by Cláudio Alves
The Movie Star and Her Director Son
Even before we see her face in The Life Ahead, it's impossible to draw the eyes away from Sophia Loren. Following in the tradition of European realism, Edoardo Ponti's camera captures an Italian marketplace with shaky energy. However, no matter how shabby the framing might be, the colors depart from the standards of realism. Angus Hudson's cinematography makes everything a bit too bright, the sun shining on the streets like golden flames, every saturated color intensified. It's reality as if painted with crayons by an enthusiastic child.
In this sunny landscape, a shot of bright blue, bluer than the sky, stands out, crowned by a mess of gunmetal hair. Dressed in azure, Loren may have lost some of the youthful glow of her heyday in the midcentury, but the star power is intact, her magnetism as strong as ever.
The Movie Star and Her Director Son
Even before we see her face in The Life Ahead, it's impossible to draw the eyes away from Sophia Loren. Following in the tradition of European realism, Edoardo Ponti's camera captures an Italian marketplace with shaky energy. However, no matter how shabby the framing might be, the colors depart from the standards of realism. Angus Hudson's cinematography makes everything a bit too bright, the sun shining on the streets like golden flames, every saturated color intensified. It's reality as if painted with crayons by an enthusiastic child.
In this sunny landscape, a shot of bright blue, bluer than the sky, stands out, crowned by a mess of gunmetal hair. Dressed in azure, Loren may have lost some of the youthful glow of her heyday in the midcentury, but the star power is intact, her magnetism as strong as ever.
- 11/13/2020
- by Cláudio Alves
- FilmExperience
It’s always a pleasure to see a screen legend return to starring roles. For Sophia Loren, we haven’t seen her on the screen in a major way in over a decade, since her supporting appearance in Nine. Now, she’s back as a lead, showcasing her talents in Netflix’s latest awards contender, the international feature The Life Ahead. A movie built around her, and one that aptly showcases her, it’s a contender not just potentially in Best International Feature, but in Best Actress for Loren as well. Hitting the streaming service today, it’s well worth a watch, if only to see Loren in action once again, proving she hasn’t missed a beat. The film is a drama, based on the novel The Life Before Us, which has twice been adapted already before this. Taking place in an Italian seaside town, a 12-year-old street kid...
- 11/13/2020
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
On paper, “The Life Ahead” sounds like sentimental mush — orphaned immigrant kid gets rescued from a tortuous life of crime by the maternal Holocaust survivor and former prostitute who takes him in. And make no mistake: Director Edoardo Ponti, who directs his mother Sophia Loren as said survivor opposite newcomer Ibrahima Gueye as the immigrant child in question, certainly has made that kind of movie. But with its formidable odd couple at the center and Ponti’s alternately slick and sensitive direction,
While “The Life Ahead” draws from the same Romain Gary novel that inspired the 1977 Oscar-winner “Madame Rosa,” Ponti and co-writer Ugo Chiti have transplanted the setting from France to inner-city Italy and set the drama in the present day. That means cinematic grand dame Loren, returning to the screen for the first time in a decade, can play a role that fits her 86-year-old visage, and she brings a sturdy,...
While “The Life Ahead” draws from the same Romain Gary novel that inspired the 1977 Oscar-winner “Madame Rosa,” Ponti and co-writer Ugo Chiti have transplanted the setting from France to inner-city Italy and set the drama in the present day. That means cinematic grand dame Loren, returning to the screen for the first time in a decade, can play a role that fits her 86-year-old visage, and she brings a sturdy,...
- 10/29/2020
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
The last time most of us saw Sophia Loren on screen, we barely saw her at all: not just because her role in 2009’s star-spangled musical deadweight “Nine” was so minor, but because Rob Marshall’s film was so enamored of the shimmery silver radiance generated by its various luminaries that it often forgot to look at them directly. That’s not a failing of “The Life Ahead,” her first feature-length starring vehicle in 16 years, and that alone makes it something of an event. That extraordinary face, regal and leonine as she heads into her mid-eighties, is so generously and adoringly cradled by the camera, it sometimes seems she has to be yanked out of scenes entirely for the narrative to progress.
Who can blame director Edoardo Ponti? His star is not only a last-of-a-generation icon, but his own mother: The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms,...
