Italy

The film critic Tatti Sanguineti arrives in Palermo to find out what has happened to Franco Maresco’s unfinished movie: Belluscone. Una storia siciliana. A film that was supposed to tell the story of the unique relationship between Berlusconi and Sicily through the misadventures of the Palermitan impresario of Neapolitan “neomelodic” singers and organizer of street festivals, Ciccio Mira—an undaunted supporter of Berlusconi, nostalgic for the old days’ Mafia— and two artists in his stable, Erik and Vittorio Ricciardi, who perform in the squares of Palermo a song entitled “Vorrei conoscere Berlusconi” (“I Want to Meet Berlusconi”). The film focuses on three failures: the political and human one of a Berlusconi now on the wane; that of the unfortunate and “slapdash” Ciccio Mira, rooted in an old but tenacious culture; and finally, the artistic one of the director, who chooses to disappear after realizing that tilting at political windmills is pointless, in a country that has long identified with Berlusconian “culture” and probably continues to do so.
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A captain in the Czar’s army encounters danger and romance while carrying a secret message across 19th-century Russia.Read More »

Quote:
The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island. After World War II, a Lithuanian refugee (Bergman) marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) she meets in a prisoner of war camp and accompanies him back to his isolated village on an island off the coast of Sicily. Cut off from the world, she finds herself crumbling emotionally, but she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Balancing the director’s trademark neorealism—exemplified here in a remarkable depiction of the fishermen’s lives and work—with deeply felt melodrama, Stromboli is a revelation.Read More »

Plot:
The little Agenore (Ferdinande Guillaume) combines a lot of trouble to family friend Ilario Mentecatti (Natale Guillaume).(European Film Gateway)Read More »

Plot summary
A beautiful film which is basically about a man, a piano player, who meets and falls in love with a beautiful and voluptuous woman, who, by some strange procedure, leaves the man unable to move but with a permanent priapism! After some time he becomes sick of it and she relieves his paralysis. Eventually she gets bored and decides to leave, but he can’t take it because he loves her.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Silvia Hacherman (Mimsy Farmer) is an industrial scientist who is completely devoted to her job. She has been going out with the handsome Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglia) for a little over four months, but he is understandably perturbed by the fact that she seems to value her work more than him. One night, while attending, with Roberto, a party at the home of a renowned African professor (Jho Jenkins), his discussion of voodoo rituals and human sacrifices seems to unroot a memory deeply buried within her psyche. She begins to hallucinate, seeing disturbingly vivid images of her mother, who died under uncertain circumstances. As the hallicunations become more frequent and more lifelike, Silvia begins to lose her grip on reality as her sanity slips away… Throw into the mix phantom girls, grisly murders, mysterious gift shops and a possible conspirary involving her boyfriend, and you have the makings of an incredibly baffling psycho-shocker that, while following some of the giallo genre’s conventions, is too anarchic a piece to fit comfortably into that particular category.
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Plot
Disappointed by love, Tontolini consults a doctor about the sadness he feels. The doctor prescribes distractions and entertainment as a cure. Tontolini accepts the doctor’s advice and begins the cure by going to café chantants and theaters, where he finds nothing but moving performances that make him even sadder. (European Film Gateway)Read More »

Quote:
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.Read More »

Plot Summary:
A sailor takes an American businessman and his girlfriend to an island where the businessman wants to build a resort. Soon a weird voodoo couple show up and warn them of bad things that are going to happen. It doesn’t take long for the zombies to show up and start chowing down on human flesh. The main characters do manage to fit in quite a bit of sex though.

Review:
One of the most interesting consequences of the brief period of “porno chic” in the early 70s was the resulting effect on the Italian exploitation industry. Never quick to miss an American cinematic “craze”, a lot of film-makers found themselves curiously crossing genres and stuffing hardcore porn into other genres, as well as vice versa. The absolute master of this was the ubiquitous Joe D’Amato, and here he fuses porno with the zombie movie (which at the time was in the midst of enormous popularity in Italy).Read More »