Il Cinema Ritrovato XL, Bologna June 2026

I was fortunate to attend this year’s 40th Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna – so many films (over 400!), screened in 6 theaters and 2 piazzas. A theme of celebrating strong women ran through the festival: one featured actor was Barbara Stanwyck, in Double Indemnity, Forty Guns, Clash by Night, and Ball of Fire. Films of Josephine Baker were also celebrated: Princesse Tam Tam, Fausse Alerte – in which she plays a sly amused match-maker between a man and woman who’ve been cultivating enmity for generations, and La Sirene de Tropique, along with numerous short clips of her performances. An extensive exhibit was devoted to the lifework of Agnes Varda, and her film Vagabond screened at Piazza Maggiore, introduced by her daughter Rosalie for a crowd of thousands as the evening sky darkened. 

Also on hand were Isabella Rossellini, Wim Wenders, Irene Jacob. A special video appearance by Mel Brooks helped us all to celebrate his 100th birthday – the crowd sang the Italian version of Happy Birthday, which he gladly acknowledged – prior to a screening of Young Frankenstein in the Piazza Maggiore. 

Given the centrality of film restoration, one of the festival highlights was Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, assembled by Bill Morrison in 2024 from fragments of nitrate stock from the US National Archives. These fleeting and damaged images show soldiers digging trenches, moving artillery piece by piece through snow, a horse corps, tanks, biplanes in combat, a zeppelin launched, and at the end a lone parachutist descending slowly to earth. The holes and discolorations in the film stock make the age of this footage more poignant – here is what remains of a record of war. In a time when we can no longer trust the images presented to us, these deteriorated clips are a testament to the importance of authenticity, of recording events. The Kronos Quartet contributed the score. 

Another treat was films of Daisuke Ito, a Japanese director who made samurai films, silent and sound, notably Five Men of Edo, and Osho, a gentle story about a chess-obsessed husband/ father who cannot stop himself from pawning household goods to pay admission to chess tournaments. I was also introduced to the work of Mitchell Leisen, a maker of light fare with matinee idols. We saw his 1941 film Hold Back the Dawn about immigrants cooling their heels in a Mexico border town while trying increasingly-desperate ways to enter the US. 

During Wim Wenders’ conversation with cinema savant Gianluca Farinelli about his career and the making of his first (student) film, Summer in the City, still unreleased, he reflected on the difference between scripted stories and his naturalistic camera work: it was hard to know when to “Cut!” As the actors continued, something surprising could arise at any time: “Who am I to interrupt this?” he asked. Having blown his full budget on filming, he had nothing left for post-production, where editing, soundtrack, and organization of footage take place. He used music from the Kinks, the Troggs, and Bob Dylan without securing the rights. His sound engineer, admonished to avoid the hiss of too-loud audio, turned conversation sound so low the actors are barely audible. 

Wenders also made the point that it was only after coming to Hollywood that he encountered his German predecessors: Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, and became aware of his lineage as a filmmaker. Wenders remarked that when he feels safe in a film – when he trusts the director to be honest – he often sleeps. He long felt apologetic about this, but finally came around to accept this as a valid response to the comfort of being in a safe place. 

Scorsese was featured with The Color of Money, 20-year-old Tom Cruise lighting up the screen with flamboyant pool-playing and the sheer joy of being so good at something. Paul Newman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio do their utmost to bring him around to the strategies of the hustler’s game, but they have a tough job – his exuberance just won’t cool off. A less-characteristic film was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which Ellen Burstyn plays the abruptly-widowed mother of an 11-year-old son, scrambling to make a living as a singer and finally a waitress. Mother and son’s free-wheeling banter gives the film buoyancy. Scorsese rounded out his part in the festival with a Piazza Maggiore screening of New York, New York, a flop at the time but an over-the-top evocation of lives and places dear to him. 

Many of these films were made in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, a useful reminder of the richness of cinematic history. Viewing Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous 1963 epic Il Gattopardo (starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale) was a treat, on the big screen it deserves. 

