I Love Italian Movies takes a hard look and makes a conclusion: There are dozens of great ones, but these are the best of the best of Italian films from the last ten years.
1) La Grande Bellezza, starring Toni Servillo – Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar winner is destined for “classic” status, and will be counted with the Fellinis and the DeSicas. You can watch it – RIGHT NOW HERE.
2) Il Divo is an earlier masterpiece (how many masterpiece is one director allowed to have?) from Paolo Sorrentino also starring Toni Servillo. The film’s subject,92 year Giulio Andreotti, the seven time Italian prime minister (Richard Nixonesque in more ways than one), walked out of the movie’s premier. FIND OUT WHY HERE.
3) Gomorrah, one of the most important Italian films in recent years is based on the non-fiction book by Roberto Saviano and about Italy’s criminal organization, the Camorra. Saviano was forced into hiding after the book was published, and he still lives with bodyguards. Directed by Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah is an extremely complicated crime story about the day to day operations of this lesser known and yet more prolific crime organization in Italy and the hard life of the normal people living in its grip.
4) Salvo– For Salvo, more lonely gunslinger than slick mafioso, any joy he’s ever gotten from the proficiency of his chosen profession seems to have been sucked out of him. hen Salvo arrives for a hit and finds his target’s blind sister, Rita, home alone, we really don’t see any clues as to why he doesn’t immediately whack her; but why?
5) Reality, from Matteo Garrone, is about Luciano, the family’s favorite cut-up, who gets talked into trying out for an Italian reality show. He’s on board at first just to please his children, but it doesn’t take long to catch the celebrity bug.
6) Il Capitale Umano should have been nominated for an Academy Award this year. Maybe it was too much, asking for a win for Italy two years in a row, but the fact remains that it’s good enough to have been considered. From director Paolo Virzì. it’s the spellbinding story of the haves and the wannabes and the collective collateral damage from their greed.
7) Vincere – In a way, this is just your ordinary “boy’s an abusive pig, girl gets off on abuse” kind of love story, but the significance and consequences of their screwed up relationship are what matters here. Here, the boy is Benito Mussolini and the girl is Ida, the determined psycopath that insists she’s his wife. From director Marco Bellocchio.
8) Benvenuti Al Sud may seen like a surprising choice, but this refreshing comedy was one of the first signs of new life for Italian comedies. Starring Angela Finocchiaro, Claudio Bisio, and Alessandro Siana, Benvenuti al Sud is smart and moving without being overly sentimental.
9) La Mafia Uccide Solo D’Estate (The Mafia Only Kills In The Summer), is a comedy from Italian TV star Pierfrancesco Diliberto (Pif), and won the award for best European Comedy this year. It’s one of the brightest and sweetest movies I’ve seen in a long time, comedy or otherwise.
10) In Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die) the Taviani Brothers use real inmates at a real maximum security prison in Rome who are staging a production of Julius Caesar. These inmates, nearly all incarcerated for drug trafficking or organized crime activity, played all the parts in the production and used it as an opportunity to tell their own stories as well as Shakespeare’s.
I Love Italian Everything 