Historical evocation of Ludwig, king of Bavaria, from his crowning in 1864 until his death in 1886, as a romantic hero. Fan of Richard Wagner, betrayed by him, in love with his cousin Elisabeth of Austria, abandoned by her, tormented by his homosexuality, he will little by little slip towards madness.
This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.
A writer brings his ailing grandmother along with him on a business trip to Tokyo, where the last moments of her life help both people feel better-connected to one another.
After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.
A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.
The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino's funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina's older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy's future. Their own futures are bleak.
A middle-aged writer is looking for a quiet retreat; a slightly younger female estate agent gives him details of a house a close to Venice.
Demetrio Cultrera, is a young rich car dealership Sicilian bachelor who becomes engaged to the beautiful and rich Rosalba Giordano. After their wedding, Rosalba's attitude changes when she decides to try turning Demetrio into the modern husband she'd like. This causes a problem, as Demetrius prefers sticking to what he sees as more traditional gender roles. Despite her attempts, Rosalba's persistent attempts to convert him to the rituals of high society, enlightened, or feminine tastes do little more than annoy him. Strongly determined to build a stable relationship with a woman who can fulfill his visions of peaceful married life, he leaves for the Amazon, where he is offered the opportunity to choose and buy a new wife as a slave. The choice falls on the beautiful and docile Manua that he trains to act the way he'd like, then proudly shows to friends and to his former wife, attracting curiosity, envy, and his ex-wife's resentment.
In the late 19th century, a chambermaid from Paris relocates to a remote household in Provence, engages in trysts and finds herself enraptured with a coach driver.
An illiterate seamstress has a powerful fetish for silk which gets her into trouble. The psychiatrist sent to help her becomes fascinated by her case and when he returns to France from World War One they fall in love, an affair that can only end in tragedy.
A mental hospital somewhere in Tuscany during the thirties. Far away from fascism, this closed world is rules over by Dr. Bonaccorsi, a passionate benevolent psychiatrist whose dream is to isolate the germ of madness. He is also a very active ladies'man and makes three women benefit from his sexual itch: Francesca the hospital manager's wife, Bianca, his devoted nurse and Carla, a nymphomaniac doctor's wife. His well-ordered universe starts being challenged with the coming of Anna, a trainee psychiatrist, who disapproves of his theory on the origin of madness. Worse, she resists his advances. As Bonaccorsi is more insecure than he looks, what will become of him?
An expressionist biography of Edith Stein, who converted from the Jewish faith to the Catholic one and became a Carmelite sister. She would die in a German concentration camp.
In 1939 Vicenza, a young petty thief befriends the local priest. Based on the novel by Goffredo Parise.
The film consists of six short stories created by different directors, but all the stories share one thing: a warm irony to current events.
Film in five episodes on the female universe. Among the women portrayed, neglected wives who become prostitutes, a worker who improvises a sexy bomb and a priestess who gives herself as wife to an emigrant.
Michele is a three-testicle, sexually insatiable man who goes around bedding all women in town (regardless of age), until one day things goes terribly wrong.
A film about a love triangle between a theater director, an actress and an actor. Exchanges take place between fiction and reality, the stage and life. The actress one day leaves the theater director for the actor. But after a few days, she begins to doubt her new relationship. Inspired by the writings by Robert Musil.
A failed actor, broken by violence and rejection, finds refuge among outcasts and forms an unconventional bond, but their fragile peace is threatened by a jealous husband.
We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli, and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one.
Three women are together in a clinic to abort; those who do it reluctantly, those with determination.
In Lazio, four young people named Riccetto, Girasole, Lallo and Tombarolo try to make a living by stealing what they find in the tombs of the rich buried. Being inexperienced, they often find themselves in trouble or pursued by the police.
