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After the rapturous debut of “Killers of the Flower Moon” at the Cannes Film Festival a little over a week ago, Oscar-winner Martin Scorsese stuck around the region before flying back to his home in New York City. The 80-year-old director and his wife, Helen Morris, met Pope Francis in Rome. This time, though, Scorsese was just one of many artists, who had been invited to the Vatican.

This was part of a weekend called “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination” held at the Villa Malta, headquarters of the Jesuit publication “La Civiltà Cattolica.” One attraction of the summit was when Scorsese sat with the journal’s editorial director Antonio Spadaro for a discussion, and it was here, in quite possibly the last place on Earth you’d expect “a scoop,” where arguably the greatest living film director dished about his next project.

“I responded to the Pope’s...

Martin Scorsese is turning his attention to a new movie about Jesus, the director said during a visit to Italy after bringing his Killers of the Flower Moon to the Cannes Film Festival.

“I responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese told Antonio Spadaro, editorial director of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica (The Catholic Civilization). “And I’m about to start making it.”

In terms of existing films, Scorsese spoke of his admiration for the immediacy of Jesus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, his experience with and the meaning of his The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as how the making of Silence represented the next step in his research on Jesus. In the final moments of the interview, Scorsese became increasingly personal:...

Martin Scorsese is on a post-Cannes tour of Italy where over the weekend, the director, known for having a religious bent, met Pope Francis and announced that he will make a film about Jesus, reports ‘Variety’.

Scorsese was till recently at the Cannes Film Festival, where his film with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, “Killers of the Flower Moon”, received a long standing ovation after it was screened.

“I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artistes in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese said on Saturday during a Rome conference at the Vatican, according to multiple reports quoted by ‘Variety’.

“And I’m about to start making it,” the director added, suggesting that this could be his next film.

Also on Saturday, before attending the conference — titled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination” –Scorsese...

As Italy marks the centennial of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s birth with a series of special events, the Academy Museum is honoring the influential film director, poet, writer and intellectual, whose 1975 murder remains a mystery, with a complete retrospective.

Titled “Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” the Los Angeles tribute in the Academy’s Renzo Piano designed temple of cinema opened Feb. 17 with Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti on hand.

Ferretti, in a moving tribute, said he owed his career to Pasolini, having worked on nine of his films, starting with Pasolini’s first work “The Gospel According to Matthew” and ending with his incendiary condemnation of the Italian upper classes “Salò – or the 120 Days of Sodom,” released in Italy just a few weeks after Pasolini’s murder on Nov. 2, 1975, at age 53, in the seaside town of Ostia outside Rome.

The Academy’s complete retro of Pasolini’s...

Rarely one finds a friend on the Criterion Channel—discounting the parasitic relationship we form with filmmakers, I mean—but it’s great seeing their March lineup give light to Sophy Romvari, the <bias>exceptionally talented</bias> filmmaker and curator whose work has perhaps earned comparisons to Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman but charts its own path of history and reflection. It’s a good way to lead into an exceptionally strong month, featuring as it does numerous films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara, newfound cult classic Arrebato, and a number of Criterion editions.

On the last front we have The Age of Innocence, Bull Durham, A Raisin in the Sun, The Celebration, Merrily We Go to Hell, and Design for Living. There’s always something lingering on the watchlist, but it might have to wait a second longer—March is an opened floodgate.

See the full...

The cinematography race pits Joshua James Richards (“Nomadland”) against Erik Messerschmidt (“Mank”), Phedon Papamichael (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”), Dariusz Wolski (“News of the World”), and Sean Bobbitt (“Judas and the Black Messiah”). Of the five, only Papamichael has been previously nominated (for “Nebraska”). Although Messerschmidt won the coveted ASC award, Richards is the favorite for Chloé Zhao’s Best Picture frontrunner.

The momentum has been with Richards for “Nomadland” ever since he won Camerimage’s prestigious Golden Frog last year. In the recessionary road odyssey, the director’s go-to cinematographer offered a roving, naturalistic nod to Terrence Malick (with the Arri Alexa Mini), while capturing Frances McDormand’s journey through the landscapes of the American West in changing light. Magic hour was the time to capture her long walks alone (with the camera placed on the Ronin 2 gimbal).

