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Spanish actress Penelope Cruz will be following in the footsteps of husband Javier Bardem by staring in a Bond movie
Spanish actress Penelope Cruz will be following in the footsteps of husband Javier Bardem by staring in a Bond movie Reuters

American screen legend Woody Allen's next film, "To Rome, with Love", which premiered in Italy on 13 April, will open the 16<sup>th Los Angeles Film Festival, scheduled to start on 14 June.

This will be Allen's first film since the successful "Midnight in Paris", which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. It will also mark his return to an acting role; the first since "Scoop" in 2006.

"I grew up on Italian cinema. I have always been an enormous admirer of Italian cinema. Anything that appears in the movie that is redolent of Italian cinema is strictly something that I have absorbed through osmosis over the years and it comes outfit would have been impossible in the years that I grew up to not have been influenced by the Italian movies that came to New York. These are the films that I saw, my fiends saw, they were very impressive. Naturally, when you make films you tend to make the kind of films that you have absorbed and have enjoyed as you developed and you grew up. It's an unconscious influence but a very substantial one," said the veteran, at a press conference.

According to the IBN Live, "To Rome with Love" is a culmination of four episodes of adventure and misadventures.

In the first short, a famous architect played by Alec Baldwin is in Rome on vacation and is reminded of his youth in the city when he meets Jack, played by Jesse Eisenberg. In the second, Allen plays a retired director who visits Rome and tries to promote the career of a man who sings professional quality opera but only when he is under a shower. The third stars Oscar-winner Roberto Benigni as a man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has suddenly and inexplicably become famous and is stalked by paparazzi. In the last episode, Penelope Cruz plays a high-class call girl who accidentally finds herself in the wrong hotel room, setting off a chain of comic events involving several couples.

"To Rome, with Love" opens in Italy on 20 April and releases in the US on 22 June.

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