Pier Paolo Pasolini

Some showbiz clichés exist for a reason. For nearly a quarter of a century, Madonna, who turned 50 this year, has been a music megastar, a pop culture provocateur and a global brand name. But what she really wants to do is direct. "I've been in...

Eleven documentaries from Europe receive their Southland premieres at the American Cinematheque's EuroDocs Film Festival, opening this evening and continuing through Wednesday at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The opening night triple shorts bill...

IN 1988, the Netherlands Opera appointed as its new head a 30-year-old Lebanese-born theater director with no background or experience in traditional opera. His passions were avant-garde music, theater and visual art. The opera world was aghast. One...

Tonight, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone will receive an honorary Oscar. The Internet Movie Database lists 504 films and television shows that he has scored (and two more that have been announced). Among the well over 400 features, five of those...

3 stars (out of four) Few stories are more familiar than the one told in "The Nativity Story"--a new film about the trials of Mary and Joseph, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and the birth of Christ. So it seems a wonder at times that director...

Few stories are more familiar than the one told in "The Nativity Story," a new film about the trials of Mary and Joseph, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and the birth of Christ. So it seems a wonder at times that director Catherine Hardwicke and...

As Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" powerfully demonstrated, lots of people are willing to spend serious money to see films with Christian subject matter. "The Nativity Story" is attempting to tap into that market by Leaving to Mel the Things That...

Nobody writes songs about January in Paris. It's cold and bleak, and the impenetrable rain clouds make 8 a.m. as dark as midnight. It's perfect weather for going to the movies, which is what I do. But I also go to the movies in Paris in April, May and...

Intimate, epochal, quietly unforgettable, "The Best of Youth" defies logic and expectation. Made for Italian television with no thought of export, it shouldn't have captivated the exclusive international film festival world, but it did. Clocking in at...

The agonies of love take poetic flight in the Mexican film "A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fence the Sky, Love, Your Being Love Will Never End." The feature debut of writer and director Julián Hernández, a fine new talent and precocious aesthete — the...

To have seen Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" when it opened in the U.S. in 1961 as a graduate school dropout turned erstwhile construction worker with a love of movies and a secret desire to review them was an unforgettable, totally tantalizing...

In a nod to the past, when an entertaining meal meant more than laughing off bad service, we've found a few eateries where you can come for dinner and stay for the fun. Frankie J's The closest thing around to vaudeville, Frankie J's is an Italian eatery...