Drama

To the priest in a small Italian town, the Splendor cinema (now sold for redevelopment) is a ‘dark grotto of sin’; to owner Jordan (Mastroianni), it’s a shrine. But writer/director Scola is more concerned with the grey areas between such views: the patrons who desert cinema in droves when TV offers cheap, undemanding entertainment. Using flashback and clips, he conveys something of the medium’s superiority over the box, at the same time beautifully unravelling a tale of life-long devotion and hard graft from Jordan, his long-term lover/usherette (Vlady), and the projectionist (Troisi). Their temperamental relationships over two decades are conveyed with great affection by the accomplished cast; and the film is full of wonderful moments – such as the homage to Capra at the climax – which manage to be both magical and unsentimental.Read More »

In the middle of the Spanish Golden Age, a Castilian convent is about to be closed and the nuns residing there dispersed. Then, one of the sisters comes up with a saving idea that could restore well-being to the community: to pretend that she has stigmata on her hands.Read More »

Visconti’s retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy – and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Sorel) which troubles her naive American husband (Craig) – on the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi’s camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father. Something like a Verdi opera without the music, the result may not quite achieve tragedy, but it looks marvellous. The title, culled from a poem by Leopardi, has been better rendered as ‘Twinkling Stars of the Bear’.Read More »

Aboard a ship late in the 19th-century, a middle-aged Italian tells his story of love to a Russian. In a series of flashbacks filmed almost entirely in creams, whites, and ochers, the clownish and superfluous Romano Patroni leaves his wife’s opulent home to visit a spa where he falls in love with a Russian woman whose marriage is a horror. He pursues her into the Russian heartland and returns to Italy resolved to leave his wife and marry his love.Read More »

Avery Bullard, President of the Tredway Corporation has died. But he never named a clear successor, so the Board members must choose a replacement.Read More »

Refugee family in Sweden faces trauma after youngest daughter falls into unexplained coma when asylum denied. Parents struggle to find cure, resilience tested amid difficult circumstances.Read More »

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Meiting is a hairdresser in Beijing. Her parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. After their divorce Meiting returned to the city to her grandfather’s. Chen Mo is a country boy who came to Beijing looking for work and a better life. He would like to send his blind brother the money necessary for an operation. A tortuous relationship between Meiting and Chen Mo begins.Read More »

A comedy writer struggles to overcome his addiction to heroin while putting his professional and personal life in danger.Read More »

It is the story of a romantic relationship, between meetings and separations, passion and pain, illusions and disappointments, from 1982 to 2000, of which twelve moments (“twelve fragments of a discourse eighteen years long love discourse”), represented through as many planes sequence, introduced by short animated sequences, created by Studio Elle from Laura Federici’s drawings. The film closes with the poem A Memory by Umberto Saba.Read More »