Rome Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Strictly's head judge Shirley Ballas sent fans into panic when she revealed she was ill in bed after returning from a trip to Rome.The 63-year-old ballroom legend said she suspected she'd picked up a bug on her holiday but was hoping a bit of rest would see her fighting fit in time for Saturday night's show.The Queen of Latin luckily had her devoted mum Audrey, 86, on hand to take care of her, bringing her some comfort food to her sick bed. Filming herself in a dark room wearing a dressing gown in bed, Shirley revealed she was using her resting time wisely - researching "the best air fryers". “What a difference a day makes," she said.

Recently launched European distribution and production studio Vuelta Group has added to its stable with Italy’s Indiana Production and France’s Pan.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Netflix on Tuesday unveiled four new Italian originals – two feature films and two series – that confirm its continued investment in Italy as local subscribers grow. The new projects also bolster the fact that the bulk of the streamer’s Italian productions are not high end and have a primarily local focus.

Netflix’s next Italian originals will be pairs of series and feature films from the likes of Stefano Mordini, Alessandro Genovesi and Cristina Comencini.

Naman Ramachandran Horace Ové, director of “Pressure” (1976), the first full-length Black British film, died on Sept. 16. He was 86.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. There’s an often-stated, invented fact that men think about sex every seven seconds. While psychologists have mostly disproven the fun factoid, TikTok may have helped prove that it’s not sex that men are thinking about at all times but…the Roman Empire.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of Content When first-time documentary director Leonard Manzella premieres his award-winning “Shoe Shine Caddie” at the Portobello Film Festival in London on September 16, it will represent a kind of return to the former actor’s roots in the international film scene. A professional family therapist for the past 30 years in California, Manzella’s earlier career began when the native Angeleno left Los Angeles for Rome in 1968 “when everything was burning.” In his early 20s and armed with “no contacts and about $50 bucks in my pocket,” a fortuitous introduction to American actor Brett Halsey got Manzella into movies, first as an extra and eventually as a leading man.

The Christmas countdown is officially on, and fashion and beauty brands have been launching their advent calendars left, right and centre ahead of the festive season. We’ve already reviewed the LookFantastic one, taken a sneak peek at John Lewis’ (which has the chance to win a trip to Rome inside!), and rounded up 19 of our favourite beauty advent calendars, but the latest brand to appear on our beauty radar is The Body Shop, which has released not one, not two, but three different product-filled calendars ready for December.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Nicola Maccanico, a former Warner Bros. and Sky Italia senior exec, has been spearheading the radical overhaul of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios since June 2021, when the government-owned facilities secured a multi-million dollar loan provided by the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery fund to upgrade and expand the iconic facilities. Under Maccanico’s watch, the studios – which now boast 20 state-of-the-art soundstages and one of Europe’s largest LED walls – have become a magnet for Hollywood productions, such as Netflix’s period soap “The Decameron” and Roland Emmerich’s gladiator series “Those About to Die,” which is still currently shooting.

, the designer and founder of , an accessories brand known for its colorful, hand-woven bags that put you in a happy-go-lucky mood no matter the season. Vibrant and adorned with porcelain charms intended to help you manifest your deepest desires, Alvarez's creations don't look anything like the overflowing with baguettes and peonies—nor do they resemble the typical .

We might have only just stepped foot into autumn, but Christmas is on every beauty fan's lips as brands begin releasing their 2023 beauty advent calendars. Amongst the returning Christmas countdowns is the John Lewis Beauty Advent Calendar 2023, £195 here, which has the retailers highest ever value.

Sophia Scorziello editor Non-scripted television producer Asylum Entertainment Group has added Ben Bitonti and Eric Hoberman to its executive team. Bitonti joins as chief creative officer, while Hoberman will serve as exec VP of programming and development.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian producer and director Ginevra Elkann, whose delicate first feature “If Only” opened the 2019 Locarno fest garnering critical praise, is at the Toronto Film Festival with her tonally different follow-up, “I Told You So.” The movie features a group made up mostly of women who are having a mental meltdown amid an unprecedented January heat wave in Rome. As the heat rises, so do the characters’ obsessions with sex, food, drugs, alcohol, and religion. The eclectic ensemble film, which was conceived by Elkann and her co-writers during the pandemic, features a star studded cast comprising Danny Huston – speaking perfect Italian on screen – as a heroin-addicted Italian-American priest.

This story is part of our cover series , in which we explore the role's often-absurd demands, astronomical expenses, copious amounts of unpaid labor, and ways to change the tradition that benefits everybody involved. Read all our stories .In the beginning there were bridesmaids. They were there, like it or not, when Jacob wed two brides in Genesis 29.