In David Fincher’s “Mank,” Messerschmidt recreated a Golden Age of Hollywood in black-and-white.

Thomas Imbach didn’t have to go far for the inspiration and execution of his latest feature documentary “Nemesis,” which premiered in the International Competition section of the digital version of Switzerland’s Visions du Réel documentary film festival and now plays in IDFA’s main competition section.

Shot over seven years from his own window, a trick Imbach previously used in 2011’s “Day is Done,” the film tracks the demolition of Zurich’s historic freight railway station and the subsequent construction of a massive, industrial prison where three quarters of the inmate population is likely to be immigrants, if it matches national averages.

As the train station crumbles beneath the metal jaws of an excavator, Imbach tells stories from his past and the impact the station has had on his own life. Once construction begins on the towering penitentiary, the stories shift to those of immigrants awaiting deportation, collected...

The Bible, according to Milo Rau, “is a book about a guy losing his fight against state power,” but who ultimately prevails by establishing a movement. It is that struggle that he depicts in his new film, “The New Gospel.”

The documentary project is a kind of political Passion Play in which Cameroonian activist Yvan Sagnet portrays a Jesus who leads a revolt for the rights of migrants that were forced to flee their homelands and cross the Mediterranean only to be “enslaved” on the agricultural fields of southern Italy.

The film, which premieres in Venice Days, is part of Rau’s “Trilogy of Ancient Myths” that began with “Orestes in Mosul” and concludes next year with “Antigone in the Amazon.”

Thematically, “The New Gospel” also follows his 2018 work “The Congo Tribunal,” which examines the causes of the Congolese Civil War, a conflict he describes as the “biggest and bloodiest economic war in human history.

“Pasolini” is not a biopic of the late Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (played here by Willem Dafoe). The complicated director of “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” “Teorema” and “Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom” (a scene involving its editing opens the film) was more personality than a 90-minute movie could handle. Any filmed biography presuming to grapple with the whole of his life would beg to be, at least, a limited TV series.

This is, perhaps, one reason why director Abel Ferrara (“Bad Lieutenant”) has scripted a 24-hour ticking clock that mostly ignores chronology and backstory. It’s the final day of Pasolini’s life, presented as part historical detail and part imagined glimpse into the man’s mind, and it culminates, as it must, in his brutal murder at age 53.

Fittingly, to touch on the life of a man who was a writer, a filmmaker, a philosopher,...

Basma Alsharif has garnered attention worldwide for her installations and shorts over the last few years. Her work invites the viewer to re-think the depiction of language, time and space, and to re-experience the understanding of creating images and telling stories.I interviewed the filmmaker about her feature debut Ouroboros, which will have its world premiere as part of the Signs of Life competition at the 70th Locarno Film Festival.Notebook: Could you comment on the process of creating this film as a mirror to your own experience and also as a bridge to your filmmaking ideas? Basma Alsharif: As a Palestinian in the Diaspora, I have watched and experienced the perpetual destruction of the Gaza Strip throughout the course of my life—as it has throughout my parents' lives and my grandparents' lives. With the privilege of distance coupled with the privilege of having access to visiting throughout my childhood into adulthood,...

Any list of the greatest foreign directors currently working today has to include Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The directors first rose to prominence in the mid 1990s with efforts like “The Promise” and “Rosetta,” and they’ve continued to excel in the 21st century with titles such as “The Kid With A Bike” and “Two Days One Night,” which earned Marion Cotillard a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama

The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...

From the opening of Multiple Maniacs when Mr. David introduces us to Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversion are we being introduced to John Waters’ own perversion? And how long do we want to stay? Divine’s entrance is as an engorged Elizabeth Taylor bathed in shimmering white light furthering the early mystique of Divine and her Cavacade. From robbing to rosaries, movie posters to murder John Waters is “performing acts” as we have truly entered Waters’ World.

“Produced, directed, written, filmed, and edited by John Waters” – auteur: check. Multiple Maniacs is not a high-budget film and was certainly never screened before the hours of midnight in the 1970’s. Waters made the film for $5000 borrowed from his father also borrowing the land surrounding their house to set the film. During the making of his first film, Mondo Trasho, he was arrested by the police so the early scenes of Multiple Maniacs...

