The film takes place in a humble Italian Catholic village where everyone is acquainted with each other but no one truly knows about the secret lives that they all live. The entire community is preparing for the annual religious festival. There’s the local butcher who covets the town’s young teenagers and then goes into the freezer and makes love to hanging beef carcasses. The teenage daughter who has sex with her father and becomes pregnant at her grandfather’s funeral. The communist drunkard who beats and rapes his wife. She lives through her dreams and fantasies or she’ll go crazy. The Christ-like stranger who does not have a name. The women fantasize about him. The children all adore him but he does not belong to the village. He always seems to be at the right place at the right time. And there’s a bizarre artist who clips out pictures of internal organs from medical journals and pastes them on magazine models with a completely insane wife who never speaks.
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Tag Archives: italian
Confessions of a Police Captain / Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971) Damiano Damiani, Franco Nero, Martin Balsam, Marilù Tolo, Crime, Drama
One of the first films about the mafia occurrence, in which the fight is hopeless, because “the polyp’s feeler” reaches everything and everybody. A police inspector and a deputy public prosecutor try to prove that the architect in the city is in the mafia.
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Così ridevano / The Way We Laughed (1998) Gianni Amelio, Francesco Giuffrida, Enrico Lo Verso, Fabrizio Gifuni, Drama
Turin at the end of the fifties: two brothers have emigrated there from Sicily and the older works very hard to let the younger study and free himself from poverty through culture. The boy however is not keen on school and would like to begin to work. When after some time he gets his degree however things take a violent and dramatic turn…
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Una ragazza piuttosto complicata / A Rather Complicated Girl (1969) Damiano Damiani, Catherine Spaak, Jean Sorel, Florinda Bolkan, Thriller, Erotic
This erotic sexploitation feature concerns a couple and their pursuit of sexual fulfillment with each other – and their mutually agreed upon third bed guests. Lesbian love angles includes the woman’s step-daughter. Alberto (Jean Sorel) is soon left alone when the women decides his services are no longer required. After acting on his erotic fantasies, he is left alone and driven to madness when his girlfriend marries another after leaving with her lesbian lover.
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Scuola elementare (1954) Alberto Lattuada, Riccardo Billi, Mario Riva, Lise Bourdin, Comedy
A primary school teacher Lazio, after years of teaching at the village, he won a competition in Milan. In the school which is intended meets an old childhood friend who does the janitor and temporarily hosting it at home. In school the teacher also meets a young colleague of which falls in love …
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La finestra di fronte / Facing Windows (2003) Ferzan Ozpetek, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Massimo Girotti, Raoul Bova, Drama, Romance
Giovanna is a bookkeeper in a company which packs chickens. She is married to a man who has a precarious job. First she starts being curious about a young man who lives in the block opposite hers, and then she falls in love with him. The relationship between the two becomes much stronger when she starts to find out more about him from an old man who bursts into their lives. The old man, obsessed with the memories of some things that happened n the long past autumn of 1943, has lost his memory and finds refuge in Giovanna.
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Un uomo da bruciare / A Man for Burning (1962) Valentino Orsini, Paolo Taviani, Gian Maria Volontè, Didi Perego, Turi Ferro, Drama
Political activist Salvatore returns to his native Sicily and stirs up trouble among the peasants, urging them to confront the Mafia and demand the right to plough their own fields. The peasants refuse to help him, and Salvatore is marked by the Mafia as a troublemaker…
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Il generale della Rovere / General Della Rovere (1959) Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Hannes Messemer, Sandra Milo, Drama, War
Genoa, 1943. Grimaldi is a swindler, pretending to be a colonel in the Italian army to get money from the family of people put into jail by the Nazis. Once caught, the Gestapo makes a deal with him : he will stay alive if he impersonates the General Della Rovere, a leader of the Resistance who has just been shot by the Nazis, to be put into a political jail where he is supposed to identify another Resistance leader.
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Il Messia / The Messiah (1975) Roberto Rossellini, Pier Maria Rossi, Mita Ungaro, Carlos de Carvalho, Biography, History
Rossellini’s final film relates the story of Christ in the director’s unsentimental, realistic style.
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La città si difende / Four Ways Out (1951) Pietro Germi, Gina Lollobrigida, Renato Baldini, Cosetta Greco, Crime, Drama
As a soccer match is in progress, a group of four criminals robs the stadium office. Before they can make their getaway, a chase begins, and they must split up before they can divide the money. The police have little to go on, since it appears that none of the robbers were experienced criminals. Meanwhile, the thieves have to arrange for dividing the money while trying to avoid being captured.
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Fotografando Patrizia / The Dark Side of Love (1984) Salvatore Samperi, Monica Guerritore, Lorenzo Lena, Gianfranco Manfredi, Drama, Erotic
The sexual relationship between a successful woman and her brother, an introvert, hypochondriacal youth, who is also a pornophile.
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Pane, amore e gelosia / Frisky (1954) Luigi Comencini, Vittorio De Sica, Gina Lollobrigida, Marisa Merlini, Comedy, Romance
In a small Italian village, Maria De Ritis is engaged to army Lieutenant Pietro Stelluti. Stelluti’s superior officer, Marshal Antonio Carotenuto, is contemplating marriage to Annarella Mirziano, but he will be forced to resign if he marries Annarella, since she has an illegitimate child and that is against regulations for army officers. When Stelluti leaves town for a few weeks, the town-gossips create an affair out of the innocent relationship between Maria and Antonio. Stelluti returns and accuses Maria of infidelity, and, she, in reprisal, runs off and joins a traveling theatrical troupe as a dancer. Antonio, after convincing Annarella that he has not betrayed her love, encounters more trouble when the father of Annarella’s child shows up and asks that she and the child go away with him. Antonio tells Annarella that it is her decision to make, and she chooses the child’s father and leaves with him.
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Il grande silenzio / The Great Silence (1968) Sergio Corbucci, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff, Western
Bounty killers led by Loco prey on outlaws hiding out in the snowbound Utahn mountains. After Pauline’s husband becomes Loco’s latest victim, she hires a gunman for revenge; Silence, mute since his throat was cut when he was a boy.
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Sesso nero / Orgasmo Nero III (1980) Joe D’Amato, Mark Shannon, Annj Goren, George Eastman, Drama, Sexploitation, Erotic
Helen arrives on a tropical island with her husband, anthropologists studying the life of the local tribe. Faced with a nice native Heini and imbued with her ??feelings, Helen takes her to the city, where does his mistress. Husband soon accuses Helen of infidelity, but he begins to use in retaliation Heini as exotic bed-toys.
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Storia di Piera / The Story of Piera (1983) Marco Ferreri, Isabelle Huppert, Hanna Schygulla, Marcello Mastroianni, Biography, Drama, Erotic
This sometimes confusing erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia (Hanna Schygulla).
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