marco manetti

Diabolik

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Diabolik in his mask

What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more

The Arrival of Wang

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Ennio Fantastichini and Francesca Cuttica in The Arrival of Wang

It’s L’arrivo di Wang in its original Italian, which still sounds bizarre, though perhaps slightly less fruity than it does in English, where the title suggests… the appearance of a Tarzanogram? The genre is sci-fi, so perhaps not, but if there’s one thing that this lo-fi offering has is plenty of intrigue. From the off we’re grabbed, as is our heroine Gaia (Francesca Cuttica), a jobbing Mandarin interpreter who is picked up out of the blue from her home one morning by a shady motorcade, blindfolded and taken to a government installation where the rest of the film plays out. What the government want from her, who they want her to act as interlocutor … Read more