The Updated 50 Best Of The New Millennium

Updated 12/14/2015:

The Best since the year 2000, in no particular order.

Paolo Sorrentino

1.La Grande Bellezza The Great Beauty (English Subtitled) For Gep Gambardella, (Toni Servillo) a journalist who wrote an important book years ago and has spent the time since resting on the laurels, everything in life seems like an exaggeration; a vapid, narcissistic, waste of time.

2.La Giovinezza (Youth) In Theaters Now, two aging buddies, Mick, a director, played by Harvey Keitel, and Fred, a composer played by Michael Cane, are on holiday together,and both understand that their time on earth is limited, but they are handling their old age in different ways.

3.Il Divo (English Subtitled) Was the Prime Minister incredibly unlucky or undeniably guilty? – that is this film’s question, because in Giulio Andreotti’s 20 some years in office, there were a whole bunch of “unfortunate” assassinations and killings made to look like suicides – people that were creating problems for the Christian Democratic Party.

Francesco Munzi

4.Anime Nere Black Souls The best film of 2014 is the story of three brothers in a Calabrian crime family.

Nanni Moretti

5.Mia Madre (My Mother) Coming soon the American theaters. Mia Madre is Moretti’s semi-autobiographical tribute to his mother.

6.La Stanza Del Figlio (The Son’s Room) A family deals with the death of a son.

7.Habemus Papam We Have a Pope (English Subtitled) The New Pope has cold feet.

Marco Bellocchio

8.Sangue Del Mio Sangue (Blood Of My Blood) Women are bewitching, and men will suck the life out of them; among the world of possible interpretations in Bellocchio’s newest.

9.Vincere (Winning) In a way, this is just your ordinary “boy’s an abusive pig, girl gets off on abuse” kind of love story, but in this film, the boy is Benito Mussolini.

10.Buongiorno Notte (Good Morning, Night) is Bellocchio’s 2003 story about the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, Italian president of the political party, Democrazia Cristiana.

11.Bella Addormentata Dormant Beauty (English Subtitled) takes the true life story of the last six days of the life of Eluana Englaro, comatose for 17 years when her family fought for the right to pull the plug and let her die and it shows us, not what was happening to this family, but to various people around her.

Matteo Garrone

12.Racconto Dei Racconti (Tale of Tales) will be in US theaters in 2016 there’s sex, blood, and adult situations, just like the original fairy-tales written in the 1600s by the author, Giambattista Basile, who predated and inspired more well-known story-tellers like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson.

13.Reality Reality (English Subtitled) A man will do anything to appear on the reality show ‘Big Brother’.

14. Gomorra Gomorrah (English Subtitled) is an extremely complicated crime story about the day-to-day operations of the lesser known and yet more prolific crime organization in Italy,the Camorra.

Paolo Virzì

15.Il Capitale Umano Human Capital (English Subtitled) Stephen Amidon’s novel about upper crust Connecticut becomes Paolo Virzì’s story of upper crust northern Italy in this stunningly complex drama about money, families going haywire because of it, and a guy on a bike who, one dark snowy night, loses his life and brings theirs into glaringly sharp focus.

16. Caterina Va In Città (Caterina in the City) Caterina must make a choice, because as in any good high school clique system, she can’t be friends with everyone. She must pick the group that will define her and do it quick. So what will it be Caterina – the snobby material girls or the sullen artists?

17. La Prima Cosa Bella The First Beautiful Thing is about a mom who has a hard time being seen as anything more than a beauty queen, a father who couldn’t accept the attention his hot wife got, and the children and the question of which parent should have raised them.

Giuseppe Tornatore

18.Baaria Tornatore’s semi-autobiographical tribute to his home town in Sicily.

19. La Migliore Offerta Best Offer Geoffrey Rush plays Virgil Oldman, a rich, famous, talented, and unscrupulous art auctioneer and collector whose elitism combined with OCD tendencies make for a solitary but apparently satisfying existence. His joy in life is his secret stash of portraits, women’s portraits from every era and genre.

20. La Sconosciuta La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) is about Irina, a Ukrainian sex slave who has escaped to Italy in search of something and we are left guessing for a long time what that something is. She arrives in a northern Italian town with a big wad of cash, taking a terrible apartment, and intent on ingratiating herself in the lives of a rich Italian family that live across the street from her.

Emanuele Crialese

21.Terraferma is about Lampedusa, an island south of Sicily, and tells the tale of a fishing boat captain who runs into a raft filled with African immigrants and loses his boat after he saves them, an act that has been proclaimed illegal by the Italian government.

22.Nuovomondo Golden Door (English Subtitled) tells of the realities of an Italian’s immigration to America. Instead of the usual scenes of weary but happy foreigners smiling brightly from a ship’s deck at the first sight of the statue of liberty, Golden Door shows the heartbreak and hardships of preparing for the move, dangers on board the ship, and degradations at Ellis Island.

Silvio Soldini

23.Pane e Tulipani Bread & Tulips (English Subtitled) is about Rosalba, the unappreciated wife and mother who looks for the life she wants to live and goes and gets it.

24.Giorni e Nuvoli Days and Clouds (English Subtitled) is about a man who loses his job, and the subsequent downward spiral for him and his wife.

25.Cosavogliodipiù Come Undone (English Subtitled) is the unglamorous, messy side of extra-marital affair.

Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza

26.Salvo (English Subtitled) 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.

Laura Bispuri

27. Vergine Giurata (Sworn Virgin) is due out in the US in 2016 and about Hana, the northern Albanian woman who opts for living as a man in order to live her life freely.

