French director Cédric Klapisch wowed both French and international audiences with his quick-witted charmer L'auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment) from 2002, which introduced Romain Duris and Cécile de France to legions of new fans. The unsure student and his lesbian best friend returned for the sequel Les poupées russes (Russian Dolls), set -- though not filmed -- five years later, with all the characters hitting thirty. For his upcoming film Paris (our review), a kaleidoscopic portrait of the French capital, Duris will play the pivotal role of a possibly terminally ill Parisian, while the director has also recruited some of France's finest talent to star alongside Duris, including Juliette Binoche, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, 2007 French Shooting Star Mélanie Laurent, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche. The film will premiere in France in February 2008.

 

Despite having two high profile film festivals in early autumn in the form of the Venice and the Rome Film Festivals, this year several highly anticipated Italian titles failed to show up at either festival, including Riccardo Milani's biopic Piano Solo, with Kim Rossi Stuart as the tortured musical genius Luca Flores; Giuliano Montaldo's San Pietroburgo with Miki Manojlovic as Dostoyevsky and Roberto Faenza's I vicerè (The Viceroys), an adaptation of the fin-de-siècle novel by Federico De Roberto. I vicerè, which premieres in Italy today, is the most famous work of the novelist and  recounts the disillusionment of a noble family in the period between the Risorgimento and Italy's unification in the middle of the 19th century.