Penelope Cruz and Adam Driver in Italy Ahead of Venice Fest to Shoot Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’

Even before the title flashes up for Venice Film Festival competition entry L’Immensita, we know that Penelope Cruz is the most fun mom – most likely the only fun mom – in town. She doesn’t just set the table for dinner; she puts on music, leads the kids in a choreographed dance and singalong as they pass plates and cutlery, emoting into a passing fork as if it were a microphone. Adults bore her. At a birthday dinner for an ancient relative, she slips under the table to join her children in removing and mixing up everyone’s shoes. “I want to play!” she says, eyes gleaming.

Irina Shayk and Stella Maxwell are looking so chic on the red carpet!

What a knotty task, to detach instinctive overtures of motherly love from the traditional structures that perpetuate the restraining of gender roles, offering love freely without conforming.

Penelope Cruz turned heads in two amazing looks at the 2022 Venice Film Festival this weekend!

Olivia Wilde is ready to promote Don’t Worry Darling.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

Harry Styles is here!

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent In Italian director Emanuele Crialese’s new drama “L’Immensità,” which is set in 1970s Rome, Penélope Cruz plays a mother of three who, while contending with a violent Italian husband, winds up in a psychiatric institution. “I don’t think my character is crazy at all,” Cruz said. “She is trapped in her family. Trapped in her home, in her body. In the situation in which she finds herself living. She doesn’t have a plan B. There is no escape,” she added. “She’s not crazy at all. She’s oppressed in many different ways. And she simply can’t take it anymore.

Emanuele Crialese put in a buoyant performance at the Venice Film Festival Sunday, during which he discussed how his identity informed his Golden Lion contender L’immensità.

Mario Gianani, CEO of Fremantle’s Rome-based The Young Pope and My Brilliant Friend production powerhouse Wildside, is enjoying a high-profile time on the international film festival circuit this year.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are stepping out to support their new movie.

Manori Ravindran International Editor “Everything is extra!” blurts out Don Cheadle at the press conference for “White Noise” at the Venice Film Festival. The Noah Baumbach-directed film, an adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel, opens the Italian festival on Wednesday night, and is nothing if not theatrical, as its cast members explained at length before the screening. “When [Baumbach] started re-reading the book, I did too,” said Greta Gerwig, who is Baumbach’s real-life partner. “[The writing] has this quality that makes you want to say, ‘Listen to this!’ and read sections out loud. There’s a performative quality to it; you want to share with other people. It seemed to be both emotionally and intellectually exciting.”

EXCLUSIVE: Italian firm Iervolino and Monika Bacardi Entertainment has boarded Michael Mann’s big canvas car racing drama Ferrari.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian director Emanuele Crialese broke out with 2002 Cannes Critics Week winner “Respiro,” followed by “Nuovomondo” and “Terraferma,” which both scooped prizes in Venice. He’s back on the Lido with his ambitious, boldly personal drama “L’immensità.” Set in 1970s Rome, the film features Penélope Cruz as the mother of two children, one of whom is a 12-year-old named Adriana who wants to change her name and gender identity and convince everyone that she is male. In his director’s note, Crialese calls “L’immensità” a memory-based film for which he needed the necessary time, distance and self-awareness to make. Though not strictly autobiographical, it is based on the director’s personal experience transitioning. As Crialese tells Variety, Adriana’s character is a representation of himself.

Now that we are in August, with fall on the immediate horizon, we know what that means: It’s time for prestige pictures from renowned and acclaimed directors to take hold of the moviegoing consciousness. With the honor of having its world premiere as the opening film for the Venice International Film Festival on August 31st, as well as opening the New York Film Festival on September 30th, the new film from writer-director Noah Baumbach can safely fill that bill.

Now that we are in August, with fall on the immediate horizon, we know what that means: It’s time for prestige pictures from renowned and acclaimed directors to take hold of the moviegoing consciousness. With the honor of having its world premiere as the opening film for the Venice International Film Festival on August 31st, as well as opening the New York Film Festival on September 30th, the new film from writer-director Noah Baumbach can safely fill that bill.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s Minerva Pictures has taken international sales on veteran director Pupi Avati’s Dante Alighieri biopic “Dante” starring Sergio Castellitto as the Florentine bard. Minerva will be introducing “Dante” to buyers at the Venice Film Festival’s informal market and then at Rome’s MIA Market in October. Pic is set for release in Italy on Sept. 29 via RAI Cinema’s 01 Distribution.  Over the course of his long career, Avati has shot more than 40 films in a wide range of genres, including the cult horror pic “The House with Laughing Windows”; romancer “The Heart Is Elsewhere,” which went to Cannes; the biopic “Bix” about American trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke; psychological drama “Giovanna’s Father” with Alba Rohrwacher; and the 2019 thriller “Il Signor Diavolo,” to name a few. 

In the year 2000, the late literary critic Robin Wood put forth the concept of “hysterical realism,” a then-emergent micro-genre in which the delirious overstimulation of modern life is expressed through a hoarder-caliber accumulation of detail. At the time, he was talking about the likes of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith, and their doorstopper works’ endless minutiae on land surveying or tennis strategy or the ethics of lab rat usage.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Michael Mann is having quite a week.

Yesterday was a good one for filmmaker Michael Mann. He began production in Italy on Ferrari, and learned that his first novel landed atop The New York Times Bestseller hardcover list. Heat 2 fleshes out the events before and after Mann’s 1995 crime classic Heat, and lands atop the NYT list in its first week in publication. Mann wrote his novel debut with co-writer Meg Gardiner in a book published through Mann’s William Morrow imprint. Heat 2 is the first book in a three book multi-million dollar deal between Michael Mann books and the Harper Collins division, In a Deadline feature on the book last week, Mann said that he plans to lean into continuing the crime story, which in the present focuses on the criminal exploits of Chris Shiherlis, played by Val Kilmer in the original film, and Detective Vincent Hanna, played by Al Pacino in the film. Mann hopes to adapt Heat 2 into a theatrical feature, after he completes Ferrari with Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz and Shailene Woodley starring.