For me, the finest point in the festival was Krysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge, his final film, from 1994. A conversation with Irene Jacob preceded it, and her moving performance as a woman leading with love and kindness, matched against Jean-Louis Trintignant’s jaded cynic, proved yet again for this viewer Kieslowski’s insight into human emotion and connection, with his fearless use of parallel experiences, repeated images, and how the heart may challenge the mind and prevail. He is the filmmaker of our highest potential, his creative approach to human relationships opening our eyes and hearts.

The Christophers, a film by Stephen Soderbergh

This 2026 film starring Ian McKellan and Michaela Coel examines art, fame, legacy and greed in an insightful way. McKellan plays Julian Sklar, a top-tier artist in his waning years. He hasn’t painted in a decade or more, and keeps money coming in by doing a version of Cameo recordings (as a famous person, recording a scripted message). His pair of adjoining London townhouses are crammed with art and memorabilia from a long career in the limelight. One of his gigs was a TV show called Art Fight, where, led on by the host, he eviscerated some young artist’s work for laughs. 

Into his life come his estranged children, Barnaby and Sallie, out to make money on a set of 8 paintings he made decades earlier then refused to complete, show, or even discuss. These paintings, the Christophers, are portraits of a lover. They’re stored in a bathtub on his third floor. Barnaby and Sallie are desperate to get their hands on those paintings – at £3.5 - £5 million apiece they’ll compensate for failed careers. Julian, no fool, won’t even admit the pair to his home. So they hire Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), an artist with a reputation as a forger. Ostensibly Julian’s assistant, she’ll get her hands on the Christophers, finish them, and spirit them out of his house. “He never goes up there,” Sallie and Barnaby assure her. 

Lori and Julian have some history, that she has more cause to remember than he. She wants the money, a chance to humiliate him, and maybe convince him that she’s a real artist. In one wonderful scene, after she’s considered then copied the Christophers, she tells Julian what they reveal about the progress of that love affair. The self-regarding cynic tries to dismiss her analysis, but viewers know she’s right, and that he knows it too. 

Their battle of wits, complicated by Barnaby and Sallie’s underhanded ways, comes alive through crackling dialogue and sharp visuals. Ed Solomon, who scripted the film, and Soderbergh, who shot and edited it, have made a compelling statement about art and artists. 

I was reminded of La Verite, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s 2019 film starring Catherine Deneuve as an aging diva who brings her star power to even a bit part. She’s recently published a memoir, and her daughter Juliette Binoche, son-in-law Ethan Hawke, and granddaughter Clementine Grenier, have come to visit her in Paris. Binoche, who played second fiddle to her mother’s career, reads the memoir and finds no trace of herself. Deneuve without apology admits her vanity, touting its importance in her ascent. She, like McKellan’s character, used egotism to great effect. 

From their lofty perches at the top of their professions, they don’t want to hear about those they trampled. They’ve achieved greatness, as their adoring public affirms. Whether the pressure of age can knock a chink in their armor, or teach them something new, remains to be seen.

RIP TIM

 

Apocalypse Now - All the Versions

A brief intro: this film uses a story much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to examine what happens to people when they move beyond the morality they understand, adopting that of a culture they perceive as more powerful in certain ways, but whose moral center eludes them. A “civilized” man “goes native” and, becoming a savage, loses who he knew himself to be. It’s also a scathing indictment of military thinking, and the insanity of war. I’ve seen all 3 versions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now: the original cut (1979) twice, then Apocalypse Now Redux, his second cut (2001) also twice, and recently, the “Final Cut” version (2019), which film buffs will recognize as a misnomer. 

This film cost Coppola and his cast and crew more than its blown out budget, more than the notoriety of making it – it cost Coppola his sense of proportion. At some point, an artist has to let the work alone – it’s out, it’s done, move on. “Final” cut? Probably not – Coppola has long been obsessed with this film. The epic took so much out of its participants that maybe he feels he owes it to all that footage to include it. I disagree. If Werner Herzog can brilliantly winnow 200 hours of Timothy Treadwell ranting about the US Forest Service while he treats grizzly bears as humans in bear suits (and pays with his life for that illusion), down to the 2-hour Grizzly Man, I think Coppola could have let well enough alone. 

