One of the best-reviewed movies of the year, "Caesar Must Die," makes its Memphis debut at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, during the third annual Italian Film Festival USA at the University of Memphis.

Directed by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, winners of the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for "Padre Padrone," "Caesar Must Die" chronicles an attempt to stage a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Casesar" in an Italian prison. Actual maximum-security inmates -- "hardened convicts," in the words of film critic Peter Rainer, of the Christian Science Monitor -- act in the film; this blurs the distinction between documentary and drama, so that the movie becomes, in effect, a history of its own production challenges, and a story with something to say about issues of art, freedom, crime, performance and so on. The result is "profoundly moving" (Philip French, London Observer) and "ranks among the most involving productions of Shakespeare ever put on screen" (Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times). "In a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do -- it dissolves every boundary it meets," wrote David Edelstein in New York Magazine.

"Caesar Must Die" ("Cesare deve morire") is the concluding film of the three-movie festival. The other selections are Massimo Venier's "One Day More" ("Il giorno in più"), which screens at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 26; this is a romantic comedy about a fortysomething womanizer (Fabio Volo) who meets his match in a confirmed bachelorette (Isabella Ragonese). Also screening is Daniele Vicari's "The Human Cargo" ("La nave dolce"), a Venice Film Festival prize-winning documentary about the 1991 hijacking of a ship loaded with 20,000 Albanians who are trying to emigrate to Italy. "The Human Cargo" screens at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 28.

Memphis is one of about a dozen cities that will host the Italian Film Festival USA, organized by the Italian Film Festival of St. Louis and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago to give wider U.S. exposure to "the most acclaimed recent releases of Italian cinema." The event is coordinated in Memphis by Cosetta Gaudenzi, associate professor of Italian at the U of M, with the support of the Memphis chapter of UNICO.

All screenings take place in the on-campus University Center Theatre, and are free and open to the public. The movies are in Italian, with English subtitles. Coffee and refreshments are provided after the movies, and viewers are invited to stay and discuss the films. For more information, look here.
By John Beifuss