Who can blame director Edoardo Ponti? His star is not only a last-of-a-generation icon, but his own mother: The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms,...
- 10/29/2020
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
After last weekend’s influx of movies from big-name directors like Spike Lee and Judd Apatow, the landscape for movies looks to be comparatively calmer this weekend. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fair share of worthwhile releases hitting VOD and streaming services this weekend, from studio movies with big stars, independently produced treasures coming off of buzzy festival runs and projects from major foreign filmmakers being distributed in the United States.
Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried star in Blumhouse Productions’ latest thriller “You Should Have Left.” Following its release strategies for “Trolls World Tour” and “The King of Staten Island,” Universal has decided to give the movie a “home premiere” and price 48-hour digital rentals at $19.99.
Meanwhile, French director Olivier Assayas’ latest film “Wasp Network” is premiering on Netflix nine months after its debut at the Venice Film Festival last September. The primarily Spanish language film...
Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried star in Blumhouse Productions’ latest thriller “You Should Have Left.” Following its release strategies for “Trolls World Tour” and “The King of Staten Island,” Universal has decided to give the movie a “home premiere” and price 48-hour digital rentals at $19.99.
Meanwhile, French director Olivier Assayas’ latest film “Wasp Network” is premiering on Netflix nine months after its debut at the Venice Film Festival last September. The primarily Spanish language film...
- 6/19/2020
- by J. Kim Murphy
- Variety Film + TV
In a good haunted-house thriller, architecture is destiny. Early on in “You Should Have Left,” when Theo (Kevin Bacon), a wealthy retired banker with a tabloid scandal in his past, shows up with his movie-actress wife, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), and their six-year-old daughter, Ella (Avery Essex), at the vacation home they’ve rented for a getaway in the Welsh countryside, you know in your bones that you’re watching a variation on “The Shining.”
The creepy originality of the home design is part of it. Just as the fantastic, gargantuan, ski-lodge-gone-Native-American set for the Overlook Hotel was such a major dimension of Stanley Kubrick’s film, here we’re sucked in by the eccentric contours of a place that looks, from the outside, like a gray designer modernist Bauhaus Monopoly house. Inside, it’s a vast airy network of light gray brick and Scandinavian wood, with flickers of pastel, and...
The creepy originality of the home design is part of it. Just as the fantastic, gargantuan, ski-lodge-gone-Native-American set for the Overlook Hotel was such a major dimension of Stanley Kubrick’s film, here we’re sucked in by the eccentric contours of a place that looks, from the outside, like a gray designer modernist Bauhaus Monopoly house. Inside, it’s a vast airy network of light gray brick and Scandinavian wood, with flickers of pastel, and...
- 6/18/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
There’s something wrong with Theo Conroy. A meditation app can’t quiet his mind, which is prone to jealous fantasies and out-there suspicions. Small annoyances rattle him. People look at him askance, his name jarring loose uncomfortable memories, even for seeming strangers. His wife’s success pisses him off. Even his kid knows that something is not quite right with her “Baba.” A vacation can’t solve everything, but it certainly can’t hurt. Or can it? Stepping back from the blockbusters on which he’s built his career — for better and worse — “Jurassic Park” writer and “Mortdecai” director David Koepp turns his attention to the small-scale chills of “You Should Have Left,”
The chiller reunites Koepp with his “Stir of Echoes” star Kevin Bacon (who also produced the film), hinting at the pair’s apparent affection for horror offerings with natty psychological twists. In search of a little peace of mind,...
The chiller reunites Koepp with his “Stir of Echoes” star Kevin Bacon (who also produced the film), hinting at the pair’s apparent affection for horror offerings with natty psychological twists. In search of a little peace of mind,...
- 6/18/2020
- by Kate Erbland
- Thompson on Hollywood
There’s something wrong with Theo Conroy. A meditation app can’t quiet his mind, which is prone to jealous fantasies and out-there suspicions. Small annoyances rattle him. People look at him askance, his name jarring loose uncomfortable memories, even for seeming strangers. His wife’s success pisses him off. Even his kid knows that something is not quite right with her “Baba.” A vacation can’t solve everything, but it certainly can’t hurt. Or can it? Stepping back from the blockbusters on which he’s built his career — for better and worse — “Jurassic Park” writer and “Mortdecai” director David Koepp turns his attention to the small-scale chills of “You Should Have Left,”
The chiller reunites Koepp with his “Stir of Echoes” star Kevin Bacon (who also produced the film), hinting at the pair’s apparent affection for horror offerings with natty psychological twists. In search of a little peace of mind,...
