Italy

Synopsis
Titta di Girolamo apparently has a regular and tedious life with nothing strange a part from his own name (as he uses to say). He lives in a Hotel in Lugano (Switzerland) since almost ten years, spending his days waiting for something we don’t know. His life is too rigid, too detached following a flat routine. Titta ignore everyone and probably he has no emotions at all. Basically there is no story. But one day he decided, breaking all his personal rules, to exchange some words with Sofia, the hotel’s barmaid. Incredibly all the situation change, emotions, love, mafia, death come back violently into Titta’s life.Read More »

Quote:
Some describe CALIGULIA as “the” most controversial film of its era. While this is debatable, it is certainly one of the most embarrassing: virtually every big name associated with the film made an effort to distance themselves from it. Author Gore Vidal actually sued (with mixed results) to have his name removed from the film, and when the stars saw the film their reactions varied from loudly voiced disgust to strategic silence. What they wanted, of course, was for it to go away.Read More »

Two teenage friends, Eugenia (Ornella Muti) and Nicola (Eleonora Giorgi) conspire to find out how much their youthful sensuality can disrupt one of their households, headed by a dentist, Dr. Emilio Rutelli (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his mentally-ill wife Elisa (Valentina Cortese).

Chronicling the competition of two nubile girls who attempt to seduce the patriarch of a household, Gianluigi Calderone’s movie didn’t shy away from depicting such forbidden subjects as incest or the early sexual awakening of teenagers. This disturbing story was made more all the sensual by the lush underscore of Piero Piccioni. “Valzer di Valentina” (Valentina’ waltz) is one of hist most famous themes.Read More »

The Damned has often been regarded as the first of Visconti’s films described as “The German Trilogy”, followed by Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973). Henry Bacon (1998) specifically categorizes these films together under a chapter “Visconti & Germany”. Visconti’s earlier films had analyzed Italian society during the Risorgimento and postwar periods. Peter Bondanella’s Italian Cinema (2002) depicts the trilogy as a move to take a broader view of European politics and culture. Stylistically, “They emphasize lavish sets and costumes, sensuous lighting, painstakingly slow camerawork, and a penchant for imagery reflecting subjective states or symbolic values,” comments Bondanella.Read More »

Based on a stage play by Eduardo Scarpetta, Il Turco Napoletano is retooled into a vehicle for Italian comedian Toto. The star plays a girl-happy dolt who assumes the identity of a missing Turkish gentleman. With stolen identification papers, the oafish impostor enters the home of a wealthy man who’d hired the Turk to protect his wife and daughter. What our hero doesn’t know–but everybody else does–is that the real Turk is a eunuch. To avoid the scissors of the censors, Il Turco Napoletano is presented as a play-within-a-play, so it isn’t really happening after all. The film was lensed by Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer Karl Struss. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis:
‘1968, London. Luca, the son of an Italian rich owner, is living his ‘swinging’ years away from duties and responsibilities while his father wants him to be introduced to the family business at any cost. Luca is first forced to return to Italy, then he is kidnapped by his father’s collaborators, jailed into a sanitarium, put through the electroshock and other torments. Then, when ‘normalized’ Luca marries a woman who in reality is a psychologist paid by his father to brainwash him and turn him into a perfect businessman.’
– davideRead More »

Quote:
Shandurai (Newton), an African refugee in Rome, pays her way through medical school as a live-in cleaner for English pianist and composer Kinsky (Thewlis). Shy and timid, he woos her with gifts and music, but she rejects his overtures; her husband’s a political prisoner in her homeland, she says. Kinsky responds with an act of love simple, profound and pivotal.Read More »

Quote:
Having largely focused on literary adaptations from 1951’s Diary of a Country Priest through 1974’s Lancelot du Lac, Robert Bresson turned his attention to the politics of the present with this seminal, searing send-up of post-’68 France. Our protagonist is Charles, a young man adrift who tries out a variety of activities to lend meaning to his life: drugs, psychoanalysis, ecology, radical politics… With surgical precision (and, contrary to his reputation, a sense of humor), Bresson vividly chronicles how Charles and his similarly listless fellow travelers come to know firsthand the emptiness of modern existence, and the question becomes not so much how to cope but rather how to escape. Perhaps Bresson’s most explicitly political film, and among the most chilling cinematic portraits of a historical moment.Read More »

Little Momi’s father has left to be a soldier and his letters are eagerly anticipated by his family at home. In one of them he recounts the adventure of little highlander Berto, who saved his mother from an attack by the Austrians by running to warn the Italian troops. Momi is impressed by the tale and falls asleep on the sofa, hugging his favourite toys, agile Trick and violent Track; as soon as the child is sleeping Trick, Track and their troops unleash a battle with a vengeance, featuring heavy artillery, chemical weapons and air attacks. Finally, in the vehemence of their clash, Momi is involved as well and prodded with bayonets. Nevertheless… it is only a rose thorn and the battle was only a dream. Momi confidently keeps looking forward to the return of his father from the front, together with his mother and grandfather. This masterpiece by the wizard of “special effects” Segundo de Chomón is a war story, divided into a first live-action part and a second animated one in stop-motion, with a skill that still leaves one gaping even today. Visual inventions and sophisticated technical solutions follow each other: from the bellows sucking in the fumes of the chemical attack to the soda bottle used to extinguish fires in the city of Lilliput after the air incursion. Read More »