Italian

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 »

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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 »

Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat (responsible mainly for the writing of birth certificates), a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined. The film is a veritable travelogue across contemporary Italy, as Matteo journeys to Napoli, Roma, Firenze, Milano, and Turino to search for each of his children; he even spends one night on the streets among the homeless. Scuro returns to Sicily, visits his wife’s grave, and reports with irony that “stanno tutti bene.”Read More »

Malèna is the utterly unforgettable story of a boy’s journey into manhood amid the chaos and intolerance of World War II. Renato gets a bicycle for his thirteenth birthday and on the day that Mussolini declares war on the Allies, he discovers sex, dreams and violence through Maddalena (Malèna) Scordia. He follows her around everywhere, watching her every move. In a sleepy Italian village, Malèna, the most beautiful woman in town, becomes the subject of increasingly malicious gossip among the lustful townsmen and their jealous wives. But only her most ardent admirer, young Renato Amoroso, will learn her mysterious untold story.Read More »

Mastroianni plays Major Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, an Italian officer on secondment to NATO, and the film follows his picaresque and increasingly desperate attempts to triumph over his idiosyncratic libido that renders him impotent with women unless his life is in danger. Adventures which lead him from Paris to the Swiss Alps, and along the length of Italy, from the cage of a lion tamer, to posing as doctor to verify the virginity, for which read seducing, of a Sicilian bride to be, with her family just the other side of the door, to climbing into ever higher bedroom windows, culminating in his being tried for the murder of the jealous husband of one of his potential conquests. Conquests who all gather in the court and who are played by a fabulous line-up of Italian actresses including Virna Lisi, Marisa Mell, Michèle Mercier, and Liana Orfei.Read More »