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Actor and screenwriter Diego Abatantuono will receive a special career prize on May 11 at the 66th David di Donatello awards, Italy's equivalent of the Oscars, Piera Detassis, the president of the Italian cinema academy, announced on Friday. Abatantuono, a beefy 65-year-old with a imposing screen presence, is best known for his comedy talents, as s...

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South of Italy, 1958. Olive trees and fields are all you can see around. Ciccio (Riccardo Scamarcio) is a 40 years old sharecropper with a dream: changing the status quo and fighting with his mates against those who exploit the weak. It may sound like a distant past, but the ancient duel between freedom and oppression, justice and abuse make the st...

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One of the problems that the Italian American community has always had, and the consequences of which it has always paid for, is division, the lack of unity. When I say that Italian Americans are, to all intents and purposes, Italian, even if some of them do not have an Italian passport that officially certifies it, I mean that there is an Italian...

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Olympia Dukakis, a character actress best known for her Oscar-winning supporting turn in Norman Jewison’s “Moonstruck” and for her role as the wealthy widow in “Steel Magnolias,” has died. She was 89. Dukakis’ brother, Apollo Dukakis, confirmed her death in a Facebook post, writing: “My beloved sister, Olympia Dukakis, passed away this morning in N...

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Tour through Star Wars filming locations, the most loved science fiction saga of all time. Trip to the Dolomites, Lake Como, Caserta Royal Palace, and the Mount Etna. Star wars is a famous saga by George Lucas, the US film director, screenwriter, and producer, which was released in 1977. Belonging to the subgenre of science fiction called space ope...

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“When I watch a movie,” says Stefano Sollima, “if I see a gruesome detail, if it makes sense to be brutal, if it's honest and done in good faith—it makes everything more real.” And few mainstream action filmmakers working are quite as willing to get as brutal as Sollima. Blunt, visceral, unexpected violence—with guns, bombs, and, in one memorable i...

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Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito was born in Copenhagen, the son of Giovanni “John” C. Esposito, an Italian stagehand and carpenter from Naples, and Elizabeth “Leesa” Foster, an African-American opera and nightclub singer from Alabama. When Esposito was six, his family moved from Copenhagen to Manhattan. He attended Elizabeth Seton College in...

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John Travolta has enjoyed a long, successful career in Hollywood that began at a young age. As fans know, Travolta is a triple threat because he can sing, dance, and act — and it also helps that he's a heartthrob, too. According to his profile on IMDb, the star was born in Englewood, N.J. in 1954, and was one of six children. Travolta began his car...

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Ida Lupino was born in Herne Hill, London, to actress Connie O’Shea (also known as Connie Emerald) and music hall comedian Stanley Lupino, a member of the theatrical Lupino family, which included Lupino Lane, a song-and-dance man. Her father, a top name in musical comedy in the UK and a member of a centuries-old theatrical dynasty dating back to Re...

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From its first edition in 1929, the Academy Awards have represented the most prestigious ceremony in cinema. With a grand total of 3.140 Oscar statuettes awarded in all aspects of motion picture production, Italy’s 60 wins may not seem like many. But the country tops the list in the International Movie category, with 14 statuettes in that field alo...

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