News

Just when The Bad Guy tried to get out, Amazon pulled him back in.

Amazon Prime Video on Wednesday unveiled a second season order for the Italian crime series, starring Luigi Lo Cascio and Claudia Pandolfi, which has been a hit with audiences and critics.

Stefano Accorsi (Italian Race) will join the cast for season 2, alongside returning cast members including Selene Caramazza, Giulia Maenza and Antonio Catania. Season 2 shot on location in Lazio, Emilia Romagna and Sicily.

Lo Cascio stars in The Bad Guy as Nino Scotellaro, an incorruptible Sicilian public prosecutor who is imprisoned on false accusations of collusion with the mafia. Once inside, he decides to pull off a Machiavellian revenge plan, embracing the “bad guy” image that has been forced upon him.

Season 2, which series producers say will be a mix of “crime and dark comedy,” will explore Scotellaro’s past as well as his likely future,...

When it comes to director Piero Messina’s Another End, it’s almost necessary to begin with its ending. But only to say that its denouement isn’t unlike that of M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, for how it confers meaning retroactively to the plot and will, most likely, leave you dumbfounded. Revealing more would mean spoiling this science-fiction film, which is as guilty of overtly sentimental dialogue as it is meticulous about revealing the rules of its world little by little. The screenplay’s last-minute plot twist is so astonishing that it all but makes one forget the hackneyed elements that structure the film.

What the atmosphere of Another End tells us from the start is that the world has become a perpetual penumbra. Its inhabitants look disaffected, if not depressed. That’s certainly the case with Sal (Gael García Bernal), who enters his elderly neighbor’s apartment...

It’s ironic that memory is the central theme of Piero Messina’s Berlin Competition title “Another End,” when so many of its twists and turns are so directly lifted from other films that it feels like you’ve seen them before; even watching it for the first time feels like rewatching. But if that makes this elegiac literalization of the timeless theme of “what is grief but love persevering?” a rather edgeless experience it’s not a wholly unpleasant one. Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.

Indeed, the story’s central alarming incident has happened some time before the film even begins: a car crash for which Sal (Gael García Bernal) believes he was...

What would you do if you could extend loved ones’ lives through their memories?

Another End, the latest film directed by Piero Messina and his writing team including Giacomo Bendotti, Valentina Gaddi and Sebastiano Melloni, boasts a cast led by Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve and Bérénice Bejo. It aspires to weave a complex narrative exploring the boundaries of human connection, the grieving process and the possibility of extending life through technological means. Yet, despite its ambitious premise, the film falls short of its potential, unraveling as a perplexing and ultimately unrewarding cinematic experience.

In a world where technology blurs the lines between life and death, Sal (Bernal) experiences a haunting blend of grief and hope. He visits an elderly couple; as they share tea, a disturbing scene unfolds. Men in white coats arrive, sedate the old man, wrap him in a white tarp, and whisk him away to Another End,...

Good news: Death is not the end of love any more than love is the end of death. On the contrary, you might find that losing someone can help you to find them in places you never thought to look when they were alive; distance can allow for clarity, and that clarity can allow for a new kind of closeness.

Bad news: That process is fraught with unanswerable questions, and we’re thinking up weird new ones to ask every day. Once upon a time you could leave it at: “How are you supposed to achieve closure when death opens so many doors to potential discovery?” Now, with the endless amount of digital artifacts we all carry in our pockets and the nascent promise that A.I. might be able to preserve someone’s consciousness for centuries to come, technology has compelled us to consider the practical applications of thought...

Festival

Raindance Film Festival, Britain’s largest independent film festival, will return to cinemas this year, reimagined and restructured with a host of new partners and new films. Running Oct. 27 – Nov. 6, this year’s in-person event will partner with several cinemas across London and offer online screenings in the U.K., facilitated by Curzon Home Cinema.

After seeing last year’s data, which showed that about 70% of the festival’s online audience was located outside of London, Raindance has made a concerted effort to continue fostering its online reach, resulting in the new partnership with Curzon, which will host pay-per-view screenings of official competition films on its iOS, Android and Smart TV apps.

