Italian Films
Italian Language Films
Cinema Paradiso
La Dolce Vita
8 ½
Il Ritorno Dulisse in Patria
I’m Crazy about Iris Blond
Italian for Beginners
Life is Beautiful
Love & Anarchy
Malena
Padre Padrone
Pinocchio
Rigoletto
Roma
Satyricon
Johnny Stecchino
Il Mostro
Il Postino
(see movie blurbs below)
Movies Set in Italy:
The English Patient
In a ruined Italian monastery-turned-Allied
hospital in World War II, a mysterious
amnesiac patient, severely burned from a
plane crash, is cared for by a devoted young
nurse. Through flashbacks, the story of the
man's past, a tale of wartime intrigue and
forbidden love in the sands of North Africa,
unfolds. Italian settings include such towns
as: Arezzo, Pienza, Rome, Siena, Trieste, and
Venice.
Room With A View
A delightful tale of Victorian romance and
British conceit, concerning the interwoven lives
and loves of a group of English tourists on
holiday in Italy and their reunion back home.
Big Night
Deliciously passionate look at two Italian
brothers who immigrate to New Jersey,
where they open a small restaurant. But chef
Primo and businessman Secondo's
enterprise verges on disaster, until a rival
restaurateur promises singer Louis Prima
and his band will stop in for dinner.
Much Ado About Nothing
The perfect answer to anyone who thinks
Shakespeare means dark, stodgy dramas,
this sunny and buoyant romp from Kenneth
Branagh is loaded with mismatched lovers,
squabbling brothers, comic constables and
bawdy humor.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Lush, involving thriller based on Patricia
Highsmith's novel stars Matt Damon as Tom
Ripley, a young New Yorker hired by a tycoon
to persuade wastrel son Jude Law to leave
his Italian villa and return to America. After
befriending Law and girlfriend Gwyneth
Paltrow, Damon's devious nature--and his
knack for forgery and imitation-come into
play. Italian settings include such towns as:
Ischia Island, Naples, Palermo, Positano,
Procida, Rome, Salerno, and Venice.
The Italian Job
A breezy reworking of the 1969 favorite
boasts Mark Wahlberg as a master thief
looking for revenge from Edward Norton, a
former ally who killed mentor Donald
Sutherland, then duped him by taking
millions in gold bars from a Venice heist.
Italian settings include such towns as:
Canazei, Genoa, Trento, and Venice.
Roman Holiday
Audrey Hepburn won an Academy Award for
her role as a beautiful princess traveling
incognito in the Eternal City. Hard-bitten
newspaperman Gregory Peck plans to get a
story out of her, but winds up falling in love
with her. Locations in Rome include the
Bocca della Verita (Mouth of Truth), the
Spanish Steps (where Hepburn eats a
gelato), Ponte Sant'Angelo, and Via Margutta,
51 (where Peck's character lived). This was
the film that also gave the buzz to the Vespa
motorino!
Under the Tuscan Sun
In this lovely adaptation of Frances Mayes'
bestseller, Diane Lane is a recently divorced
writer urged by pal Sandra Oh to get away
from her dreary existence in San Francisco
by taking a trip to Italy. Once in gorgeous
Tuscany, Lane decides to radically change
her life by buying and renovating a villa in the
countryside, hoping her luck at love changes
in the process. Italian settings include such
towns as: Arezzo, Cortona, Florence,
Montepulciano, Positano, and Salerno.
Movies About
Italian Americans:
The Godfather Series
Mean Streets
Moonstruck
Saturday Night Fever
Pope of Greenwich Village
Miller's Crossing
Heat
On the Waterfront
Once upon a time in America
The Sicilian
Reservoir Dogs
Analyze This
Mickey Blue Eyes
My Cousin Vinny
Rocky
Tea With Mussolini
This poignant autobiographical tale from
director Franco Zeffirelli is set in Florence,
Italy, and covers the years 1935 to 1945 in
the life of a boy named Luca who is sent by
his father to live with Englishwoman Joan
Plowright.
William Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream
Lovely, wonderfully performed version of the
Bard's enchanted comedy is now set in
Tuscany in the 1800s, where nymphs, satyrs
and fairies cohabit the world of star-crossed
lovers, kings and weavers with donkey ears.
Italian settings include such towns as:
Caprarola, Montepulciano, Sutri, Tivoli, and
Viterbo.
Italian Language Movies:
Bicycle Thief
Many critics consider this Oscar-winning classic to be
one of the greatest films ever made. Vittorio De Sica
used non-professional actors to tell the simple,
human tragedy of a working man whose bike, which
he needs for his job, is stolen, sending him and his
son on a harrowing search through the streets of
Rome.
Bitter Rice
Silvana Mangano became an international sensation
with her performance as a shapely city woman
working in the rice fields of Italy's Po Valley after
World War II. The sexy Mangano is caught in a love
triangle with the respectable Raf Vallone and the
unscrupulous Vittorio Gassman. A Neo-Realist
classic.
Death in Venice
Luchino Visconti's brilliant version of Thomas Mann's
classic story. Dirk Bogarde stars as a jaded,
middle-aged composer on holiday on Venice who
spots a handsome young boy on the beach. His
doomed obsession with the youth renews his interest
in living.
Ciao Professore!
A tender and often hilarious comedy from Lina Wertmuller
centering on a teacher who is mistakenly assigned to a
third-grade class in an impoverished town in Southern
Italy. The teacher soon faces the Mafia, truancy, and
pupils with family problems while trying to steer his
students in the right direction.
Cinema Paradiso
A charming, bittersweet tribute to the power of movies
which won 1989's Best Foreign Film Academy Award.
A film director looks back on his childhood in Sicily,
where he served as an apprentice to the projectionist
at his small town's only movie theater. Giuseppe
Tornatore directs.
The Garden of The Finzi-Continis
Director Vittorio De Sica's Oscar-winning drama
centers around an upper-class Jewish family living in
Fascist Italy, oblivious at first to the growing tide of
anti-Semitism that soon threatens their existence.
Divorce, Italian Style
Marvelous, Oscar-winning farce starring Marcello
Mastroianni as a man facing mid-life crisis who
discovers it's easier to kill his annoying wife than divorce
her. Eventually he falls for a gorgeous younger woman,
played by Stefania Sandrelli.
Il Postino
Lovely romance set in a small Italian town during the
1950s where exiled Chilean poet Pablo Nerudo has
taken refuge. A shy mailman befriends the poet and
uses his words - and, ultimately, the writer himself - to
help him woo a woman whom he has fallen in love.
With Philippe Noiret and Massimo Troisi (who died a
day after filming ended).
La Strada
Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning study of members
of a travelling circus troupe, as a brutal strongman
uses a simpleminded woman who loves him, forcing
her to find solace with a good-hearted clown.
Seven Beauties/Le Sette Bellezze
Giancarlo Giannini stars in Lina Wertmuller's dark
serio-comedy as a small-time hood in WWII Italy trying
to support his sisters. His desperate attempts to stay
alive take him from jail to a mental hospital, and
eventually put him in the hands of an obese
concentration camp commandant.
