Continuing the tradition of films that capture the magic and mystery of the Eternal City, the most famous of which are Federico Fellini’s“Roma” (1972), William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” (1953) and Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City” (1945), Woody Allen’s new film, “To Rome with Love,” is his own portrait of of Rome. In an ode to the Italian capital as well as to Italian cinema, Allen adopts a structure more similar to that of Fellini in “Roma” with a series of loosely connected episodes. Through these stories, Allen pays homage to the city’s beauty, energy and its knack for absurd situations

The annual Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto) has been attracting increasingly larger and more youthful crowds of silent film enthusiasts to Pordenone, Italy. Inhabiting a media culture in which portable film screens feel more and more like sensory extensions of one’s own body—from the iPod Touch to the all-encompassing, visceral thrills of 3-D IMAX—it is nothing short of spectacular to witness a hand-tinted, science-fiction film from 1902 manage to fill Pordenone’s palatial Teatro Verdi to the limits of its capacity.