Italian

Quote:
Shot on location with a cast of nonprofessional actors, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece follows Umberto D., an elderly pensioner, as he struggles to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic boom. Alone except for his dog, Flike, Umberto strives to maintain his dignity while trying to survive in a city where traditional human kindness seems to have lost out to the forces of modernization. Umberto’s simple quest to fulfill the most fundamental human needs—food, shelter, companionship—is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever filmed and an essential classic of world cinema.Read More »

from IMDB:
The copy of this film that I have is in Italian language with no subtitles, so there is little risk of my giving away any real spoilers, but suffice to say it does not take sitting through much of the film’s running time to determine that “Veruschka”, which is named after the then-popular supermodel who plays the lead, is not going to be the fun and frothy story of the jet set life one would expect a woman like Veruschka to lead. Instead we are treated to the story of a very unhappy young woman who is apparently so lost and hopeless that the viewer early on wants to help her, but likewise feels equally hopeless. Much of the film takes place in a car on the road, with Veruschka and her boyfriend (the great Luigi Pistilli) driving and getting into personal trouble all over Italy.Read More »

Almost exclusively featuring his family, Bellocchio filmed over a ten year period with segments shot from 1999 to 2008. It begins when Elena (Bellocchio’s daughter, and an incredibly natural performer) is five. Elena’s mother, Sara (Finocchiaro), is an actress and is often away from home so Elena spends much of her time with her uncle Pier Giorgio (Bellocchio’s son), a frustrated artist. They live in the small town of Bobbio (Bellocchio’s hometown) with Pier Giorgio’s spinster aunts (Letizia and Maria Luisa Bellocchio).

Over ten years, the film follows these difficult relationships as the characters come and go from Bobbio, and Bellocchio captures the hopes, disappointments and yearnings of his own family. Moments from Bellocchio’s other films including Fist in His Pocket and The Nanny are also interspersed throughout as quick flashes that relate to the family’s onscreen drama.Read More »

This delightful romantic comedy, had it been made in America during this same period might have featured Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur and might have been directed by Gregory La Cava.
It gives us a Vittorio De Sica as a chauffeur, Bruno, who passes himself off as a man of importance by offering Mariuccia (Lia Franca) a ride in the car which he passes off as his own. She is the daughter of taxi driver Cesare Zoppetti. From the city of Milan they go off to the country for, spending some time at an inn, enjoying each other’s company. Bruno romances her with the song “Parlami d’amore, Mariù” or “Talk Love to Me, Mariuccia” by Cesare A. Bixio, which made the Italian hit parade of the time.Read More »

Summary:
An old woman’s poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy moments and the sad, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian.Read More »

Quote:
The film was based on a subject by Mario Gariazzo, a director who in the seventies, gravitated into the orbit of Daunia and to whom Fernando di Leo “lent a hand” by offering advice for his script – for his detective film, The Bloody Hands of the Law – and for the production of his western, Holy Water Joe and the tear-jerker, The Balloon Vendor, a story vaguely inspired by William Wyler’s famous film, The Desperate Hours. At the start it was Gariazzo who was to direct it but at the producers’ insistence he was finally replaced by di Leo.Read More »

Synopsis

Quote:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood cast to tell its heavily Marxist tale of Italian peasants during the twentieth century. Two boys born on the same day are destined for divergent paths; Olmo (played by Gerard Depardeiu as an adult) is born to peasant parents and will become a passionate socialist, while Alfredo’s (Robert De Niro as an adult) bourgeois, landowning origins will lead him to ultimately embrace fascism. Driven by a sincere hope for and belief in political change, Bertolucci’s film is nonetheless made up of very humane individual stories; it concentrates on highly personal experiences of a politically-charged time, which color the little dramas of love, sex, family, and community. It is at once an epic poem and a political manifesto, and it is the product of a director who was unabashedly communist in his youth, contrasting markedly with later works like 2003’s THE DREAMERS.Read More »

from IMDB:
The deranged Roman emperor Gainus ‘Caligula’ (Little Boots) Caesar (12-41 A.D.) rules Rome with an iron fist and has anyone tortured and exectued for even the slightest insubordination. Mostly set during his last year of his reign, as Caligula loses support due to his brutal and crazed excess, a young Moor woman, named Miriam, becomes his lover while ploting to kill him to avenge the murder of a friend which Caligula was responsible for. But Miriam is torn between her personal vandeda against Caligula and her own personal feelings towards him despite his madness and debauched lifestyle of orgies and bloody torture murders. Written by Matthew PatayRead More »

here’s very little about this film on the internet. Pasolini travels to India to make notes about a future film he planned on making. He examines differences between the modern India and the historical one found in its mythologies and vedic texts by posing a particular question based on a didactic anecdote that no longer seems to apply in a twentieth century world. This ‘prehistory’ forms most of the first part of the film. The second part covers a modern India marred by social divisions, overpopulation and poverty. Pasolini keeps his focus on the human tragedy involved at all times.Read More »