The documentary relates the decisive moments, the turning points and the rollercoaster ride of a brilliant, eventful international career and the extraordinary life of a great Italian artist. From his origins as an illegitimate child with no name to the attainment of great international fame as a film director, art director, painter and stager of theatrical and operatic productions. Through original and archive interviews with some of the most acclaimed stars who have known, admired and loved him and with his closest relatives, friends and collaborators, this gripping account paints a picture of the person and the artist—and not just “the master”—Franco Zeffirelli in all his many and even conflicting facets.
Nag, a prostitute, walks the streets. One night, a violent man sends her to the hospital. There she meets Herve, a nurse obsessed with people's age and death in general. He falls madly in love with Nag and enters a world that amounts to very little.
1936. In a village in the Bassa Padana, a beautiful and shapely forty-year-old girl is aunt of some boys in the middle of their sexual maturity.
A young man returns to the family home to face a childhood trauma: his brother's suicide, but nobody in the family is willing to help him.
A young girl falls in love with an actor. She persuades her father to support his acting company, but when she discovers him with another girl she runs away. Then everybody try to find her.
When a impoverished widow’s family moves to the big city, two of her five sons become romantic rivals with deadly results.
The life of a Northern Italian middle-class family is turned upside down after their 12-year-old son falls overboard during a sea trip, only to be picked up by a boat of illegal immigrants.
The year is 2037 A.D. Depletion of natural fuels has eliminated electrical power throughout the world. No light… no heat… no T.V., until a team of award-winning scientists succeeds in harnessing energy from the world’s oldest source of reciprocating motion.
Set in a rural area of France in the 19th century, this simple tale tells the story of a servant girl whose life seems marked by grand tragedy, but whose heart is simple and uncomplicated enough not only to endure, but even to attain serenity in the face of her manifold frustrations. Her only friend, to whom she pours out all her troubles, is an old parrot. When the parrot dies, she reverently has it stuffed and continues telling it her woes. This drama is based on a story by Gustave Flaubert.
A film in 5 segments. The first is about a trafficker who takes a German tourist to an illegal sex market in a working-class neighborhood. The second involves an elderly man courting a young adult film star. The third, a thief seduces a man's wife. The fourth involves an Italian immigrant in Germany who is fired and subsequently offered work as a porn actor. Finally the last segment involves a baron who convinces his wife into a swinging.
Oliver has a happy childhood in the streets of Montmartre, Paris, in the 30's. Suddenly his mother dies. He is alone and helpless. He seeks comfort with the offbeat adults.
Study of 1960s Milanese social life and its glamorous depravity, as seen through the story of the working class Mario who dreams of social climbing.
The Catanese baron Paolo Castorini leaves the closed Sicilian environment and moves to Rome where he enters into erotic relationships with women of all classes. He, however, feels dissatisfied with a life of only the body, compared to his journalist friend Vincenzo and his own father, a sober and serious thinker. But is it too late for him?
Cottafavi's adaptation of the Greek tragedy for RAI.
After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.
November 2, 1975: Pier Paolo Pasolini is murdered in the outskirts of Rome. The suspect, a 17-year-old hustler, pleads to have acted in self-defense, citing Pasolini's notorious sexual habits as proof. However, many inconsistencies start to undermine his version, pointing to him not having acted alone or even being assaulted in the first place. Was Pasolini also killed for another reason?
In 1880 Rome, a patriarch closes the family bakery. His ambitious daughter-in-law manipulates her brothers-in-law to prevent their father's remarriage, securing her inheritance.
A mother so insanely overprotective of her grown son decides to make a deal with death by offering alternate victims plucked from among her fellow tenants in a 1938 Italian apartment building.
Arthur, a university professor, and former political activist, lives in France with Francesca. They decide to hire a young man in order to help the teacher organize his notes. The employee leaves his girlfriend Ingrid and moves in with the couple.
A single mother faces a culture of sexual harassment at her new workplace.
Neapolitan Vincenzo LoRusso lives of expedients in Rome, as he tries to sell at an intersection a faux suede jacket, accidentally meets Laura, a beautiful woman who invites him to her house.
