Roy Menarini's Il Grande Cinema Italiano

An inside look at Italy's modern-day crime families, the Camorra in Naples and Caserta. Based on a book by Roberto Saviano.

A group of men hire some prostitutes and go to a villa in the countryside. There, they engage in group sex and resolve to eat themselves to death.

Italy, 1916. Oreste Jacovacci and Giovanni Busacca are called, as all the Italian youths, to serve the army in the WWI. They both try in every way to avoid serving the army.

A series of skits involving customers and store personnel from several departments of the big department store.

Young Alvise's body is paralyzed, or at least he thinks so. He is infatuated by his beautiful aunt Lea. What starts as innocent therapy and care soon develops into strange erotic and psychological battle between them.

A man wanders aimlessly away from his town, away from the woman he loves, emotionally and socially inactive.

Two disillusioned New York policemen plan a $10 million robbery to fuel their low pensions, only to run into one debacle after another in the process.

Three tales of very different women using their sexuality as a means to getting what they want.

A solitary embalmer meets a charming and unemployed waiter who becomes his assistant, but the two get involved in a morbid and unhealthy professional and personal relationship.

An obscure Italian magistrate suspects that a well-known industrialist commited murder, and decides to investigate him, and bring him to court, whatever it takes. But - will the magistrate have it in him to go against impossible odds, in the name of the Italian people he represents?

Un console britannico in servizio a Roma rimane vedovo e deve prendersi cura dei suoi due bambini. Andrea, il maggiore, soffre terribilmente per le scarse attenzioni che il padre gli dedica il quale sembra dedicarsi unicamente al piccolo Milo.

A chief of detectives, homicide section, kills his mistress and deliberately leaves clues to prove his own responsibility for the crime.

Loosely adapted from Dante's Divine Comedy and inspired by the illustrations of Gustav Doré the original silent film has been restored and has a new score by Tangerine Dream.

After her mother commits suicide, a young woman travels to Italy in search of love, truth and a deeper connection with herself.

La storia vede protagonista Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli), ragazza di provincia che vuole farsi strada nell'ambiente romano dello spettacolo e allo scopo non esita ad usare il proprio fascino e il proprio corpo. La sua ricerca la porterà a conoscere numerosi personaggi che con maggiore o minore fortuna fanno parte di quel mondo. (from Wikipedia.it)

In a tiny community enclosed by wheat fields, the adults shelter indoors, while six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted countryside. Exploring a dilapidated and uninhabited farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he dares not tell anyone about it...

Abandoned by his wife, who leaves him their child, Michele, a former '68 student protester with little going on in his life, struggles to be a good father. In the meantime, he spends his time acting in an experimental theater company directed by his friend Fabio.

A man and his son search for a stolen bicycle vital for his job.

Antonio, a policeman (carabiniere), has an order to take two children (Rosetta and her brother Luciano) from Milan to Sicily to an orphanage. Their mother has been arrested for forcing Rosetta (11 years old) to work as a prostitute. First the relation between Antonio and the children is tough, but it relaxes so they become temporary friends.

Fiore, an Italian conman, arrives in post Communist Albania with Gino, his young apprentice, to set up a shoe factory that will never open. The con requires a native Albanian, so they designate Spiro, an impoverished and confused former political prisoner as chairman of the board. When Fiore returns to Italy to get government funds for the proje...

A drifter comes to town where his brother is sheriff. His brother is actually a robber who broke the real sheriff's leg and left him for dead, and became sheriff in order to hide out. They team up against the local land baron who is trying to get rid of the Mormon settlers in a valley he wishes to own

In Italy, Checco Dal Monte manages a troupe of traveling performers with plenty of heart but minimal talent. At a small town engagement, he encounters the starry-eyed, gorgeous Lily Antonelli, and hires her as a dancer on the show. Vivacious Lily quickly sells out crowds and earns the resentment of Checco's mistress, Melina Amour, but the fledgl...

Successful WWI pilot Luciano Serra has problems adjusting to an ordinary life in peace, so he leaves his family and becomes a pilot in America. In the 30s, his son in Italy wants also to become a pilot, and Luciano accepts an offer of a double dealing agent for a flight from Rio to Rome, but his plane crashes in the Atlantic. For the world Lucia...

1943. The affair between Anna, unhappily married to wheelchair-bound Pino, and deserter Franco unfolds in foggy Ferrara, intertwining with the power struggle taking place within local Fascist ranks that culminates in a massacre of civilians, including Franco's father – Pino sees it all from his window, but will he tell anyone?

