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The English-language Dutch film is now shooting in Italy and the Netherlands.

UK actor Aneurin Barnard, whose credits include TV series Peaky Blinders and Dunkirk, and Israel’s Dar Zuzovsky have joined the cast of Dutch director Michiel Van Erp’s costume drama A Beautiful Imperfection, about Casanova and the woman with whom he falls in love.

Barnard is set to play Casanova’s brother Barrnard while Zuzovsky has been cast as Maria, the woman with whom Giacomo Casanova (the more famous of the Casanova brothers) is played by Jonah Hauer-King.

The film is based on the novel In Lucia...

The English-language Dutch film is now shooting in Italy and the Netherlands.

UK actor Aneurin Barnard, whose credits include TV series Peaky Blinders and Joe Wright’s Dunkirk, and Israel’s Dar Zuzovsky have signed to star in Dutch director Michiel Van Erp’s costume drama A Beautiful Imperfection, about Casanova and the woman with whom he falls in love.

The film is based on the novel In Lucia’s Eyes by Arthur Japin and tells the story of the love affair between Casanova and a courtesan who becomes disfigured by smallpox and flees Italy for Amsterdam.

The €5.5 million English-language...

Photo: ‘The Last Paradiso’/Netflix A forbidden affair between two passionate free spirits threatens to upend a small town’s social order in the new Italian Netflix film ‘The Last Paradiso’, or ‘L’ultimo paradiso’, directed and co-written by Rocco Ricciardulli. Set in the 1950s in an insular southern Italian town, co-scriptwriter Riccardo Scamarcio stars as Ciccio Paradiso, a notorious adulterer, and idealistic man. He dreams of wresting power from the few men who control the town’s wealth and of leaving to travel the world, but both are easier said than done. Ciccio’s latest affair is with Bianca (Gaia Bermani Amaral), the daughter of one such powerful man who owns most of the land on which the crops are grown. “We have to travel,” Ciccio tells Bianca. “Meet new kinds of people. We cannot die here.” They wistfully talk of escaping the town, but can they make that dream a reality?...

"I've never yielded to anyone." Netflix has unveiled the official trailer for an indie Italian drama titled The Last Paradiso, also known as L'ultimo Paradiso originally in Italian. This film tells the true story of an impossible love, a dream of an indomitable man who has a sense of rebellion and justice coursing through his veins. The story follows a man who falls in love with the local mayor's daughter, encountering all kinds of trouble when he refuses to let her go. Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio stars as Ciccio Paradiso, plus Gaia Bermani Amaral as his love interest Bianca, along with Valentina Cervi and Antonio Gerardi. This looks like a cliche Italian story full of passion and romance intertwined with olive oil and politics. Dive in and escape to another time. Here's the official trailer for Rocco Ricciardulli's The Last Paradiso, direct from Netflix's YouTube: Based on real events,...

VENICE -- Sprinkled with surrealist touches and involving some pleasant music, writer and director Roberto Faenza's "The Days of Abandonment" offers reassurance to abandoned wives that while there may be some pain, they will come to appreciate life better for the experience of being unceremoniously dumped.

The attractively made film, screened In Competition at the Venice International Film Festival, is based on a novel with the same title by Elena Ferrante. It allows Margherita Buy to display her considerable dramatic skills as a wife whose husband leaves her for a younger woman but the predictable story is an unexceptional addition to the many on the topic that have gone before. It is unlikely to make a box office splash.

Buy plays Olga, a contentedly married 40-something with two great kids and an engineer husband named Mario (Luca Zingaretti) who provides a beautiful home in Turin, is loving and attentive, and walks Otto the dog dutifully. Until one day he doesn't.

Explaining that he has found "a lack of meaning" in life, Mario says he needs to be alone to reflect upon it. Olga's best friend Lea (Gea Lionello) urges her to ask her errant husband what the lack of meaning's name is.

It turns out to be Carla Gaia Bermani Amaral), a beautiful young student Mario has been tutoring. This information is slow to emerge, however, and in the mean time, Olga goes to pieces and at one point physically assaults Mario and Carla in the street.

Into her life, however, come a bushy-haired musician named Damian (composer Goran Bregovic, who also scored the film), who has previously just been the annoying neighbor downstairs, and a vaguely threatening young bag lady (Alessia Goria) camped across the street.

The story winds to its mundane conclusion with Olga's children, the tramp, the musician and Otto the dog each playing a part in the woman's discovery that life goes on. As indeed it does.