Paul Greengrass has spent the past twenty-plus years crafting lean, energetic action films such as his Bourne entries — a franchise he returns to this Friday with Jason Bourne — and equally taut docudramas such as Captain Philips and United 93. His staging and editing of action has become a seminal staple of modern cinema, though it has proven hard to properly imitate as the coherence he often achieves is lost on his imitators. His films explore national paranoia and wounded heroes (often Matt Damon), while his style focuses on kinetic, intimate, and spur-of-the-moment action and storytelling.

Thanks to BFI‘s most recent Sight & Sound poll, Greengrass has compiled a list of his ten favorite films, many of which globe trot outside of the U.S. to everywhere from France (Godard), to Japan (Kurosawa), and Russia (Eisenstein), among others. There’s a clear connective thread between the French New Wave style of...

The French New Wave did not invent the idea of exploring a city through the wanderings of a couple—F.W. Murnau suggest as much from the Fox studio backlot in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Luchino Visconti offered his own glorious fairy tale stroll of Cinecittà’s Venice in White Nights—but that movement certainly provided an invigorating, youthful inspiration to an emerging generation of international filmmakers to orient their cinema to the relationships close to them and to streets they know so well.Thus we see Catalonian director José María Nunes’s 1966 masterpiece Noche de vinto tinto (Red Wine Night), which begins with a young woman distraught when her boyfriend breaks a promised date and, going out into the night, she attaches herself to a failed Romeo. The character of their meeting encapsulates all the oneiric, irrational, partially romantic, partially despondent tenor of the evening of bar hopping that follows,...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

On November 2, 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini was found by a beach in Rome’s Ostia neighborhood. Being the result of a heavy beating and multiple run-overs by his own car, this death is so ignoble — and so mysterious; despite a conviction, the culprit has never really, truly been identified — that it casts a permanent pall over his legacy. (Worse yet, as one below video will show, that Pasolini was still working on Salò, a movie whose controversial status is only heightened by the murder.) Today marks the horrible occasion’s 40th anniversary, but it doesn’t necessitate mourning. If anything, now is a time to honor the man who always forced us to consider things we might not wish to acknowledge — our desires, our vices, our limits, our connections to art, and our relationship with the alternately beautiful and disgusting human body.

Embedded for your viewing pleasure, then,...

We return with a look at The Gospel According to St Matthew and are joined with regular guest Hunter Duesing from The Midnight Movie Cowboys.

From Masters of Cinema:

Legendary director (and avowed atheist) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew [Il vangelo secondo Matteo] is one of the great retellings of the story of Christ – a cinematic rendering (filmed by invitation from the Pope, no less) at once both passionate and poetic.

With stunning black-and-white photography, an eclectic soundtrack (Odetta, Bach, a Congolese mass, etc), and using a cast of non-professionals who voice dialogue drawn directly from scripture, The Gospel According to Matthew depicts the key events in the life of Christ, from immaculate conception to death on the cross.

Vaunted by the Vatican as one of its select few recommended films, acclaimed by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a “great film”, and revered by critics and audiences alike, Pasolini’s Oscar-,...

Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights "is not a literal adaptation of The Arabian Nights, it merely adopts its structure, its disposition, and—eventually—its sublime perspicacity," writes Little White Lies editor David Jenkins. "It comes across as a cross-processing of Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the films of inspirational Portuguese filmmakers, Antonio Reis and Margaret Cordeiro. But even that doesn't quite cover it." We've got the trailer and we're collecting reviews of all three volumes. » - David Hudson...

Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights "is not a literal adaptation of The Arabian Nights, it merely adopts its structure, its disposition, and—eventually—its sublime perspicacity," writes Little White Lies editor David Jenkins. "It comes across as a cross-processing of Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the films of inspirational Portuguese filmmakers, Antonio Reis and Margaret Cordeiro. But even that doesn't quite cover it." We've got the trailer and we're collecting reviews of all three volumes. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Agata Pyzik for frieze on Vera Chytilová's Daisies; a history of censorship and the movies in Iran after the Islamic Revolution; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Statues Also Die and Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) plus a speech by Pere Portabella; Matt Connolly on Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, Fernando F. Croce on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Francine Prose on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Peter Hogue on Raoul Walsh, Danny King on James B. Harris, Todd Field's interview with Sissy Spacek, Michael Tully's with James Gray—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Agata Pyzik for frieze on Vera Chytilová's Daisies; a history of censorship and the movies in Iran after the Islamic Revolution; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Statues Also Die and Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) plus a speech by Pere Portabella; Matt Connolly on Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, Fernando F. Croce on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Francine Prose on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Peter Hogue on Raoul Walsh, Danny King on James B. Harris, Todd Field's interview with Sissy Spacek, Michael Tully's with James Gray—and more. » - David Hudson...

20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Directed by: Terry Gilliam

So…drugs, right? Based on Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel of the same title, Fear and Loathing stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively. The pair is heading to Sin City, speeding through the Nevada desert, under the influence of mescaline. From there, the film is series a bizarre hallucinations seen through the eyes of Duke. So, we jump from hotel room to hotel room, all of the action a blur of what is happening and what really isn’t. Throughout the course of the film, Duke and/or Gonzo ingest the following drugs: mescaline, sunshine acid, diethyl ether, LSD, cocaine, and adenochrome (probably more). Duke – who is a Thompson stand-in – is supposed to be writing an article before heading back to Los Angeles, but tends to get sidetracked quite a bit. In...

Abel Ferrara has always been known for creating characters and stories that delve into  extreme human behaviour, but his last couple of films have concerned events that he did not have to dream up. This summer, the filmmaker unveiled "Welcome To New York," the fictionalized tale of former Imf chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and now, just a couple of months later, Ferrara is in Venice where he's premiering "Pasolini," a feature about controversial, slain filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. And a pretty great first trailer for the film has arrived. Vacillating between English, Italian and French, this looks to be a respectful and quite beautiful look at the director who brought "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" and "The Gospel According To St. Matthew" to cinemas. The movie will focus on the events surrounding Pasolini's murder: while a male prostitute initially confessed to the crime, he later said the act was coerced via.

And here we are. The day after Easter and we’ve reached the top of the mountain. While compiling this list, it’s become evident that true religious films just aren’t made anymore (and if they are, they are widely panned). That being said, religious themes exist in more mainstream movies than ever, despite there being no deliberate attempts to dub the films “religious.” Faith, God, whatever you want to call it – it’s influenced the history of nations, of politics, of culture, and of film. And these are the most important films in that wheelhouse. There are only two American films in the top 10, and only one of them is in English.

courtesy of hilobrow.com

10. Andrei Rublev (1966)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...

Look no further for a bracing antidote to hoary biblical epics on television and escapism that stretches belief from Ben Stiller

Every year, the aisles of Easter greeting cards in stationers' shops grow wider, as more commercial enterprises clock to the holiday's prettier-than-Christmas potential but the film industry, by and large, has resisted. The list of great Easter-related films is short, and the list of those available online considerably shorter. Happily, iTunes recently identified an exception by adding Pier Paolo Pasolini's rapturous The Gospel According to St. Matthew to their download roster and you could not ask for a more bracing antidote to the hoary biblical epics that TV programmers routinely trot out over this particular weekend.

Not at all the reading one might expect from the bristly gay Marxist, this spare, serene observation of Jesus Christ's trajectory from birth to death to, well, beyond instead surprises with its devotion to the text,...

The Gospel According to Matthew

Written and Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italy, 1964

As an avowed Marxist, homosexual, and atheist, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini may seem to some a dubious choice to have made one of the most austere, faithful, and simply one of the best films about the life and death of Jesus Christ. But, with The Gospel According to Matthew, from 1964, that’s exactly what the controversial filmmaker, poet, novelist, and theorist did. This gritty and unpolished depiction of the life of Christ contains many of the narrative hallmarks featured in other film versions of the same story: the virgin birth, the early miracles, the apostles, Christ’s persecution and, ultimately, the crucifixion. However, no other cinematic depiction of this well-known chronicle looks, sounds, or feels quite like this one.

