "disturbing and compelling,...

Code Red DVD just sent Fango the specs for a trio of upcoming releases set to hit retailers later this summer.

On August 18th, Code Red DVD will unleash The Strangeness. It is 1980 and the price of gold is soaring. Old timers warn would be prospectors to stay away from the Gold Spike Mine. It has stood as a ghastly reminder of the horrors of a century before when the earth violently shook and over twenty miners were killed, their bodies stripped of flesh. The residents of Basin City talked of the grisly murders only in whispers from which legends of The Strangeness grew. A small group of explorers innocently make their way to the Gold Spike. Only one knows the incredible secret of the mine, and here the nightmare begins.....!

Nightmare USA's Stephen Thrower described the film as having, "Ominous atmosphere, flashes of humour, and a truly startling monster!