Kicking off on Oct. 27, the Raindance opening gala will feature a screening of Lina Roessler’s “Best Sellers,” starring Academy Award winner Michael Caine, Cary Elwes and Aubrey Plaza. Bookending the event on Nov. 6, the closing gala...

About Premium Content (Apc) has boarded “Ever After,” a relationship drama produced by the award-winning Italian banner Indigo Films in the run up to MipTV.

“Ever After,” created by Giacomo Bendotti (“The Stolen Caravaggio”), is a six-part Italian drama series portraying a broken couple. Apc is repping ready-made and format rights to “Ever After.” Previously titled “The Promise,” the show was previously pitched at Series Mania.

Now in post, the series revolves around Anna and Enrico, who have been married for 11 years and start fighting each other to get the sole custody of their son. Weaving past and present, “Ever After” explore the reasons why their relationship deteriorated from unconditional love to psychological warfare.

Veteran Italian helmer Gianluca Maria Tavarelli (“Don’t Make Any Plans for Tonight”) directed the series with a strong acting duo, Greta Scarano (“Suburra”) and Simone Liberati (“Suburra”). Bendotti co-wrote the series with Sofia Assirelli (“Summertime...

Online platform was created to replace physical event that was due to take place in northern French city of Lille.

Series Mania is reopening the project component of the online Digital Forum it set up to replace its physical event in the northern French city of Lille, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It will now run from April 20 until May 29.

Series Mania CEO and founder Laurence Herszberg said that following consultations with participants after the platform went offline last week it had been decided to reopen the project component of its offering to allow more time for...

Italy’s Indigo Film, the production company behind Oscar-winner “The Great Beauty,” is in advanced stages on a TV series for the global marketplace titled “A Marriage” that intends to put the narrative of a painful divorce involving custody of a child under a microscope.

The six-episode series depicting an Italian couple named Anna and Enrico from multiple angles over the course of twelve years – starting when they first intersect to the bitter legal battle for custody of their son – is among projects to be pitched during the Series Mania Digital Forum set up following cancellation of the event’s 2020 physical edition in Lille, France, due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Indigo partner Francesca Cima underlined that “A Marriage” is “totally different” from Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” and was conceived by young Italian writer Giacomo Bendotti prior to the Netflix drama being on anyone’s radar.

“When I saw ‘Marriage Story’ in Venice,...

Streaming online via video presentations from March 25, Series Mania’s experimental Digital Forum will make or break on the quality of its centerpiece, its Co-Pro Pitching Sessions. This year’s lineup, at least on paper, looks particularly strong.

Following, a break-down on the 16 originally selected projects:

“The Abduction of Yossele Shuchmacher” (Israel)

Co-created and to be directed by celebrated Israeli cineaste Eran Riklis, based on a notorious true case in 1961 and co-created by “Fauda” writer Moshe Zonder.-Backed by veteran producer Michael Sharfshtein, the title “blends an intimate, painful drama within a powerful social-political set up, wrapped as a psychological thriller,” says Riklis.

“The Black Lady”

An English-language six-part bio-series led by Brussels-based At-Prod about Madga Goebbels which author Hélène Duchateau describes as a “depressingly modern” miniseries: “Beyond Madga Goebbels’ unique experience, it echoes the growing populist trends in Europe and the processes of radicalization in our time.”

“Casa Girls” (France)

A comedic,...

The Wait

Director: Piero Messina // Writers: Piero Messina, Ilaria Macchia, Andrea Paolo Massara, Giacomo Bendotti

Piero Messina previously served as Assistant Director on Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film, The Great Beauty. He makes his directorial debut with The Wait and snagged none other than Juliette Binoche to headline his vehicle. Initially we were none to thrilled with up and coming ingénue Lou de Laage, who first landed a notable role in Daniele Thompson’s insipid It Happened in Saint Tropez (2013), but we were more impressed in her more psychologically unnerving turn in Melanie Laurent’s Breathe, which premiered at Cannes in this year’s Critics’ Week. Seasoned Italian vet Giacomo Bendotti (a supporting player in Sorrentino’s 2008 Il Divo) rounds out that cast in a narrative that concerns a mother unexpectedly meeting her son’s fiancée at a villa in Sicily and gets to know her as she waits for her son to arrive.