Italy

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With La Terra trema, Luchino Visconti shows an extraordinary concern and sympathy with the plight of ordinary Sicilian fisher folk. Coming from a privileged aristocratic background, Visconti was so appalled by what the fascists had done to his country that he took up with left-wing politics and Marxist ideology. Whilst this political awareness does make its way into La Terra trema, what is far more striking is Visconti’s genuine compassion for the people he is filming. He conveys their sense of pride and nobility, as well as their extreme hardship and inability to make a better lot for themselves. Perhaps it is the fact that Visconti came from such a totally different world that allows him to engage so forcefully with his subject, to draw out every scintilla of poignancy, not as a complacent distant voyeur, but as someone who is profoundly moved by what he is seeing around him.Read More »

PLOT: A movie director struggles with his relationship with his family, and with his latest movie, about the impact on the Italian Communist Party of the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956.Read More »

Criterion” wrote:
Olmi’s 1967 short about a young boy’s first loveRead More »

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Dr. Wendell Simpson is troubled surgeon with a nagging wife, named Carol, and stressful hospital job, who botches a surgery on an injured young man, named Johnny, who then dies under his care. The man’s dangerously disturbed girlfriend, Jessica, abducts the doctor and holds him captive at her apartment and subjects him to mind games and sexual torture because she holds the doctor responsible for the death of her boyfriend which triggers hidden repressed memories about Jessica and Johnny’s times together, while Dr. Simpson finds himself pervasively drawn to this strange young woman holding him captive.Read More »

An orphaned teenage girl attempts to raise her young siblings while being courted by a poor laborer in this Italian neorealistic drama.Read More »

When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley, the man who is already a meteoric rock-and-roll superstar becomes someone entirely unexpected in private moments: a thrilling crush, an ally in loneliness, a vulnerable best friend.Read More »

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Best known for his seminal spaghetti westerns, Sergio Corbucci tried his hand at many genres during his long career as a director. Here, late in his career, he makes a nice entry in the commedia sexy all’italiana sub-genre.

The film exists in several versions; one made for television ran a lot longer than this feature film edit, and it played like an omnibus film.

In this theatrical version, the different vignettes are inter-cut. Some segments are naturally more funny than others, but it would be difficult to argue against the sexiness of the ladies involved, even if everything almost remains too tasteful.Read More »

The beautiful young daughter of a crazed count fears that she will fall victim to the family curse – to be sacrificed to fulfill an ancient family legend.Read More »

In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to get their son back. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly take a political dimension. But the Church and the Pope will not agree to return the child, to consolidate an increasingly wavering power…Read More »