The chiller reunites Koepp with his “Stir of Echoes” star Kevin Bacon (who also produced the film), hinting at the pair’s apparent affection for horror offerings with natty psychological twists. In search of a little peace of mind,...
- 6/18/2020
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
Blackadder
By Kieran Kinsella
Click here to friend Best British TV on Facebook or here to follow us on twitter.
Without butlers the British would never have been able to solve any murders that involved the rich and famous. British TV butlers have always been key figures in both period dramas and anything involving Agatha Christie. With so many men in black to choose from, narrowing down the 10 best British TV butlers was no easy task but here are our men.
Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) in Blackadder III. Blackadder III (to use his American name) treated all men in the same manner – with complete contempt. His dislike for fellow man was understandable given that he worked for a playboy prince (Hugh Laurie) and a man called Sod-off (Tony Robinson).
Angus Hudson (Gordon Jackson) in Upstairs Downstairs. In The Great Escape Gordon Jackson caused Richard Attenborough to get killed as a result...
By Kieran Kinsella
Click here to friend Best British TV on Facebook or here to follow us on twitter.
Without butlers the British would never have been able to solve any murders that involved the rich and famous. British TV butlers have always been key figures in both period dramas and anything involving Agatha Christie. With so many men in black to choose from, narrowing down the 10 best British TV butlers was no easy task but here are our men.
Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) in Blackadder III. Blackadder III (to use his American name) treated all men in the same manner – with complete contempt. His dislike for fellow man was understandable given that he worked for a playboy prince (Hugh Laurie) and a man called Sod-off (Tony Robinson).
Angus Hudson (Gordon Jackson) in Upstairs Downstairs. In The Great Escape Gordon Jackson caused Richard Attenborough to get killed as a result...
- 8/25/2011
- by admin
Beginning October 2, the Sitges Festival Internacional de Catalunya 2008 was a sun-drenched 10-day fiesta teeming with talent and terror. Every major genre movie of current note was on show in the picturesque Spanish resort town’s veteran festival, which surprised organizers Angel Sala and Mike Hostench by equaling last year’s record-breaking figures—especially as this 41st edition took place against the gloomiest of economic backdrops.
But as Sala pointed out in his speech at the closing awards ceremony, people need to escape to fantasy/horror cinema more than ever in such trying times. And Sitges certainly put the credit-crunch blues on hold for anyone attending the numerous gala events. Like the two Surprise Movies: Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea, genius animator Hayao Miyazaki’s delightful reworking of the “Little Mermaid” fairy tale, and Michael Doughtery’s nice and nasty Trick ’R Treat (pictured above). The latter was a...
But as Sala pointed out in his speech at the closing awards ceremony, people need to escape to fantasy/horror cinema more than ever in such trying times. And Sitges certainly put the credit-crunch blues on hold for anyone attending the numerous gala events. Like the two Surprise Movies: Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea, genius animator Hayao Miyazaki’s delightful reworking of the “Little Mermaid” fairy tale, and Michael Doughtery’s nice and nasty Trick ’R Treat (pictured above). The latter was a...
- 11/4/2008
- Fangoria
We have the full list of the Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia 2008 award winners. Among those taking home prizes was "Surveillance," a film by Jennfier Chambers Lynch which captured the Best Motion Picture award. Lynch writes alongside Kent Harper, the crime drama/thriller which stars Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Pell James and Ryan Simpkins. Also taking significant awards was Brian Cox for his work on "Red," Fernando Meilelles' "Blindness" drama starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo and "Let the Right One In." What is Sitges? The number one fantasy film festival in the world and represents, at the same time, the cultural expression with the most media impact in Catalonia. With a solid experience, the Sitges Festival is a stimulating universe of encounters, exhibitions, presentations and screenings of fantasy films from all over the world. As announced, here are the winners announced by Sitges: Surveillance, by Jennifer Lynch, Best...
- 10/13/2008
- Upcoming-Movies.com
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