Before making this film, Pasolini had directed his first feature, Accattone!, in 1961, followed by Mamma Roma, starring...

“Movie Houses of Worship” is a regular feature spotlighting our favorite movie theaters around the world, those that are like temples of cinema catering to the most religious-like film geeks. This week, Fsr’s Allison Loring chose one of her favorite theaters in Los Angeles. If you’d like to suggest or submit a place you regularly worship at the altar of cinema, please email our weekend editor. Aero Theater Location: 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA Opened: Originally opened in 1939 as a 24-hour theater for aircraft workers, but closed in 2003 after Robert Redford’s Sundance Cinemas project (which was going to take over ownership of the theater) fell through because General Cinemas (which was being sold to AMC) went bankrupt. The Aero is now officially known as the “Max Palevsky Aero Theater” thanks to Palevsky’s funding for the American Cinematheque’s refurbishment of the theater which re-opened in January 2005. No. of...

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two artists whose accomplished individual bodies of work already complement one another with overlapping ambitions, ideas and approaches, co-direct A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (which has just premiered here in Locarno in the Fuori concorso section), a three part manifesto on the potential for utopian living, and a loose, fluid (distinctly apolitical and secular) definition of what that may be. Beginning in a commune in the Lofoten Islands, Rivers and Russell fleetingly document moments of life, music and conversation among a peaceful collective of people, before jarringly switching to a portrayal of a tranquil solitude in the wilderness of Northern Finland as a figure canoes and settles on the shore, and, finally, a black metal performance in Norway. These three parts are seemingly disparate, but tonally unite in Rivers and Russell's unbiased presentation. One of the central elements that connect these three parts are the film's main figure,...

The daring new movie from the director of Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond The Pines is a sweeping emotional drama exploring the unbreakable bond between fathers and sons.

Luke (Academy Award nominee Ryan Gosling) is a high-wire motorcycle stunt performer who travels with the carnival from town to town. While passing through Schenectady in upstate New York, he tries to reconnect with a former lover, Romina

(Eva Mendes), only to learn that she has given birth to their son Jason in his absence. Luke decides to give up life on the road to try and provide for his newfound family by taking a job as a car mechanic. Noticing Luke’s ambition and talents, his employer Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) proposes to partner with Luke in a string of spectacular bank robberies – which will place Luke on the radar of ambitious rookie cop Avery Cross (Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper).

Avery,...

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 363 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies, the Up docs and Decalogue) and of those 363, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 362 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies and Decalogue) and of those 362, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do,...

A new retrospective puts the unconventional film-maker back in the spotlight. About time too says John Patterson

Pier Paolo Pasolini's gruesome murder nearly 40 years ago – his own Alfa Romeo was driven over his head after a rent-boy dispute/homophobic ambush/political assassination (the controversy endures) – was followed by the posthumous release of his most notorious succès de scandale, Salo, Or The 120 Days of Sodom, that poison feast of cruelty and excrement.

A murder you can't bear to think about, topped by a movie you can hardly bear to watch: it's unsurprising, perhaps, that people forgot about Pasolini very quickly indeed, relegating him merely to queer-bashing murder victim or the guy who made that rape, torture and shit-eating movie. It all left a very poor taste in the mouth.

There's another Pasolini, though. In fact there are several: the Marxist, the playwright, the documentarian, the poet who ranks high in the 20th-century Italian canon,...

Thanks to preview takings, the fairytale-themed action flick kicks Wreck-It Ralph into second place, while Mama is a spooky third

The battle for the top spot

For the second time in its four-week run, Wreck-It Ralph has been forced to yield the top spot to a film it actually out-grossed over the weekend period. Thanks to preview takings on Wednesday and Thursday, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters sits in pole position in the official UK box-office chart, with five-day grosses of £1.50m. Strip out the previews, and the tally falls to a less-lofty £1.10m. The last time this happened was two weeks ago, when previews for A Good Day to Die Hard earned the action flick the top position, despite lower takings than Wreck-It over the actual weekend period.

With the half-term holiday ending the previous weekend, Wreck-It Ralph fell by a predictably hefty 59%, but Disney will be more than happy...