Ferzan Ozpetek

28.La Finestra Di Fronte Facing Windows is about Giovanna, who for any number of reasons she may have married the wrong guy. She’s smarter, more driven, and more responsible than her husband and is starting to resent having to carry the weight of the entire family. Watching the extremely hot, single neighbor, Lorenzo, played by Raoul Bova, has become her escape from reality.

29.Mine Vaganti Loose Cannons (English Subtitled) is warm, sweet, and at times very funny about Antonio,the family’s patriarch, who has just disowned his son for coming out and has another one in the wings.

Gabriele Salvatores

30.Io Non Ho Paura (I’m Not Scared) Ten year old Michele finds Fillipo in chains in a hole in the ground covered with a sheet of metal and you might think that his first instinct would be to tell the adults – to get help. But Michele knows that the adults, even his own parents, are not to be trusted. As he begins to understand more about what’s going on he’s compelled to help Filippo.

Pierfrancesco Diliberto

31.La Mafia Uccide Solo D’Estate (The Mafia Only Kills In The Summer) is a clever child’s eye view of what it’s like for a city to live under the mafia’s thumb.

Cristina Comencini

32.La Bestia Nel Cuore (Don’t Tell) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign film in 2006, and is the story of a young woman who has vague memories of sexual abuse and seeks out her brother, Andrea, in America to find the truth

33.Latin Lover is about golden era film star Saverio Crispo, dead for 10 years, and his eclectic and complicated family who has planned a memorial for him in his Puglian hometown. Crispo, who “left a lot outside of the scene”, collected wives, lovers, and children from all of his movies.

Roberto Andò

34.Viva La Libertà (Long Live Liberty) is about Enrico Oliveri, the secretary of the major opposition party, who goes AWOL and hides out at an old girlfriend’s house in Paris (“What’s he doing here, Mom?” ” I think he just needs a little rest.”), an absurd and Pirandello-esque scenario works surprisingly well.

Lamberto Sanfelice

35.Cloro (Chlorine) 17-year-old Jenny is a normal teenager from Ostia who loves her friends and her synchronized swimming team, but her mother dies, and her world falls apart.

Marco Tullio Giordana

36.La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth) follows two brothers from the ’60s to the 21st century in Italy.

37.I Cento Passi (The Hundred Steps) is true life story of the murder of political activist Peppino Impastato who spoke out against organized crime.

Alice Rohrwacher

38.Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) Young Rohrwacher surprised everyone when her second feature-length film, won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Even me. Quiet, slow-moving, artistically filmed, it’s about a pre-teen girl in an eccentric beekeeping family.

39.Corpo Celeste (English Subtitled) is about Marta, who has lived most of her life in a more secular location in Switzerland until the family returns to their native Calabria and she’s thrown into a Jesus Land that she is unfamiliar with. So that she’ll make friends and prepare for her Catholic confirmation, Marta’s mother puts her in the parish confirmation class.

Luca Guadagnino

40.Io Sono L’Amore I Am Love (English Subtitled) Not even her family had seen that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be for all those years, but when Antonio asked Emma about being Russian, it was as if no one had acknowledged it for a very long time.

Ivano De Matteo

41.I Nostri Ragazzi The Dinner is a movie version of Herman Koch’s The Dinner, in which a major part of the dialogue takes place over the course of one unpleasant evening, but De Matteo’s movie’s more natural plot progression and the changing settings in the movie are more natural and less claustrophobic. De Matteo ultimately “fixes” all the problems of the book.

Saverio Costanzo

42.Hungry Hearts Hungry Hearts A chance meeting in the bathroom of a New York City Chinese restaurant brings Jude, a young American engineer and Mina, an Italian girl working for the embassy together and a pregnancy seals the deal. But the romantic idea of throwing caution to the wind and marrying someone you know too little about is a bad one for Jude.

Gianni Di Gregorio

43.Pranzo Di Ferragosto Mid-August Lunch (English Subtitled) is about an unemployed, middle aged Roman who lives with his 93 year old mother and starts babysitting and cooking for all the other old ladies in his neighborhood.

Sergio Castellitto

44.Non Ti Muovere (Don’t Move) was first a very dark, disturbing book written by Margaret Mazzantini and then it became a very dark, disturbing movie directed by and starring her husband,Castellitto, who plays Timoteo, a prominent surgeon/debaucher. His co-star is Penelope Cruz in one of the most unflattering roles ever in the history of the movies – Italia, the prostitute

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

45.Cesare Deve Morire Caesar Must Die uses 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.

Stefano Sollima

46.Suburra There are no good guys in Sollima’s new film, Suburra, and if you require a hero for your movie enjoyment, it’s really going to depend on your definition of the word.

Giuseppe Capotondi

47.La Doppia Ora The Double Hour (English Subtitles) has something that not many modern Italian movies have – a fear factor! There were a few things that made me jump right out of my seat, and I found myself covering my eyes. And it was done in the best kind of way; the threat was hidden in the shadows, waiting to jump out and say “boo” at any given moment.

Mario Martone

48.Il Giovane Favoloso (Leopardi) is about 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, the ill and deformed poet who enjoyed success and popularity in his lifetime, and yet lived it, for the most part, in pain and suffering. A severe curvature of the spine, most likely caused by Potts disease (spinal tuberculosis) worsened as years progress and eventually caused his death from what is believed to be pulmonary edema at age 39.

Giuseppe Piccioni

49.Luce Dei Miei Occhi Light of My Eyes (English Subtitled) Antonio is doing all kind of crazy, dangerous things to help Maria and risks his life and his job for this woman that has shown no real interest in him. “Sorry, I’m not that excited by you,” she tells him, “but I warned you.”

Andrea Segre

50.Io Sono Li Shun Li and the Poet (English Subtitled) A Chinese barmaid (Tao Zhao) and a Slavic fisherman (Rade Serbedzija) find friendship and more in an Italian fishing village.