Venice Review: Penelope Cruz In Emanuele Crialese’s ‘L’Immensita’

EXCLUSIVE: Veteran producer Richard Salvatore has been appointed Head of US Film Production and Distribution at Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment (ILBE) as the Italian company looks to grow its stateside footprint.

Penelope Cruz received a special honor at the 2022 San Sebastian Film Festival this weekend!

Liza Foreman After wowing a home crowd at the opening night of the San Sebastián Film Festival on Friday, looking dazzling at 48, Spain’s best-known actress, Penélope Cruz, spoke to a packed auditorium at the city’s Tabakalera culture center on Saturday when she was honored with Spain’s National Cinematography Prize. “It is truly an honor for me to receive this National Cinematography Prize,” said Cruz speaking in Spanish.  “Cinema is and has been my passion since I was a child. Since I dreamed in the living room of my parents’ house of worlds to explore beyond our neighbourhood. The streets of my neighborhood sometimes became sets for incredible stories,” she went on. “My childhood was fantasizing about acting, living life so intensely to be able to encompass many lives through dozens of characters.”

Spain on Friday. The actress, 45, showed off her chic sense of style in a in a black dress with a plunging neckline. The tiered circle skirt flared out as she stood on the red carpet while posing for pictures.

Penelope Cruz is taken by surprise as she sees so many fans at the premiere of her new movie, On The Fringe, during the 2022 San Sebastian Film Festival held at Victoria Eugenia Theatre on Friday (September 16) in San Sebastian, Spain.

Michaela Zee editor Irene Papas, the Greek actress known for such films as “Zorba the Greek,” “Z” and “The Guns of Navarone,” has died. She was 93. Greece’s Ministry of Culture and Sports confirmed the news Wednesday in a statement. Papas starred in over 70 films and stage productions throughout her career spanning nearly six decades, from Hollywood features to French and Italian cinema. She also appeared in dozens of Greek tragedies, including the title role in the 1961 film adaptation of “Antigone.” Born on Sept. 3, 1929, in the village of Chiliomodi near Corinth, Papas began her acting studies as a teenager and later worked on multiple film and TV projects in the ’40’s and ’50s, including “The Man from Cairo,” “The Unfaithfuls,” “Bouboulina” and “Attila,” among others.

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Patrick Dempsey has white hair!

Heavy on Loachian social realism and undergirded by the intensity and heavy stakes of a Safdie Brothers flick, Juan Diego Botto’s gritty eviction thriller “On the Fringe” — produced by Penélope Cruz, who also lends her name to the billing sheet — makes for hard-hitting stuff. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival today in the Orrizonti section, here’s a slice of agitprop that feels as timely as ever, with the energy crisis surging across Europe, the costs of living rocketing from shore to shore, and society’s most marginalized left to pick up the tab.  Anyone with half a heart and half a brain will be quickly won over by its interweaving stories, following three different people in the same Spanish city living under the cold, foreboding shadow of red-stamp eviction notices: though a little baggy in the second act, the first and final thirty-minutes are appropriately earnest and affecting.

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are wrapping up their time at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.

Penélope Cruz dazzled in a lace couture gown on the red carpet at The Venice Film Festival on Sunday, 3 September. The star looked the picture of elegance as she attended the premiere for L'immensità, in which she stars as leading lady, Clara, in a film about a mother-of-three navigating her life in 1970s Rome. To attend the red carpet event, Penélope wore a black lace gown adorned with stunning pink detailing, designed as part of Chanel's couture collection.

Tilda Swinton takes over the red carpet in a dazzling lavender gown at the premiere of The Eternal Daughter during the 2022 Venice International Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6) in Venice, Italy.

printed with the double C emblem, a black and white bouclé tweed waistcoat and matching jacket, platforms, aviators, and statement logo earrings. Naturally, Cruz is a fan of Chanel’s classic quilted bags, and she carried a smart circular clutch with a chain handle for her moment in the spotlight.Penélope Cruz in Chanel jeans on September 5.Cruz has been a Chanel ambassador since Karl Lagerfeld’s tenure (she attended her first show in 1999), so it’s become customary practice for her to fly the flag for the brand.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

Not all of the amazing fashion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival will be seen on the red carpet!

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!

Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

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.