Gangs Of Wasseypur Part 2 | Stoker | Arbitrage | Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters | Caesar Must Die | The Bay | Sleep Tight | Broken City | Trashed | Safe Haven | Hi-So | Michael H. Profession: Director | The Gospel According To Matthew | The Attacks Of 26/11 | Acoustic Routes

Gangs Of Wasseypur Part 2 (18)

(Anurag Kashyap, 2012, Ind) Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Zeishan Quadri, Aditya Kumar, Huma Qureshi. 160 mins

It's over five hours long in all, but there's barely a slack moment in this exhilarating Indian epic as it races through generations of smalltown criminal, industrial and political enmity. Yes, it's violent, but like all great crime stories it's also a vibrant tapestry of family life and modern history, closer to Leone, Coppola or Tarantino than Bollywood.

Stoker (18)

(Park Chan-wook, 2013, Us/UK) Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode. 99 mins

The Oldboy director gives us a sensual, tantalisingly ambiguous thriller, centred on Wasikowska and her shifty smalltown family.

Arbitrage (15)

(Nicholas Jarecki, 2012, Us) Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling.

Champion of the disinherited of postwar Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterworks reveal an obsession with martyrdom that foreshadowed his own wretched death

At the end of Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini's great film, the hero lies dying on a prison bed like the dead Christ of Mantegna or a barefoot saint by Caravaggio. Much has been made of the Renaissance and baroque iconography in Pasolini's cinema. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio's grubby, low-life Christs excited the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose wretched death was somehow foreshadowed in his own work. On the morning of 2 November 1975, in a shanty town outside Rome, Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo. A woman had noticed something in front of her house. "See how those bastards come and dump their rubbish here," she complained.

The scene of the murder, Idroscalo, recalls a setting for a...

Above: Giotto, Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1305.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) was released by Criterion in 1998 and in 2004 they released Mamma Roma (1962). This past month they released a much belated box-set of his six-hour Trilogy of Life (1971-1974), in a beautiful restoration and accompanied with an awesome heap of great docs, essays and other goodies. On December 13 MoMA started a month-long retrospective dedicated to his work.

I. Defending Pasolini Against His Devotees

The prevailing view of Pier Paolo Pasolini has become subjugated to the misshapen reputation of his most infamous film, Salò (1975). The film’s unyielding serial descent into ever more severe cycles of mutilation, sodomy, coprophagia, and chronic rape of a group of 12-15 year olds has scandalized and influenced a culture that is frantic for any stimuli that can remind its constituents of their humanity. The film has furnished ample fodder for generations of filmmakers intent on...

Last week saw the annual London Italian Film Festival showcase a week of exciting new Italian cinema at Ciné Lumière. This year’s raft of 10 titles was picked by Irene Bignardi and two Film London’s Adrian Wootton. They chose well. Very well, indeed. The festival continues throughout March at the Italian Cultural Institute with an homage to Federico Fellini and Mario Monicelli and a series of screenings focused on film and food.

Film-goers were treated to Passion (dir: Jon Turturro), We Believed (dir. Mario Martone), And Peace On Earth (dirs: Matteo Botrugno & Daniele Coluccini), Lost Kisses (dir. Roberta Torre), Basilicata Coast To Coast (dir. Rocco Papaleo), Angels of Evil (dir. Michele Placido), Sorelle Mai (dir. Marco Bellocchio), The Passion (dir. Carlo Mazzacurati), A Quiet Life (dir. Claudio Cupellini) and Gorbaciof (dir. Stefano Incerti).

One thing is for sure, all the films shown deserve to be seen and distributed in the UK.

by Vadim Rizov

Veiko Õunpuu's second film, The Temptation of St. Tony, offers special thanks to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Buñuel in the end credits. That's apt for a film whose skepticism about religion as a redemptive force resembles the latter and which pays explicit homage to the former in a song cue. Odetta's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," used during the Nativity sequence of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, plays over a cannibalism scene directly reminiscent of Porcile. Despite that double-barreled reference, Õunpuu denies any direct influence: in an interview last year, he allowed that "the homage to all of them" (Tarkovsky, Fellini, Lynch and Bresson as well) "is there, whether I like it or not."

