Italian Movies

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...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Italian title: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, lit. "The Good, the Ugly, the Bad") is a 1966 Italian epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van...

L'Avventura (English: The Adventure) is a 1960 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, and Lea Massari. Developed from a story by Antonioni, the film is about a young woman's disappearance during a Mediterranean...

Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian tragicomic comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian book shop owner, who must employ his fertile imagination to shield...

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new...

Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Cinema Paradiso is the beautiful, enchanting story of a young boy’s lifelong love affair with the movies. Set in an Italian village, Salvatore finds himself enchanted by the flickering images at...

Winner Of Five Italian Oscars Including Best Director - Ricky Tognazzi Sicily, 1992: When a high-profile judge and his bodyguard are brutally murdered, four reluctant young cops are assigned as 'La Scorta' - Italian for 'the escorts' - to protect...

From the director of Cinema Paradiso comes a stirring, unforgettable new epic of Italian life as you’ve never seen it before. The course of a lifetime reflects the evolution of a country as young Peppino takes work as a...

Directed by Gabriele Salvatores, Mediterraneo is a 1991 Italian film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991. The film is set during World War II, and regards a group of Italian soldiers who become...

Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie,...

Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887...

When Sergio Leone turned Lee Van Cleef into a major star with For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the actor sensibly stayed in Italy to make several more spaghetti westerns, including...

Human Capital begins at the end, as a cyclist is run off the road by a careening SUV the night before Christmas Eve. As details emerge of the events leading up to the accident, the lives of the well-to-do...

L'Eclisse (English: Eclipse) is a 1962 Italian drama film written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. Filmed on location in Rome and Verona, L'Eclisse is about a young woman who breaks up with...

In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom) brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of premodern world literature—Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The...

Inspector Federico Vivaldi is an old-school cop in a new world: his son is gay, his wife has left him and he's got an ambitious colleague nipping at his heels to take over his position. He may be old-fashioned...