There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film.
Io Capitano works on several levels. At first glance, it’s a ripping yarn – two optimistic Senegalese teenagers embark on a dangerous journey, across the Sahara, through the hell of Libya and on to an overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean – all inspired by the lads’ dream of Europe.
Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.
Immaculate marks Sydney Sweeney’s complete takeover of the big screen. This year alone she has brought back the rom-com with Anyone But You, showed off her acting chops in whistle-blower drama Reality, and joined the Marvel universe with Madame Web. Immaculate is her headfirst dive into horror, and it’s a grisly convent story that aims for Rosemary’s Baby meets Suspiria, but sometimes feels like The Nun 2.
Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of carnival and joy in a tragic trumpet solo – a composer who makes you think “Italy” in every phrase.
Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme battle of the sexes, carried by extravagant pop art designs and its star Dagmar Lassander’s playful pertness.
Just as Napoleon may be Ridley Scott’s most autobiographical subject, so motor-racing potentate Enzo Ferrari’s mastery of streamlined speed seems made for Michael Mann. But where his best films’ cool control accelerates into calibrated mayhem, Ferrari mostly stays underpowered.
Does “the practice of opera singing in Italy” need help from UNESCO, which has newly inscribed it on the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”? Italian opera is surely immensely popular worldwide. But when it comes to practising the art properly, its greatest senior exponent, Riccardo Muti, powerfully argues that Verdi and Bellini, his most recent special projects in the city where he lives, Ravenna, need as much respect and care as Beethoven or Schubert.
Singular in its variousness, this is a three-act ballet that need some unpicking. No wonder those hooked on first acquaintance in 2021, like theartsdesk’s dance critic Jenny Gilbert, have been back to see it more than once.
Eighteenth century Sweden is the nominal setting for A Masked Ball, but its essence is a unique mixture of Italian testosterone and French opéra-comique elegance. If this concert performance brought it closer to the indiscriminate vitality of early Verdi rather than the experimental shades of the middle period, there was still a huge amount to enjoy, and one stellar performance.