Much has been sad about this documentary, before it’s been shown. Europe outside Italy has its view clear. How is Berlusconi possible? You meet this agent with Mussolini songs in his cell phone. You meet the paparazzi king who with a considerable amount of self irony calls himself a Robin Hood, who takes from the poor and gives to himself. You also meet the 26-year-old worker, still living with his mother, who wants to be famous, combining Ricky Martin songs with karate tricks.Read More »
IMDB:
A boy lives alone in the desert. He spends the day gathering firewood, waiting for an old man to provide him of the essentials to his survival.Read More »
Quote:
Vittorio De Seta’s rhythmic editing adds drama to this chronicle of a Sicilian spearfishing expedition.Read More »
Quote:
One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made, M. Hulot’s Holiday has delighted and disarmed moviegoers the world over since its first appearance in 1953. There’s little in the way of plot or dialogue to this French-made farce about a group of vacationers at a small seaside hotel. But an unconventional form has not stood in the way of audience appreciation of the film’s comic content—good, old-fashioned slapstick fun. Writer-director Jacques Tati’s penchant for physical wit has prompted many to compare M. Hulot’s Holiday to the silent classics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And truth to tell, the temptation for comparison is just about irresistible in light of the film’s hero, the hilariously accident-prone M. Hulot—played by Jacques Tati himself.Read More »
Synopsis:
The story concerns the romance between Carmela and Antonio. Faced with the hostility of their parents, they symbolically shed themselves of all responsibilities to others in a climactic act of stark-naked bravado.Read More »
Quote:
In the sporting world, bullfighting remains the epitome of contradiction, where grace begets gore and patience rewards ego. Such unsettling dichotomies haunt Francesco Rosi’s The Moment of Truth, a dangerously alive film that jumps down from the stands and into the ring where Spanish toreros dance a prolonged tango with beasts whose one instinct is to gorge whatever body part they can. In an attempt to grasp a sense of immediacy from convention, Rosi leans heavily on a gripping hand-held aesthetic, seemingly pinning his fluid camera to the flamboyant garb of his strutting protagonists as they tempt fate on a daily basis. While much of The Moment of Truth can be surmised within a very generic sports-genre arc (rise and fall, temptation of riches), this is most definitely a film that lives and breathes in the details of experience, and it’s hard not to admire its unabashed dedication to controlled chaos and incompleteness despite the difficult subject matter.Read More »
EP.1 – IL DELITTO AL PONTE DE NEULLY
EP.2 – GIAN GIOVEDÌ’
EP.3 – LA FIGLIA DEL GHIGLIOTTINATO
EP.4 – GIUSTIZIA!
“Not many Italian silent films structured in episodes have survived, though a good many were made (see Monica Dall’Asta, “La diffusione dei film a episodi in Europa”, in Storia del cinema mondiale. Vol. 1: L’Europa. I. Miti, luoghi divi, Einaudi, 1999, p.309). Most of them were based on foreign models, particularly French, and some were direct reworkings. One such case is Il Fiacre n. 13, from the novel of the same title by Xavier Henri Aymon Perrin, Count of Montépin, a highly prolific and much-loved author whose books were vehicles for the depiction of social inequality, narrating stories of love, death, betrayal, blackmail, and redemption. Read More »
PLOT SYNOPSIS:
A romantic drama partially set in Amsterdam, this standard tale starts out in a mining area in Holland where conditions are about as rough as they get. Two of the miners, Italians Federico (Lino Ventura) and Vincenzo (Bernard Fresson) take off together for the city’s red-light district, where the women pose in windows for prospective customers. There the duo meet Else (Marina Vlady) and Carrel (Magali Noel) who are willing to leave their windows to spend a weekend at a resort with the two men. Soon Else has fallen in love with Vincenzo and the future of the two hookers, as well as the miners, seems to look brighter.
(Allmovie)Read More »
A wealthy land baron’s sadistic son has taken to abusing the local citizenry with his bullwhip in perverse, evil games.
Prospector Franco Nero returns home to help his alcoholic half-brother and finds a maniacal, bullwhip-wielding tyrant controlling the land and Nero’s sibling.
Nero joins forces with his kin to try to beat the sadistic creep and his followers.Read More »