Italy

  • Sergio Corbucci – Gli specialisti AKA The Specialists (1969)

    1961-1970Euro WesternsItalySergio CorbucciWestern

    Johnny Hallyday plays Hud, a dressed all-in-black gunman extraordinaire who returns to the town of Blackstone to seek out the men responsible for the lynching of his brother.
    Seems someone robbed the bank in Blackstone of every penny. His brother got the blame. The money is still missing.
    But lots of people are looking for it, including a Mexican bandit named El Diablo (Mario Adorf), the businessmen of Blackstone who lost all of their savings, and Virginia Pollywood (Francoise Fabian), the lady bank owner who tells Hud no one trusts her anymore.Read More »

  • Peter Del Monte – Etoile AKA Ballet (1989)

    1981-1990FantasyItalyPeter Del MonteThriller

    Synopsis:
    Young American, Claire Hamilton, arrives in Budapest, Hungary to enroll in a prestigious local ballet school. She meets two more Americans there, young Jason Forrest and his enthusiastic old rich uncle, Zio Joshua, who’s attending an art auction. After a visit from a strange woman in black and another young man, Claire becomes inexplicably obsessed with Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet “Swan Lake” and her personality changes so completely that she starts calling herself Natalie and can’t even remember ever meeting Jason. He becomes worried and tries investigating the mysterious man from the school who took Claire in, which puts him in mortal danger. However, nothing can prepare him for what he discovers in the bowels of an old opera house where Claire/Natalie is about to perform Tchaikovsky’s spellbinding ballet.Read More »

  • Lamberto Bava – Blastfighter (1984)

    1981-1990ActionCrimeItalyLamberto Bava

    Jake “Tiger” Sharp, a former Georgian police officer has been released from jail, after serving a 8-year sentence for taking the law into his own hands. Tiger decides to return to his hometown Georgia as he tries to live a quiet life and try to escape from his past. But for Tiger, things are about to get very bad. When he gets cruelly taunted by a group of deer poaches who are employed by a man from Hong Kong, who is using the deers they kill to make medicine. But when the poachers rape and kill his long-lost daughter Connie, Tiger looses his rocker. Armed with a arsenal of weaponry, Tiger, with a thirst for vengeance, decides to give the Poacher’s a dose of their own medicine, as he sets out off on a violent rampage, as he blasts the poachers to pieces…Read More »

  • Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel – La pivellina AKA Little Girl (2009)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaItalyRainer FrimmelTizza Covi

    Synopsis:
    Abondoned in a park, the two-year-old girl Asia is found by Patti, a circus woman living with her husband Walter in a trailer park in San Basilio on the outskirts of Rome. With the help of Tairo, a teenager who lives with his grandma in an adjacent container, Patti starts to search for the girl’s mother and gives the girl a new home for an uncertain period of time.Read More »

  • Steno – Copacabana Palace (1962)

    1961-1970ComedyCrimeItalyQueer Cinema(s)Steno

    This film is also known as “The Girl Game” and “Saga of the Flying Hostesses”. The film takes place during Carnival Time in Rio De Janeiro. As unconfined joy wafts its way through the streets, the lives of several fabulously wealthy visitors and a group of voluptuous stewardesses intersect, sometimes with startling results. Sylvia Koscina and Mylene Demongeot are among the visual delights of this garish romp. Featuring the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim.Read More »

  • Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub – Proposta in quattro parti (1985)

    Arthouse1981-1990ClassicsDanièle HuilletItalyJean-Marie Straub

    More material from Straub and Huillet. RAI TV capture.

    Proposta 1: Accaparramento di granoRead More »

  • Nanni Moretti – La cosa (1990)

    1981-1990DocumentaryItalyNanni MorettiPolitics

    From: Cinema On Cinema: Self-reflexive Memories in Recent Italian History Films, by Tiziana Ferrero-Regis
    Nanni Moretti’s documentary, La cosa (The Thing, 1990), represents the painful transformation of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) through the voices of the party’s members who met throughout Italy to discuss the changes proposed by the PCI’s leadership. From the confronting debates depicted in La cosa, the re-evocation of the history of the Italian Left and of its founding principles emerge as a background, creating a nostalgic longing for a style of politics that had disappeared in Italy.Read More »

  • Ettore Scola – Romanzo di un giovane povero (1995)

    Drama1991-2000Ettore ScolaItaly

    Two neighbors, young Vincenzo and old Mr. Bartoloni, are utterly unhappy. On the one hand Vincenzo must lead a miserable and frustrating life as he cannot find any regular job, despite his Arts degree. On the other hand, Mr. Bartoloni is fed up with his despotic wife: the woman who used to be a beautiful artist is now a fat and shabby drunkard. The two men meet on a particularly sad night and, during an outburst Mr. Bartoloni asks Vincenzo to help him to get rid of his wife by simulating an accident with the promise of a considerable amount of money. Read More »

  • Roberto Rossellini – Anno uno AKA Year One (1974)

    1971-1980DramaItalyPoliticsRoberto Rossellini

    From Channel4.com:
    Rossellini’s indelible career flagged in the late 1950s for a variety of complicated reasons, and after directing commercial films and an episode in Rogopag (1962) he abandoned cinema for television. Twelve years later and near the end of his life he returned to movie-making with this film. It’s a biopic of the postwar Christian Democrat leader, Alcide De Gaspari (Vannucchi), who was responsible for keeping the Communists out of power in the years that followed the fall of fascism. An extension of Rossellini’s documentary and historical reconstruction films, this failed both critically and commercially.Read More »

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