Editor’s Note: The Odeon Original Sound programme continues at the Astra 2 in piazza Beccaria during the 50 Days of International Cinema Festival, which is being held at the Odeon (see TF 151 for details). For showtimes at the Astra 2, see the events listing.
Astra 2
Piazza Beccaria
tel. 055/2343666
November 14
MONEYBALL
Based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction bestseller, the movie’s subject is Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who put together a baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft his players. ‘While a hopelessly awkward-looking Hill provides fish-out-of-water laughs, Pitt gives a genuinely soul-searching performance’ (Variety). ‘The movie does achieve something nearly impossible: Someone who doesn’t even like the sport may care about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics’ (The Hollywood Reporter). ‘True to Hollywood’s tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula’ (Slant Magazine).
November 18, 20, 23, 24
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1
‘Every moment, every battle has led to this…’ The fourth in the series, Part One of the saga’s final instalment, features (surprise! surprise!) Edward and Bella’s wedding and honeymoon in romantic Rio where their superhuman efforts at abstinence finally break down. But their welcome to the grown up world – offspring in the form of weird daughter Renesmee arrives with almost indecent haste – is thrown into thrilling jeopardy as the Quileute and the Volturi close in on the counter-threat posed by this unnatural development, setting the scene for the final showdown (which we all know about anyway). ‘No measure of time with you will be long enough. But we’ll start with forever…’ Immortality knows no bounds…
November 21, 22
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN
Steven Spielberg’s movie is the first in the series of 3D motion-capture films based on the iconic character created by Georges Remi, better known to the world by his pen name, Hergé. Intrepid young reporter Tintin and his friends discover directions to a sunken ship commanded by Captain Haddock’s ancestor and go off on a treasure hunt. ‘Clearly rejuvenated by his collaboration with producer Peter Jackson, and blessed with a smart script and the best craftsmanship money can buy, Spielberg has fashioned a whiz-bang thrill ride that’s largely faithful to the wholesome spirit of his source but still appealing to younger, Tintin-challenged audiences’ (Variety). ‘Action-packed, gorgeous, and faithfully whimsical: Hergé thought Spielberg the only director capable of filming Tintin. He was onto something’ (Empire).
The British Institute
Lungarno Guicciardini 9
tel. 055/267781
‘With Great Emotion‘: Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini
November 16, 8pm
VOYAGE TO ITALY
Viaggio in Italia/Voyage to Italy (1954), hailed by the Cahiers du Cinema critics as a masterpiece, this Bergman-Rossellini collaboration is definitively the most successful critically but was a commercial disaster. British couple Katherine and Alex Joyce, trapped in a jaded marriage, travel to Naples to sort out an inheritance and are transfigured in various ways by the Italian experience, climaxing in an epiphany of reconciliation. ‘Roberto Rossellini’s finest fiction film, and unmistakably one of the great achievements of the art … A crucial work, truthful and mysterious’ (Chicago Reader). ‘Rarely has screen chemistry worked so indefinably well… And though critics may have always praised it as “one of the most beautiful films ever made”, its genuinely romantic tenderness … mark it as never so unfashionable, never so moving’ (Time Out). (In English.)
November 23, 8pm
LA PAURA
Non credo piu’ all’amore/La paura/Fear (1954), is the fourth collaboration and probably the least known and least successful, La Paura, like its predecessors, continues the personal contexts with an excellent premise of a woman driven to suicide as she lives in dread that her husband, who she madly loves, will discover her affair. ‘It takes on the shadowy look of film noir with its German expressionist style and protagonist caught in a seemingly never ending dark psychological web. It plays as a nightmare, leaving a lingering bad aftertaste as it settles in and becomes fixated in moralizing about the virtue of telling the truth no matter the consequences’ (Dennis Schwartz). (In Italian with Italian subtitles.)
