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He may have been born and raised a proud citizen of Italy, but Sergio Leone found his greatest cinematic successes coming when he applied his innovative and influential techniques to stories that were distinctly American in their conception and execution. It goes without saying the western has always been closely associated with the wide-open plain...

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Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, is set for a remake now in development. The 1964 classic film created the “spaghetti Western” and was itself a remake of Akira Korosawa’s 1961 Yojimbo. The latest version will come from Gianni Nunnari and Simon Horseman’s Euro Gang Entertainment and Italian production partner, Enzo Sisti...

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The BAMPFA dedicates a series of films to one of the most influential and prolific music score composers, Ennio Morricone (1928–2020). As a boy, Morricone considered becoming a doctor or competitive chess player, but he was encouraged by his father, a trumpet player, to study music. After graduating from the Conservatory of Music Santa Cecilia, Mor...

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1862, the American frontier: A ruggedly handsome man in a poncho and Cattleman cowboy hat slowly enters a cobble-stoned circle, surrounded by tilted gravestones, immersed in the dusty wild west. He is followed by two other men, who eye each other suspiciously. Two hundred thousand dollars in gold lay hidden under one of the gravestones around them....

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Among the pantheon of gangster movies, the Sergio Leone flick Once Upon a Time in America should be considered one of the very best, rubbing shoulders with other classics like Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The contemporary mastermind Quentin Tarantino certainly thinks so too, with the Leone lover often discussin...

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His son Andrea recounts: "Once Upon a Time in America was supposed to be called Once Upon a Time: America but my father said the title was too 'cocky.'" It took almost 40 years and a beautiful documentary film for us to realize that, at least on that occasion, Sergio Leone was too humble. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the title of the film...

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Few storytellers have shaped the modern American Western than, ironically, Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, who approached the genre with an outsider's view and pioneered the Spaghetti Western. Unlike his predecessor John Ford, Leone portrayed his "heroes" as morally ambiguous and argued that survival and greed shaped the American frontier more than...

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Between the pore-rich tightness of his close-ups and the mysterious, patient grandeur of his landscapes, Sergio Leone took the Hollywood-forged myths that enraptured him as a child and created one of cinema’s most influential oeuvres. Considering Leone’s impact, from those sun-cooked, Ennio Morricone–scored westerns through the nostalgic sweep of h...

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Creators of timeless films, that will remain etched in the memory forever: Italy has seen the birth of some of the most important directors in the world. Linked by the common thread of Italian neorealism, let’s discover who are the most famous Italian directors of the twentieth century. Who are the most famous Italian directors of the twentieth cen...

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“I’m convinced that I created “Once upon a time in my cinema”, rather than “Once upon a time in America.” Who better than the director himself to enclose in a handful of words the deeper meaning of one of the most talked about films in the history of cinema?  “Once Upon a Time in America” was initially a flop, then re-evaluated by critics, especial...

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