Italy

Synopsis:
March 1945 Asolo, Italy. Livia Mazzion, the attractive wife of a top ministry official, slips into the car of lawyer Ugo Oggiano, Livia’s admirer and her husband’s informer. Livia must reach Venice and her lover Helmut Schultz, a Wermacht lieutenant, as beautiful and accursed as a pagan god, with whom she is having a burning love affair. During the trip she relives the high points of her devastating sexual abandonment gone adrift, one that has shattered her life and her destiny, swallowing her up in the ruinous vortex of a sybaritic and bituminous Venice. The city, in the throes of the final months of the war, is rife with traffickers, officials, nabobs, military brass, sharks and adventurers of every kind. Yet a surprise awaits Livia upon her arrival in Venice, a surprise in which the heroes’ own personal defeats interweave with those public, as historical and political events now seek to settle accounts.Read More »

Synopsis (possible spoilers):
At Santa Monica, during 30s, two contending gangster bands claim for dominance on the city. Willing to solve permanently this situation, Johnny Bello sets an ambush for Jack Lo Dolce’s gang, killing them brutally.
The only survivor is Fred “il Solitario”, Jack Lo Dolce’s brother. Expecting Fred’s revenge, Johnny Bello charges one of his killers with finding and eliminating him. Fred, after avoiding successfully the killer’s search, becomes a friend of Fanny, Johnny’s girlfriend, from whom he hears details about a next coming robbery to a bank van. Lurking at the place designed to attack the van, Fred exterminates the whole Johnny’s gang, but during the shootout also Fanny dies. Captured and sentenced to die by the electric chair, Fred, while waiting for death, thinks back to his life, till that remote day when he, as a child, was forced to stand and watch his own parents’ murder: a trauma which had to lead him, along with his brother Jack, into the world of crimeRead More »

Raffaele, a Neapolitan student, get the news that his beloved grandmother Sabella is dying. He immediately goes to Pollena to be beside her.
Based on the novel of the same name written by Pasquale Festa Campanile. The film won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. It was followed by La nipote Sabella.Read More »

Synopsis
A rich and lonely American widow befriends two young people whose motives become suspect.Read More »

Cottafavi’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ play.

Michael Billington wrote:
The Persians is the oldest surviving work of Western drama. First performed at the City Dionysia in 472 BC, The Persians takes a nuanced approach to the matter of war and conquest. It was a direct inspiration for the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’. Percy Shelley’s drama Hellas was written in response to it. It’s the only play from the classical era that deals with historical events rather than mythological ones. In short, The Persians is a fascinating play and Aeschylus’ handling of war is worthy of closer inspection and analysis.Read More »

Maria, Pinuccia, Lia, Katia, Antonella. The childhood, adulthood and old age of five sisters born and raised in an apartment on the top floor of a small block in the suburbs of Palermo, where they live alone, without their parents. A home that bears the marks of the time that passes, as do those who have grown up in it and still live there. The story of five women, of a family, of who goes, who remains and who resists.Read More »

Synopsis
In his youth, Leah was fascinated by black magic. After her marriage and the birth of her son, she naturally continued to brew toad potions and lizard decoctions to protect the beloved child from diseases and misfortune. The cherub, now an adult, is threatened by two terrible scourges, women and war. Broths of critters are no longer sufficient and Leah must take drastic measures to deviate friends and enemies from the road of his son’s…Read More »

Salvatore (Gian Maria Volonte) lives in a rural environment on the island, and when he becomes fed up with Mafia tactics, he swings into action. First he convinces the farmers and workers that they can band together, and then he convinces them to go on strike against their exploitative employers. The results bring tragedy in their wake, but the beginnings of a unified stance against the mobsters takes hold.Read More »

IMDB:
A man faces a trial for murder. The court is biased because of his personal qualities.Read More »