Matt Blake – Page 66 – The Wild Eye

December 8, 2009

Segretissimi: Guida agli spy-movie italiani anni 60

Here’s a new Italian guide to Italian Spy films by Daniele Magni. The domestic spy film genre has received almost no coverage whatsoever among the Italian film community to date, so it’s nice to see that they’re getting some attention at last.

December 4, 2009

New Petri & Rosi on DVD

At last, two Italian classics of the the early seventies – Petri’s La classe operaia va in paradiso and Rosi’s Uomini contro – are released on DVD. And they even have English language options!

December 4, 2009

Gangster venuto da Brooklyn, Un

Following Three Bullets for Ringo, Salvi decided to change tack again and return to the same present day setting that he’d previously used in FBI chiama Istanbul. Un gangster venuto da Brooklyn, though, wasn’t a spy film – even if the opening credits and soundtrack feel as though they’ve been nabbed wholesale from that genre…

November 30, 2009

R.I.P. Tony Kendall

Ah, no… this is bad news. Actor Luciano Stella, aka Tony Kendall, died over the weekend. He’s best known to Eurospy fans, of course, as Joe Walker, the hero of the Kommissar X series of films, and he also appeared in numerous other genre films from the 1960s onwards.

November 25, 2009

La prima linea

Here’s an interesting sounding new film that’s just been released in Italy, Renato De Maria’s La prima linea, aka The Front Line. It’s another…

November 23, 2009

Italian films flopping at box office

There’s an interesting article in Screen Daily about the lack of success being enjoyed by Italian films in the domestic box office at the…

November 17, 2009

The Brøken

Not to be confused with the 2006 film Broken, directed by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason, The Brøken is a rather more ambitious production directed by Sean Ellis and released in 2008. With a budget of around £4million, it can count itself as unfortunate not to have been granted a wider release; it played in several festivals around the world and had a limited release in the UK and internationally, but most of its business will inevitably be done on DVD.