I appreciated aspects of the Redux version: giving Marlon Brando more time on screen, bringing the movie resolution. I didn’t need the Bill Graham/ Playboy Bunnies USO show – it was OK, but did the story need it? Debatable. The section in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) encounters a French plantation and its armed and determined family who declare Vietnam to be their home, for which they will fight and die and kill Vietnamese intruders, seems to be stretching a point. Is the purpose to teach us about Dien Bien Phu? To remind us that long before the US sent “advisers” to the country in the late 1950s, the French had established a colonial state there, which they were unwilling to cede to its natives? I found this section, first appearing in Redux, to be a distraction, even more so in the much longer Final Cut version where Willard shares an opium pipe with a Frenchwoman (Aurore Clement) and has an idyllic night – I thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and was disappointed by Coppola’s borrowing. 

Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Final Cut gets much more screentime for his surfing obsession, cocky sense of command, and the annihilation of villages. The point was well made in the original – I didn’t need more of his bluster and arrogance, nor even more footage of rows of palm trees going up in flames, Hueys swarming, nor the ridiculous pursuit of Willard on the patrol boat to retrieve Kilgore’s stolen surfboard. I really didn’t need that. 

The extended jungle scene of Final Cut in which Willard and Chef (Frederic Forrest) go looking for mangoes, was good – I really got a feel for these Americans in a totally alien environment, afraid all the time. The glimpse of an unexpected peril underscored the absurdity of the entire American misadventure in Southeast Asia. 

In the original, Brando’s screentime was brief – as the reason for Willard’s journey it needed more weight, and in Redux Brando received his due. But the Final Cut version beat a dead horse: I didn’t need Willard’s drawn-out imprisonment in a bamboo cage, being lectured by madman Dennis Hopper (in the role he was born to play) – in Redux we got all we needed of Kurtz’s camp, the ubiquitous dangling corpses and disembodied heads. I didn’t need more more more of that. The end was the same – Willard terminates Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Taking the hand of LB Johnson, the still-childlike surfer, to lead him back to the now crewless patrol boat, was enough. 

Here’s my compromise, Mr. Coppola: You can keep the USO show in the movie, but ditch the French plantation, and keep Kilgore and Brando to their Redux footage. That makes the film shorter than the Redux version (OK with me!!). Final Cut felt like piling on – the points had already been powerfully made. Shoving them at us repeatedly dulled their impact.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This 2025 novel is vividly told through the voices of its characters. The Salt family, Dominic (a widower) and his 3 children, son Raff (eighteen), daughter Fen (seventeen), and son Orly, (nine) are the last people on Shearwater Island, a dot in the southern ocean halfway between Australia and Antarctica. They’ve been here seven years – Orly remembers no other home. Though the weather is harsh, the island supports an abundance of plant and animal life. A seed bank repository has been built here, to save for replanting by survivors after climate apocalypse has devastated the planet. 

But sea level is rising rapidly, the seed vault built into permafrost is warming, and the family labor to save what seeds they can. A scientific group made lists prioritizing those to be salvaged, but by the time this novel opens, only the Salt family remain. A ship will come collect them and what seeds they’ve been able to remove from the drowning vault – but that arrival is weeks away and they have no communications. Their radio tower was sabotaged by someone on the island, so the ship crew have no notion of what has occurred. Down to their last rations – food, fresh water, fuel, dying batteries – the Salts live a spartan existence filled with hard work and awful secrets. 

Into their lives, then, comes a woman from the wreckage of a small boat whose pilot died. Fen, living in a boathouse at the beach surrounded by seals and penguins, sees the flotsam, swims out, and pulls in Rowan, who should be dead but insists on surviving. How her arrival catalyzes each family member’s griefs, and how their love changes her, drive the story. 

