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A humble Milanese window-cleaner with dreams of magazine and TV fame accuses himself of the murder of a soprano from La Scala. “It’s a film close to my heart. It was an old project called Essere un mostro (‘Being a Monster’) and this, too, is the story of an ‘anti-hero’. Giannini was extraordinary”. (A. Lattuada)Read More »
The three films directed by Valerio Zurlini at Titanus—Violent Summer, Girl with a Suitcase and Family Diary—were products of a fruitful collaboration interrupted by Titanus’ financial crisis of the mid-1960s. The Professor marked the reunion of director and studio after a decade in which Zurlini was only able to make two films. Here he returns to his trademark style: sober melodrama involving complex characters. The focus is on the title figure, a teacher—played by Alain Delon—who arrives for a temporary position in Rimini in the midst of a midlife crisis. Unable to face his depressive mistress, he spends his nights drinking and gambling as a mutual attraction develops between him and one of his students.Read More »
Vita coi figli is a 1990 Italian television film directed by Dino Risi. It marks the screen debut of Monica Bellucci.
The story of one man dealing with an unexpected series of events, discovering his youth once again in the relationship with a much younger woman and finally coming to grips with his age, and the fact that he hasn’t been there for his family like he should have.Read More »
“Only for those abnormal” (an IMDB review by RodrigAndrisani)
The music for this film is composed by the greatest composer of film music of all time, Ennio Morricone. But it’s almost nonexistent and as little as it is, it’s not great. Deliberately maybe, because the subject itself, with capital M, is Madness, The Madness of Humanity. Place of the action: the crazy world we live in, a world where those who do not kill, do not use drugs, etc., are abnormal. Here’s what the director Elio Petri himself says, in his book “The adventurous history of Italian cinema”: “It’s a film about the société du spectacle. In the society of the spectacle it’s not the spectacle of life, there is only the show that gives you the impression that you live, while you don’t live from long time ago.Read More »
Inspector Tellini investigates serial crimes where victims are paralyzed while having their bellies ripped open with a sharp knife, much in the same way tarantulas are killed by the black wasp. As suspects keep dying, Inspector directs his attention to a spa all the victims had a connection with.Read More »
Mimi is a Sicilian dockworker who loses his job when he votes against the Mafia candidate in what he thinks is a secret ballot. He leaves his wife behind and goes to Turin, where he meets and moves in with Fiore, a street vendor and Communist organizer. They have a child, he works non-union jobs, and again he comes to the Mafia’s attention. This time they’re impressed, promoting him to a supervisor’s job back in Sicily. He must keep Fiore and the child a secret, which is fine with Fiore, as long as he never makes love to his wife. He doesn’t, and when she becomes pregnant, he knows he’s a cuckold. His personal revenge and the Mafia’s tentacles then intertwine in tragicomic ways. (IMDb)Read More »
A disbarred lawyer, recently released from prison and now involved with organized crime, checks into the Snack Bar Budapest where he is instructed to make contact with the up-and-coming local kingpin, a 19-year-old punk-pimp-gangster named Molecola (Italian for “molecule”); a Buffalo-trained politician trying to run out the local shops and turn the town into a giant casino-entertainment complex, with the Snack Bar as the centrepiece.Read More »
Lina Wertmüller’s harrowing 1976 film stars Giancarlo Giannini as a petty crook with seven unattractive sisters to support, and it features a picaresque, World War II-era journey through a prison asylum, army service, and a Nazi concentration camp. Wertmüller is more indulgent in highbrow sadomasochism than she is real profundity, but there’s no denying that the film is powerful in its story of subjugation and survival. A climactic scene in which Giannini saves his skin at the camp by seducing its disgusting female commandant is unnervingly honest. Giannini became a ’70s international icon partially on the basis of this work.Read More »