Italy

  • Bernardo Bertolucci – Prima della rivoluzione AKA Before the Revolution (1964)

    Drama1961-1970ArthouseBernardo BertolucciItaly

    Quote:
    The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino’s funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina’s older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy’s future. Their own futures are bleak.Read More »

  • Nanni Moretti – Bianca (1984)

    1981-1990ComedyItalyNanni Moretti

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    Michele is a mathematics professor who just started a new job in a school with some peculiar teaching methods. After a woman in his neighborhood is murdered, Michele meets beautiful colleague Bianca, and a relationship begins between the two. Where is this relationship heading, and will Michele be able to help the police catch the murderer?Read More »

  • Jean-Marie Straub – Le genou d’Artémide AKA Artemide’s Knee (2008)

    Arthouse2001-2010ItalyJean-Marie Straub

    Jean-Marie Straub’s first film after the death of Danièlle Huillet is a love poem to her. Le Genou d’Artémide is based on Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues of Leuco”, which had already been adapted by Straub et Huillet as Ces Rencontres Avec Eux (2006).Read More »

  • Matteo Garrone – Terra di mezzo (1996)

    Arthouse1991-2000DocumentaryItalyMatteo Garrone

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    An early Garrone documentary in 3 episodes: “Silhouette”, “Euglen & Gertian” and “Self Service”.
    In three plainly told segments, the bleak lives of Third World immigrants are examined as they try to establish themselves in their new home in Italy. In true neorealistic style, the stars themselves are immigrants reenacting real-life situations. The first segment examines the activities and circumstances of three Nigerian prostitutes; the second segment looks at the life of an Albanian boy laborer, and the third, of an Egyptian gas-station attendant.Read More »

  • Luis Buñuel – Le Fantôme de la liberté aka The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

    1971-1980ArthouseExperimentalItalyLuis Buñuel

    Quote:
    Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Buñuel’s surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of non sequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Buñuel throughout his career—from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.Read More »

  • Alain Corneau – Le nouveau monde AKA New World (1995)

    1991-2000Alain CorneauDramaItaly

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    Synopsis
    A young boy who worships all things American comes of age in this amiable French melodrama set in Orleans where over 14,000 American GIs were stationed. The film opens with the solemn vow between young Patrick and Marie-Jose that they will both head to the US when they grow up. The children are totally obsessed with American culture and even surreptitiously go through the gringo garbage to find things such as old magazines, clothing, and empty packages. Years pass and the two friends are seen as lusty 16-year olds. Patrick finds himself feeling smothered by Marie-Jose and ends up falling for the vivacious blonde Yankee coquette, Trudy. He lives to go to the military base where he can hear the live jazz he is so crazy about. Soon his studies begin to suffer. On base, Patrick is befriended by a clumsy but kindly sergeant who buys him a drum kit so he can play with the jazz quintet when it entertains the troops. But when Patrick gets a chance to play drums at an out-of-town concert, his father forbids it, causing his son to rebel. Tragedy ensues.Read More »

  • Tinto Brass – Snack Bar Budapest (1988)

    1981-1990CultEroticaItalyTinto Brass

    A disbarred lawyer, recently released from prison and now involved with organized crime, checks into the Snack Bar Budapest where he is instructed to make contact with the up-and-coming local kingpin, a 19-year-old punk-pimp-gangster named Molecola (Italian for “molecule”); a Buffalo-trained politician trying to run out the local shops and turn the town into a giant casino-entertainment complex, with the Snack Bar as the centrepiece.Read More »

  • Jesus Franco – Sexo Caníbal AKA Devil Hunter (1980)

    1971-1980EroticaExploitationItalyJesus Franco

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    Description: A Vietnam veteran heads to an island inhabited by cannibals to save a kidnapped model not only from her kidnappers, but also from the cannibals’ lurking Devil god.Read More »

  • Enzo G. Castellari – Il Grande Racket AKA The Big Racket (1976)

    1971-1980CrimeEnzo G. CastellariHorrorItaly

    Quote:
    Nico is a police inspector who is battling against gangsters who are terrorising an Italian town and extorting money from its locals. No one dares to speak out against them except a local restaurant owner. After telling all his daughter is swiftly raped and the inspector taken off the case. He decides, however, to go it alone and enlists support from victims of the hoodlums.”Read More »

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