At Giunti Odeon, the highly anticipated new film by one of the most beloved directors of contemporary cinema, Wes Anderson: The Phoenician Scheme, in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Anatole ‘Zsa-zsa’ Korda, an almost immortal tycoon, collects enemies and plane crashes, which he survives in spite of his saboteurs. In a climate of capitalist predation and imminent death, Korda puts his affairs in order and decides to leave his immense fortune to his daughter, an imperturbable novice, with a pipe and rosary, one step away from vows. Except that he has nine other children, all boys, whom he has neither the time nor the desire to love. The presence of Liesl, who accepts a job as a temporary heiress in an attempt to identify her mother's murderer, will change the game and the destiny of a father embarked on a daring industrial project.

The Big Dreamer: the cinema of David Lynch retrospective continues successfully at Giunti Odeon, with the third appointment dedicated to one of the great American director's best-loved films: The Elephant Man. London, second half of the 19th century. Due to a very rare disease, neurofibromatosis, which has given him a monstrous appearance, young John Merrick is exposed as an ‘elephant man’ in the slum of Bytes, an alcoholic who lives off his monstrosity and treats him like a beast. It is here that Merrick is discovered by Dr Frederick Treves, a surgeon at the London Hospital, who convinces Bytes to give him up for a while so that he can study and treat him. Taken to the hospital and presented to a congress of scientists, John soon reveals himself in Treves' eyes as a man of superior intelligence and a refined and sensitive soul. An epochal film, which changed the rules of horror, reversing the dynamics between ‘monster’ and spectator: who is afraid of whom? No less ancestral and traumatic than Eraserhead, hybrid and tragicomic like its protagonist, on the one hand it drags the general public to tears and on the other it throws up splinters of horror and Tod Browning's memories. The restoration enhances the black and white of the great Freddie Francis, giving new strength to this highly topical reflection on the gaze and horror, staged by one of the most visionary directors in the history of cinema.

At Giunti Odeon the new film by Asif Kapadia, the Oscar-winning director, already the author of the acclaimed Senna (2010), Amy (2015) and Diego Maradona (2019). In 2073, the capital of the Americas (not of the United States) is New San Francisco, a desertified city ravaged by pollution, monitored at every turn by droves of drones, control cameras and police, even robotic ones. Democracy is effectively zeroed out, the authorities repress all dissent, power is in the hands of a minority of tech industry and media capitalists who hold the bulk of the wealth, control the technological revolution, direct information and dictate the agenda to political representatives. Thirty-seven years earlier, the Event occurred: a meteorological, political, social disaster. In a former Bloomingsdale's warehouse, abandoned after the human rights blackout, a few resisters survive, including Ghost (Samantha Morton), who after the Event has stopped speaking verbally, but whose voice-over guides the viewer. Ghost tries to hold on to memories, inherited from her grandmother, who stored them for her on analogue media. Because to erase the past from the human mind is to condition it, to destroy the structures of thought, culture, language, in order to mould a new mentality and guide the choices of individuals based essentially on their consumer preferences.l

Giunti Odeon presents the new film by Italian director Louis Nero, who continues his personal quest for a philosophical and visionary cinema. The title is inspired by the famous master of Tibetan Buddhism Jetsun Milarepa (to whom Liliana Cavani already dedicated a film in 1974), who lived between the 11th and 12th centuries, and is known for his radical path of inner transformation. Vexed since childhood by his greedy uncles, the young Mila later learns the art of black magic in order to take revenge, until he decides to purify himself and undertake a path of asceticism, meditation and illumination, thus becoming Milarepa. The same parable is essentially fulfilled by the film's protagonist Mila, who here is a girl robbed of her father's inheritance by her uncles, on a timeless Mediterranean island, suspended between past and future. Determined to avenge her father's murder by her relatives, Mila is driven by her mother to travel far away to learn the magical arts necessary for her purpose. When her revenge is accomplished after a long journey, however, Mila feels guilty and wants to go to Guru Marpa to atone for her actions and regain her long-lost serenity. As has become customary in his albeit highly experimental cinema, Louis Nero makes use of a cast embellished with international faces and sacred monsters, from Harvey Keitel to F. Murray Abraham, from Ángela Molina to Franco Nero, and each of them accompanies the protagonist Mila - played by the young Isabelle Allen, who made her debut in Les Misérables (2012).