It’s well-told, unfolding a bit at a time, grounding readers then shifting deeper. Chapters are short, alternating voices; through them we mourn not only the humans but the planet they love. These seeds have been selected for human survival – but what about Earth's co-inhabitants, plants and animals? Do they have no right to a future we have jeopardized? Young Orly, a savant, feels deeply how that question must be answered. And Rowan brings creativity, skill and determination to this haunted place, where the first human population slaughtered colossal numbers of seals and penguins, rendering their carcasses for oil till there were none left, then abandoning the rusty barrels piled at the scene of their enterprise. 

Tragedies and secrets whisper to every character – so much of themselves is buried on this storm-whipped island, the reader wonders what leaving will do to them. McConaghy puts us into frigid water, fierce wind, constant hunger, and the human drive to finish what tasks we are set. Partner to their love of Shearwater is dread of what returning to society will mean – and in what threatened place it will make any sense to start over.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took my time reading the essays in this 2013 book by enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, PhD botanist, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY, founder and director of Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer. In addition to these credentials she is a mother, and student of traditional ways of living with Earth and its creatures. 

She writes beautifully, and she writes of the truths we ignore at our peril: that we are part of nature, that we thrive with our co-inhabitants and suffer when we do them harm. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.” 

She says, “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world… How do we consume that does justice to the lives that we take?” 

“Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest… I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.“ 

In a later essay, she observes, “The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Had we not worked waist-deep in the swamp, had we not followed muskrat trails and rubbed ourselves with soothing slime, had we never made a spruce root basket or eaten cattail pancakes, would [her students] even be debating what gifts they could offer in return? In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” 

This book is an avenue into a way of thinking whose time is urgently at hand. If we do not soon learn to live with earth and its creatures – plants, animals, rocks, streams and all – as partners, we will die alongside them. Earth itself will continue, but as a host for life, may go dormant for an age. We don’t have to do this, to our home and to ourselves. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise woman – read, listen, and heed her words.

LaRose, a novel by Louise Erdrich

This 2016 novel is a masterful landscape of the human heart, shattered by grief, rage, and jealousy, healed by generations of LaRoses. In brief, it’s the story of a tragedy – a man sees a big buck on his land and shoots it – except what he kills is his neighbor’s young son. Landreaux Iron is Ojibwe, his neighbor Peter Ravich is white. In this rural area they live closest. Their wives are half-sisters who are wickedly hateful to each other. 

Landreaux decides that the traditional way of repairing such damage is to give his youngest son, LaRose, to the Raviches. The repercussions of this decision are deep and wide. LaRose, however, handed over at the age of six, talks to the ancestors, and finds ways to move both families toward healing. In his lineage he is the fifth LaRose (so far), the first being a girl sold by her drunken mother to a trapper/ trader in exchange for booze, in the 1870s. 

Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now?... “You did right,” [Randall told Landreaux] at last, “the elders… knew the history. Who killed the mother of the first [LaRose], Mink, and what she could do. Then her daughter, her granddaughter, the next one, and Emmaline’s mom. Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew… People think that what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now. But not magic.” 

Erdrich has a genius for letting a sly adjective say everything: “Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was an unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.” 

and 

“Landreaux should not have imagined it was over… A man’s heart, shriveled raisin, prune of loneliness, burnt clam, understood what it was to lose out on love. And lose to a lying liar. Romeo bet his livid black heart could burst Landreaux’s baggy heart sack.” 

and 

“Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.” "Ah, god, please, Emmaline." 

"I can’t stand it anymore," she said. “It was never supposed to go on forever, was it?” 

Her characters, assaulted by a system that wants them all dead, persist. But amid the misery she gives us moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, as when the nurse’s aide/ addict who steals pills from the senior home, mixes them for an evening’s high and spends several days incapacitated with raging intestinal misery, complaining to his bathroom walls that those old ladies poisoned him.