He very much does like it. His first film Autumn Ball reveled in post-Soviet architecture and dour, lifeless color. Despite one character's outburst that "Baltic consciousness" is a...

Producer of Pier Paolo Pasolini's early films

Though an enterprising film producer, often ahead of his times, Alfredo Bini, who has died aged 83, is best remembered for having given the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini the chance to make his debut as a film-maker with Accattone (1960), when no other film company was prepared to back it. Bini produced more than 40 films, including all the features made by Pasolini up until 1967, including Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964). Among his other films were many starring his wife, Rosanna Schiaffino.

Bini was born in Livorno, Tuscany, and, during the second world war, ran away from home to join the army. He was wounded and got a medal, but went back to finish his studies in biology. He soon gave up the idea of a scientific career and in 1945 moved to Rome, where, after taking on various jobs, he managed a theatre group.

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...

Dennis Hopper's recent announcement of terminal cancer jump-started a long-overdue appreciation of his art and life. He got a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame last month (finally), and newspaper and blog appreciations are starting to pop up, focusing mainly on Hopper the performer. That makes sense: Hopper's career spanned a half-century's worth of theater, cinema, TV and recorded music; his list of collaborators stretches from Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne through Kiefer Sutherland and Gorillaz.

Still, one hopes descriptions of Hopper's directorial career don't start and end with "Easy Rider." Hopper's 1969 debut is notable for its alternately ecstatic and lacerating portrait of the counterculture, the then-unusual use of pre-existing pop songs for its soundtrack, adventurous editing and its status as the first independently financed feature to become a mainstream smash. But there's more to his directorial résumé than philosophical bikers.

Although he directed just seven features ("Easy Rider,...

Mark Kermode chooses the most believable sons of God...

Lothaire Bluteau in Jesus of Montreal (1989)

It's perhaps ironic that the best telling of the Easter story is a solidly secular work, but Denys Arcand's modern parable about a troupe of actors attempting to breathe new life into the Gospels (and annoying the church in the process) is a genuine masterpiece. Bluteau is mesmerising as the performer who starts to take Christ's teachings to heart, thereby radicalising those around him and threatening the authorities. Arcand's intelligent script even contrives a real-life resurrection which offers eyesight to the blind and health to the sick. A real cinematic miracle.

Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Hey kids! Jesus Rocks! Nowadays, this film of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical would doubtless be cast via a trashyTV show entitled How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Messiah? Back in 1973, however,...

A list of the 50 Most Important Religion Films of All Time is now online at Film Snobbery, which is paying tribute to "the union of the sacred and cinematic" in celebration of Epiphany (Jan. 6), the final day of the Christmas holiday season. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is not the #1 film on the list. Instead, that position belongs to Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, in which Charlton Heston (above) turns down Anne Baxter so he can go flush the waters of the Red Sea. Rounding out Film Snobbery’s top 10 religion movies are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof (1971), [...]...

Movie legend Cecil B. Demille's The King Of Kings has topped an Easter-flavoured poll to find the best film about Jesus' life.

The 1927 film, starring H.B. Warner, beat director Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake and 1964's The Gospel According to St. Matthew to top Time magazine's new list.

Also making the top 10 are Godspell, The Last Temptation of Christ, Passion of The Christ and even Monty Python's Life of Brian.

ROME -- A screening of Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ scheduled for Tuesday did not take place because Gibson accepted a request by the Vatican that some of the more violent scenes be cut, the screening's organizers said. Andrea Piersanti, president of Ente dello Spettacolo, a non-profit Catholic body that had organized the screening, said the screening was postponed "for technical, not political, reasons." The film was to be screened at the start of a week long, Vatican-sponsored International Festival of Spiritual Movies in Rome (HR 12/03). The Passion of Christ had been at the center of a controversy in Italy, with several church members voicing their concern that some of the film's scenes may be too violent for the general public. Instead of Gibson's Passion, a 10-minute clip of Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ was screened along with clips from earlier films on the life of Jesus, including Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and The Greatest Story Ever Told starring Max von Sydow. Scorsese's movie had previously been on the Vatican's interdicted list.