Italy brings a strong representative to our Winter Festival in Fellini’s modern fable of an innocent young woman who ends up on the road with a brutish circus performer.
Tag Archives: Italian movies
PASQUALINO SETTEBELLEZE (1975)
Lina Wertmüller became the first ever female director nominated for Best Picture for a movie that, to my surprise, turned out to be about an amoral hatchet murderer trying to seduce his way out of a concentration camp.
LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO (1960)
A seminal Italian horror classic that takes whatever you think of when you hear the word “gothic” and is way more gothic than that.
LADRI DI BICICLETTA (1948)
The prototype of the postwar European realism, it is a very simple movie about the cycle of poverty that worked way better for me than I would have thought.
THE NIGHT PORTER (1974)
A highly controversial drama about the Holocaust, trauma, and sadomasochism, among other things. It’s probably better than that combination makes it sound.
JOURNEY TO ITALY (1954)
Italian Robert Rossellini directs his Swedish wife, Ingrid Bergman, in English in this surprisingly modern take on a marriage which, finding itself in unfamiliar territory, immediately disintegrates.
L’AVVENTURA (1960)
A landmark of “modernist” cinema, but don’t expect it to, y’know, have a story or make any attempt to explain anything.
AMARCORD (1974)
Federico Fellini’s exaggerated childhood memories form the basis for this story of a year in the life of a 1930s Italian small town.
ROMA CITTÁ APERTA (1945)
Perhaps the definitive “neorealist” film, shot in the rubble of Occupied Rome just after the Nazis had left.
8 ½ (1963)
Federico Fellini couldn’t figure out how to make a movie and made a movie about not being able to make a movie. I’m still trying to figure it out.
Movie Valhalla 