Ellise Shafer MIA, the international market held annually in Rome, has announced the first confirmed speakers for its ninth edition. This year, speakers at the industry event — which focuses on co-production, financing strategies and sales and distribution — include Nicole Clemens, president of Paramount of Paramount Television Studios and Paramount+ original scripted series; Sara Bernstein, president of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries; Marge Dean, head of Skybound Entertainment’s animation studio and president of Women in Animation; “Waltz With Bashir” director Ari Folman; Nicholas Weinstock, founder and president of Invention Studios and “Severance” producer; and James Townley, chief content officer of development at Banijay.

Emiliano De Pablos Madrid-based agency Feel Sales has picked up worldwide sales rights to indie social drama film “Third Week,” by long term New York-based Catalan writer-director Jordi Torrent (“The Redemption of the Fish”). A U.S.-Spain co-production, the film is produced by Torrent, alongside Randy Simon, Maria Àngels Amorós and Toni Espinosa, for New York’s companies Duende Pictures and RFS Wolf Entertainment and Barcelona’s Toned Media.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Canary Islands-based filmmaker Paula Bilbao, whose debut documentary “Inshallah,” about the Las Raíces migrant camp in Tenerife, won the Audience Award at the MiradasDoc festival this year, is turning to fiction in her upcoming dramedy “A Supermarket in Tigaday.” Among the projects in the development showcase at MIA’s Spanish Screenings on Tour, “A Supermarket in Tigaday” focuses on Fer, a frustrated musician, who returns home after a 20-year absence to bury his estranged father. He turns to the music of his past to deal with his grief but to his great surprise, he finds that his father is still alive and that he must prove himself to earn his inheritance, a tiny supermarket in the town of Tigaday.

Paramount’s Nicole Clemens, Imagine Documentaries boss Sara Bernstein and Severance producer Nicholas Weinstock are among the first tranche of speakers for this year’s MIA market in Italy.

Spanish Screenings on Tour, which unspools at Rome’s MIA forum, taking place Oct. 9-13. A platform of market premieres, projects, pics in post and potential remake titles, the Spanish Screenings also underscore the ever stronger emergence in Spain of open arthouse titles – Isaki Lacuesta’s “Saturn Return,” Arantxa Echeverría “Chinas,” Benito Zambrano’s “Jumping the Fence” and Gerardo Herrero’s “Under Therapy,” which was one of the best-selling titles at March’s Malaga Spanish Screenings.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Alicia Moncholí, winner of the New Directors of Asturias Award for her latest short, “Campolivar,” is developing her first feature film, the coming-of-age drama “Weekends,” just announced as one of the five titles in development set to be presented at the Second Spanish Screenings on Tour. They unspool at Rome’s MIA forum, which takes place Oct.

Catherine Bray In a typical scene from “An Endless Sunday,” three teenage delinquents wander beside a canal. They end up killing a frog with a brick. Another group of children slightly younger than they are are also mucking about, and one of them is playing the recorder, blasting out a wobbly but recognizable version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the second movement.

posted to X, the platform previously known as Twitter, by Vatican News shows Stallone, 77, and Francis, 86, shaking hands before he introduces the head of the Catholic Church to his family.Sylvester first introduces his wife, Jennifer Flavin, and then their three daughters, and the couple’s three children — Sophia, 27, Sistine, 25, and Scarlet, 21, as well as their son, Frank Stallone.“Three, so many!” Francis jokes about the many Stallone women. “Thank you very much for taking time from your busy day,” Sylvester added.

Welcome to the 19th installment of Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast. It is a task Oscar-nominated filmmaker Billy Ray took on at the beginning of the Writers Guild strike against AMPTP, and who knew he would be engaged in it longer than it would have taken him to shoot a picture.

YSL Beauty global brand ambassador Austin Butler got a jumpstart on New York Fashion Week celebrations at an event celebrating the launch of the brand’s new men’s fragrance MYSLF.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian hotshot Pietro Castellitto is in competition in Venice with his second feature “Enea,” in which he also stars as the titular character, a young Roman sushi restaurant owner and cocaine dealer whose best friend Valentino just got his license as an airplane pilot. There is a lot going on in this fresh and frenzied film lensed by ace cinematographer Radek Ladczuk (“The Babadook”). “Enea” is produced by Lorenzo Mieli’s the Apartment, which is a Fremantle company, and Luca Guadagnino’s Frenesy.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian genre specialist Stefano Sollima – who is known in Hollywood for “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” “Without Remorse” and the TV series “Gomorrah” – is in the Venice competition for the first time with Rome-set crime drama “Adagio.” This beautifully shot picture features an ensemble cast of Italian A-listers comprising Pierfrancesco Favino (“Nostalgia”), Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”), Valerio Mastandrea (“Perfect Strangers”) and Adriano Giannini (“The Ties”). It’s the tale of three old – and once mighty – mobsters searching for redemption in a cutthroat contemporary Rome that is literally burning. They find it in the form of a 16 year old named Manuel who is being blackmailed after venturing too deep in a rotting Roman underworld world that he doesn’t understand.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Giuliano Montaldo, the prolific Italian director, actor and film industry executive, whose works comprise powerful political drama “Sacco and Vanzetti” about the Massachusetts trial and execution in 1927 of accused Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, has died at his home in Rome. He was 93.

