Anna Manni is a policewoman trying to capture a vicious serial rapist and killer. The problem is that she suffers from Stendhal’s syndrome, a psychosomatic disease that gives her dizziness and hallucinations when she is exposed to the sight of paintings and artistic masterpieces. When the maniac lures her into a trap inside Florence’s famous Uffizi museum, her troubles are just beginning…Read More »
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A peasant tradition of making homemade ricotta cheese on a wood-burning fire becomes an act of resistance in this unforgettable film. Amateur actors from the regional Buti theater, many of them ordinary laborers and farmers, recite or read passages from Elio Vittorini’s Marxist novella Women of Messina, their singularly musical voices ringing out as one in the verdant forest. The story, which Italo Calvino called a “choral narrative,” centers on a group of workers and peasants who rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Second World War by rebuilding a destroyed village and forming a utopian community.Read More »
A grouchy farmer, known around his small Italian town as being wonderful to his employees, but actively driving everyone else away, is in for a surprise when a beautiful girl from the city, ends up on his stoop after her car breaks down in the rain.Read More »
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Based on the story of Franca Villa and Filippo Melodia. In Sicily, as a Mafia boss leaves for prison, he advises Vito, a young man who’s his potential successor, to marry a virtuous and poor woman. Vito’s eye settles on Francesca, only 15, but lovely and self-possessed. Among her virtues are high self worth and forthright speech, so although she falls in love with Vito, she won’t bow down to him. Believing he’s losing face, he has his boys kidnap her and he rapes her. Then, he tells her he’ll still marry her. Instead, she files charges. Her parents, brother, and neighbors refuse to support her. Will she break? Will Vito continue his assaults?Read More »
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In 1996, Marcello Mastroianni talks about life as an actor. It’s an anecdotal and philosophical memoir, moving from topic to topic, fully conscious of a man ^Óof a certain age^Ô looking back. He tells stories about Fellini and De Sica’s direction, of using irony in performances, of constantly working (an actor tries to find himself in characters). He’s diffident about prizes, celebrates Rome and Paris, salutes Naples and its people. He answers the question, why make bad films; recalls his father and grandfather, carpenters, his mother, deaf in her old age, and his brother, a film editor; he’s modest about his looks. In repose, time’s swift passage holds Mastroianni inward gaze.Read More »
Synopsis:
Emanuelle (Lindt) is out to avenge her sister (Gori), who committed suicide after escaping from her sadistic lover Carlo (Eastman). So she chains him up in her basement, drugs him, and forces him to watch her having sex. Carlo starts hallucinating all kinds of bloody horrors and cannibalistic doings, so he decides he has to break free and kill Emanuelle.Read More »
Straub/Huillet’s From the Cloud to the Resistance (1978) has been summarized by Straub as follows: ‘From the cloud, that is from the invention of the gods by man, to the resistance of the latter against the former as much as to the resistance against Fascism.
‘Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.’
(Library Synopsis): Six dialogues between figures from Greek antiquity, taken from Cesare Pavese’s ‘Dialoghi con Leucò’, are followed by an episode set in modern times, taken from the same author’s novel ‘La Luna e i falò’.Read More »
During a Post-Apocalyptic period in the near future the majority of the European population has been wiped out by some sort of undefined plague. Cino and Dora, a young couple, are rounded up by what constitutes the authorities on an isolated temporary base. They are examined and given antibiotics which will protect them for six months, told to pick out a deserted house to live in the area, and use that time to conceive a child. They are later visited by an enigmatic group of black-clothed, initially threatening vigilantes who are evidently satisfied with the couple when they hear that a child is contemplated. However, despite her evident fondness for Cino, Dora is reluctant to try to conceive a baby. Then their domestic tranquility is interrupted by a beautiful French interloper who seems as if she is more than willing to fill in for Nora and conceive Cino’s children.Read More »
In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played, in a tour de force performance, by New Wave icon Michel Piccoli. In his claustrophobic mod home, he pampers his pill-popping wife, seduces his maid, and uncovers a gun that may have once been owned by John Dillinger—and then things get even stranger. A surreal political missive about social malaise, Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto) finds absurdity in the mundane. It is a singular experience, both illogical and grandly existential.Read More »