Quote:
The great Italian comic filmmaker, Nanni Moretti turns his satirical eye on the nomination of a new Pope. When the man is chosen he freezes at the immense responsibilities throwing the Vatican, and all Catholics into a major crisis. A psychiatrist is called in to help the elected Pope overcome his nerves, but the anointed man has other ideas.Read More »
Alessandro Manzoni’s book I Promessi Sposi from 1823 seems to be one of the best kept secrets of the whole Italian literature. While by many considered to be the greatest novel ever written in the Italian language, it doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong reputation abroad. I first heard about it from an Italian friend during a long night of Totò films and beer some months ago, but when doing some googling after watching Camerini’s film during a train trip yesterday, I realized that I actually have a Norwegian translation myself, bought some years back when I spent most of my time going to book sales in Oslo and filling up my parents’ attic with everything I came across.Read More »
In a Puglia country, the young seminarian Hercules lives in a middle class family in shambles, as the plant organism that feeds on decaying organic matter, said saprophyte.
Priest failure, he goes for the driver and the sick-nurses in a wealthy family and becomes the lover of the noble Baroness Clotilde …Read More »
A woman becomes obsessed with a man she can’t have, and carries the torch for more than 15 years.
Synopsis:
‘An international co-production with dialogue in both Italian and English, this erotic thriller from writer Lucio Fulci and director Giuseppe Patroni-Griffi stars Tony Musante as Michael Parker, a successful American businessman living in Italy with his girlfriend. When she leaves on vacation, Michael is soon involved in a torrid, passionate affair with Marie (Laura Antonelli), a woman with whom he once enjoyed a one-night stand. This time, however, Marie is not about to let Michael off the romantic hook so easily, exacting horrific revenge on her lover. Further complicating Michael’s love life is Jacqueline, Marie’s nubile preteen daughter, whose attraction for Michael pits mother and daughter against each other in an incestuous love triangle.’
– Karl Williams (Rovi)Read More »
A young girl, Erminia (Agostina Belli) marries a handsome and successful but brutish local butcher, Antonio (Gianni Macchia) at the behest of her countess stepmother, Giulia (Françoise Prévost). The new wife turns out to be frigid on their wedding night, and the couple have a big fight. She leaves the town to stay with her older, married sister Angela (Ewa Aulin), and gets involved with her sister’s jaded swinger friends. The husband consoles himself by picking up prostitutes and carrying on with a sexy, voluptuous wealthy widow neighbor (Femi Benussi)right in his new mother-in-law’s villa. For some reason the mother-in-law considers this a turn-on and becomes sexually drawn to her loutish son-in-law.Read More »
Synopsis:
Sessomatto, or Crazy Love, or How Funny Can Sex Be? is a series of nine short sketches, all of them starring Giancarlo Giannini, and eight of the nine starring Laura Antonelli. They are:
Signora Sono Le Otto. A woman’s butler is in love with her.
Due Cuori E Una Baracca. (Two Hearts and a Shack.) A couple with a bunch of kids live in a shack and fight a lot.Read More »
A historical document on the uses of Architecture and urban reform as tools for political propaganda, populism and the co-optation of the masses.
The newsreels of the time are a testimony to it: the city is a gigantic construction yard; new buildings rise next to the demolitions in the heart of Rome and the Fascist regime adopts new architectural styles and transforms the city. The documentary La Roma di Mussolini, by Leonardo Tiberi and Leonardo Ciacci, aided by footage of the Istituto Luce and maps and drawings of the time, describes XX century Rome, a monumental city opposed to the ancient and medieval one. And yet Mussolini, and his ‘demolishing fury’ take on older city plans, started or laid out back in 1800s. Republican Italy indeed did the same with projects that have begun under the Fascist regime.Read More »
Quote:
Leave it to an old master to strip a complex question down to its basics, leave aside all the anxiety and handwringing, and discover compassion as a basic reflex, a core value of a Europe few seem to recall. Michael Sicinski for Cargo: “Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village stars Michael Lonsdale (fresh from his turn in Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men) as an elderly Italian priest in the final days before his retirement, watching as his church is deconsecrated, the pews pushed into a corner by a forklift, Christ deposed from the cross by a crane. In the night, the priest takes to the pulpit and addresses the absent congregation. ‘Where have you all gone?’ he asks? Unbeknownst to him, the town’s North African immigrants, hunted by the carabinieri, take up in the back storeroom. Eventually they build a tent city in the empty nave. The younger priest (Rutger Hauer) tries to convince the old man that it is too dangerous to harbor the refugees. ‘When charity is a risk,’ he says, ‘is precisely when it is necessary to offer charity.'”Read More »
Synopsis:
Roberto Rossellini’s first film is a work of deceptive transparency. In its initial moments the film appears to be a documentary about underwater, even deep-sea, species. But soon after, the narration, in the manner of Cocteau, unleashes a powerful “dual reality” onto the images, imbuing them not only with a narrative logic, but a kind of magic. Read More »