“I feel like there’s a sort of mouth over the city, ready to eat us up,” says Enea, sophisticated young nightclubber, tennis champion and coke dealer; if anyone is trying to swallow the Eternal City whole, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mother hosts a television chat show about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the city’s most exclusive sports club, the city’s most exclusive parties and, even more thrillingly, rendezvous with the criminal classes, homespun proletarians to a man. “You need to marry Eva, have a child with her, make her happy. If you have no one to kiss, you go crazy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and family man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of work and with the company he keeps, Giordano isn’t going to last that long.

Nirvana‘s ‘In Utero’ has been announced.The band’s final studio album was released on September 23, 1993 and featured hit singles ‘All Apologies’, which famously featured in their MTV Unplugged performance that same year, and ‘Heart Shaped Box’.On October 27, the landmark album will be reissued in several formats including a limited-edition eight LP super deluxe box set, five CD super deluxe box set, one LP + 10 inch edition, two CD deluxe edition, and a digital super deluxe edition.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Nirvana’s third and final album, “In Utero,” is often overlooked because it basically marked the beginning of the end of the band — Kurt Cobain died less than eight months after it was released. While not the kind of celebratory, culture-shifting album that its predecessor, “Nevermind,” was, it’s still a glorious piece of vulnerable, rebellious rock music that includes some of Cobain’s best-ever songs.

Fans of Game Of Thrones and Succession are bound to love Sky original drama Domina , which returns for its second season this week. Set in Italy, the eight-part series continues the retelling of the power struggles for control of the Roman Empire from a female perspective. Polish-born actress Kasia Smutniak stars as leading lady Livia Drusilla who, after three years away, returns to Rome alongside her husband Augustus Caesar, known as Gaius (played by Matthew McNulty).

EXCLUSIVE: It’s a scorching 90 degrees in Rome at the end of July, but producer Lorenzo Mieli isn’t breaking a sweat.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Whoopi Goldberg and Jeremy Irvine are set to star in Italian comedy “Leopardi & Co.,” directed by Federica Biondi and produced by Franco-Tunisian film and TV entrepreneur Tarak Ben Ammar’s Eagle Pictures. Shooting on the film is currently underway in the town of Recanati, which is known to many Italians as the birthplace of one the country’s greatest poets, Giacomo Leopardi. Goldberg plays the agent of a U.S.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic As any critic will tell you, when you’re watching a comedy with an audience, it doesn’t matter how bad the movie is — even the jokes that are making you groan are going to provoke laughter. (That’s why comedies are always screened in advance; the studios want the audience giggles to rub off on you.) But at the Venice Film Festival, when I saw “The Palace,” Roman Polanski’s garish debacle of an ensemble comedy, I was sitting in the Sala Darsena, which seats 1400 (and was full), and on the rare occasion when a line in the movie got laughs, it was literally coming from about six people.

Time is a relative construct stretched to the limits of elasticity by Saverio Constanzo with the period drama “Finally Dawn.” The bloated 140-minute runtime begins at a cinema in Rome in 1953 as three women watch the final scene of a saccharine war drama, the light of the big screen coming to reveal a mother and two daughters, one donning the beauty of a Hollywood starlet and the other the beauty of a traditional Italian woman, with big blue eyes framed by thick curly hair. Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch The curly-haired girl is Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), a shy 21-year-old used to inhabiting the uncomfortable but familiar shadow of her daintier sister, Iris (Sofia Panizzi).

Despite its soft-sounding title, Stefano Sollima’s crime drama is a gripping call-back to the heyday of poliziotteschi movies, a peculiarly Italian genre that dealt with inter-gang wars in a country where the police were often more venal than the bad guys. Adagio, though, takes a unique tack, borrowing from Martin Scorsese’s fatalistic masterpiece The Irishman to portray to tell a story in which a trio of gangsters — one blind, one suffering early-onset dementia, and another with terminal cancer — are forced to reunite against a team of bent cops involved in an elaborate blackmail plan.