Some puppets come to life in a theater with no windows. This time the puppets interpret William Shakespeare's Othello.
An Italian actor (Massimo Ranieri) and his son (Domenico Balsamo) stage a show in a Parisian theater.
During the brutal era of the military government, an innocent tourist manager is accused of being a member of the illegal resistance movement.
A liberal-thinking author watches his wife as she attempts to seduce his best friend at a dinner party. She ends up taking on another man as well, and the writer has an affair with the another dinner guest. Soon the three men and two women are entangled in a confusing series of partner-swapping sex sprees where everyone's morals are challenged in the wake of the sexual revolution.
The young Rimini native Stefano Santi goes to Rome, with a letter of recommendation for the maestro Melchiorri, artistic director of the Opera House, to take part in a competition for cellists. While trying in vain to be received by Melchiorri, he met an unscrupulous girl, Giorgia Muller, an architectural student temporarily linked to a fellow student. Between one misfortune and another the cello smashes, a homosexual theater manager tries to enmesh him Stefano, who now has a precarious employment in a nightclub, yields to the allurements of Giorgia, ending up in his bed. The girl, however, is unfaithful to him, so that Stefano, disgusted with her, and having now lost all hope of participating in the competition,
A newly arrived governor finds his province under the control of the corrupt Colonel Huerta. To avoid assassination by Huerta, he pretends to be weak and indecisive so Huerta will believe he poses no threat. But secretly he masquerades as Zorro, and joins the monk Francisco and the beautiful aristocrat Hortensia in their fight for justice against Huerta and his soldiers.
This highly acclaimed feature film on Pope John Paul II was filmed on location in Italy and Poland. Focusing on the papacy of John Paul and the tremendous impact he had on the Church and the world, Karol: The Pope, The Man stars actor Piotr Adamczyk in a deeply moving portrayal of the beloved pontiff. It is the powerful true story of a charismatic spiritual leader who helped bring down Communism, renewed the life of the Church, greatly impacted youth worldwide with love for Christ, and a Pope who reached out to other religions and world leaders with a message of peace and love. Also stars Raoul Bova (Saint Francis), Michele Placido (Padre Pio: Between Heaven and Earth) and Adriana Asti as Mother Teresa. The beautiful film score is by legendary film composer Ennio Morricone.
A tongue-in-cheek documentary that goes "behind the scenes" during the production of Federico Fellini's film "Amarcord" (1973).
Italy, the early 19th century. A villa is the home of a small English community, all rich and superficial people lounging about in its beautiful surroundings. Claire, George's wife, and Robert, her son, are murdered by a mysterious killer. Thinking the murderer is one of the family, distraught George devises a plan to unmask the culprit. Having met a woman, Ann, who is a dead ringer for Claire, he takes her back to the villa and announces their imminent marriage. Ann is considered an outsider and treated with contempt and hostility, while George fails to find any significant clue to the solution: everybody is to be blamed, at least morally, but the final revelation is more bitter than expected...
Forced to support herself, her children, her physically incapacitated husband and her obtrusive brother and mother, a downtrodden working woman contracts tuberculosis. She is granted a brief vacation at a health spa, where a whole new world — and potential new life — is opened up to her.
One of the most controversial, original and loved figures of Italian cinema. The most censored director of all time. An anarchist of the film, a gifted experimenter, an inventor of dreams. A truly great artist.
In post war Italy during the fifties it is very difficult to find a house to rent and a family ends up living in a former brothel.
Marie, in her forties, lives alone. She finds herself living with her parents in a vacation home.
The real story of a French man who was able to control his own farts.
Lorenzo, who's 16 and born to a wealthy family in Parma, tries to make things right toward a showgirl, Aida, whom his older brother has mistreated. In extending kindness and standing up for her, he comes of age. But, is there anything he can do that will alter Aida's situation or her prospects?