Luigi Comencini: Last News

Jay Weissberg French director Axelle Ropert makes an unwise shift from sprightly comedy (“Miss and the Doctors,” “The Apple of My Eye”) to faux-naive artificiality with “Petite Solange,” a tiresome divorce drama seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl. Though clearly meant as a refreshing, femme-centric throwback to a style of filmmaking that petered out in the 1970s (Ropert cites inspiration from François Truffaut and Luigi Comencini), the results merely feel out of place, bizarrely innocent and clumsily executed.

Italian big-screen diva Gina Lollobrigida was due to be laid to rest in her native hilltop town of Subiaco, after a televised funeral ceremony on Thursday at the Church of the Artists in nearby Rome.

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, who was one of the world’s most famous actresses enjoying success in Europe and Hollywood in her 1950s and 60s heyday, has died in Rome at the age of 95.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentProlific Italian director Francesca Comencini (“Gomorrah,” the series “Django”) is set to make a personal feature film that will pay homage to her father Luigi Comencini, the Italian master who made Oscar-nominated Cinema Italiano classic “Bread, Love and Dreams,” with Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio De Sica.Francesca’s film, with the working title “First Life, Then Cinema,” is being developed by Kavac Film, the Rome-based shingle of veteran Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio. Bellocchio is being honored in Cannes with a Lifetime Achievement honorary Palme d’Or on July 17.Bellocchio’s partner in Kavac, producer Simone Gattoni, will be shopping the Comencini project in Cannes.