A young girl, pursued by a band of conspirators, hides in a movie theatre where she watches the film Cabiria. She determines to seek the aid of that film's strongman, Maciste. When she locates him, he helps her overcome her enemies, but not without many thrilling and dangerous adventures.

The devil takes Maciste down to hell in an attempt to corrupt and ruin his morality.

A young woman teaches commercial writing and makes her students practice by writing letters addressed to an imaginary recipient from Vienna. One day, the love letter the woman writes to this non-existent man is accidentally sent by one of her students –and falls into the hands of a real person.

A police inspector comes into contact with people of all types and dispositions during a grueling murder investigation.

A nineteenth-century Italian noblewoman, imprisoned in a foreboding lakeside palazzo by her uncle, comes to believe she's possessed by a long ago mistress of the manor.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her tr...

After learning that an old friend of theirs has been arrested in Morocco on drug charges, four former college buddies set out for Marrakech to bail him out.

A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant. Only the girl's brother and a handsome doctor stand in her way.

During the bombing of Naples in World War II, a cynical businessman helps a naive prostitute, who spends the next two decades desperate to have him reciprocate her feelings.

After his quest to retrieve the fabled Golden Fleece, Jason returns to Greece with powerful sorceress Medea. However, when the king banishes her, it's only human that Medea plots her furious revenge. Can they escape her wrath?

Comedy about the flawed Italian healthcare system of the time and a doctor's expeirence with it.

Greek Sea, World War II. An Italian ship leaves a handful of soldiers in a little island; their mission is to spot enemy ships and to hold the island in case of attack. The village of the island seems abandoned and there isn't a single enemy in sight, so the soldiers begin to relax a little. Things change when their ship is hit and destroyed by ...

Spanning four decades, from the chaotic 1960s to the present, director Marco Tullio Giordana's passionate epic 'La Meglio Gioventu' follows two Italian brothers through some of the most tumultuous events of recent Italian history.

A teacher discovers his calling. Marco relocates to Palermo from Milan and takes a job teaching in a reform school while he waits for a high school position. He tries to understand and motivate his handful of students, reading them colloquial poetry, encouraging them to stand up for their rights, finding out about their histories. Natale, in for...

With her father on trial, 15-year-old Mignon leaves Paris to stay with her Italian relatives. The rather prim, snooty teen at first struggles to fit in with the more earthy Forbicioni family, each with their own problems. Eventually she bonds with her lovestruck little cousin Giorgio—who'll learn important life lessons over the course of his sum...

An electronic engineer is called by the Hungarian Television Directorate to test the new television installations. He arrives in the capital, Budapest, together with his girlfriend.

Sicilian dockworker Mimi inadvertently becomes embroiled in an increasingly complicated array of personal conflicts. When he loses his job after voting against a Mafia kingpin in an allegedly secret election, Mimi leaves his wife to find new employment. He moves to Turin, where he engages in an affair with a Communist organiser. Soon, Mimi finds...

An open-hearted, unrelentingly energetic orphan struggles to make the best of his life on the streets of Milan.

The television series, based on Victor Hugo's 1862 novel of the same name, is one of the most impressive television adaptations of a literary work. Filmed in 1963 over a period of four months at the RAI headquarters in Via Teulada, it is set in France between 1815 and 1833.

Felice Sciosciammocca, scrivano squattrinato, si prodiga per aiutare un giovane marchese il cui amore con la bella ma arricchita Gemma non è ben visto dalla sua famiglia.

Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.

The myths of the sixties are satirized in 20 episodes.

In the Po Valley during the 19th century, a rich girl engaged to a well-to-do farmer ends up penniless and is forced to work for her fiancé’s relatives. Peasant unrest, carried to extremes by both workers and landowners, leads to violence and tragedy.

A combination of a satire on war and a comedy with war as the background. It tells of the ordinary people living on a Naples sidestreet, from 1940 to 1950 under the dominance of the Fascists, the Nazis and then the Allies occupation forces. Primary among the citizens is Gennaro Iovine (Eduard De Filippo)who has a penchant for innocently getting ...

Although released anonymously, as was the custom with all films produced by the Italian Navy, La Nave Bianca is the first feature-length effort directed by Roberto Rossellini; it is also very much the work of its co-writer and supervisor Francesco De Robertis. The film combines a documentary look at the Italian Navy during World War II with news...

1828. In the wake of the repression of revolutionary movements in Southern Italy, three young friends join Giuseppe Mazzini's republican and unificationist cause. Their idealism will clash with the inevitable disillusionment as they grow apart over the decades.