Poor But Beautiful

When an Italian man comes out of the closet, it affects both his life and his crazy family.

Nadia is a social worker who is trying to keep the residents of a local slum in line. Unfortunately she keeps neglecting her work and fantasizing about a life as a pop-star. When she falls for one of the residents in question, a small time crook called Bel Ami, she ends up an accomplice in a convoluted heist involving a holy Catholic relic.

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.

Are all relationships based on lies? Jake Bianski runs a fish market in north Boston, surrounded by Italians. For years, he's carried a torch for Isabella, an ex-girlfriend now married with three children and no interest in Jake. Yet, he tells everyone she's his girlfriend, including Marisa, a veterinarian his employees set him up with at the Italian singles club. She's interested in him until he tells her about his girlfriend, then he's persistent in asking her to be his friend. As the friendship bumps along, Jake realizes that reality may be better than fantasy, but what if Isabella changes her mind about Jake, and what if it comes out that Marisa, like Jake, isn't Italian?

The film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia than parody status would imply. In the context of this film, "Allegro non Troppo" means Not So Fast!, an interjection meaning "slow down" or "think before you act" and refers to the film's pessimistic view of Western progress (as opposed to the optimism of Disney's original).

While scouting out apartments in London for her Venetian boyfriend, Carla rents an apartment overlooking the Thames. There, she meets the lesbian hyper-horny real estate agent Moira.

In 1987, Ricardo is 17 years old. This summer, Ricardo has a busy schedule: loose his virginity, find a way to get into bars, have a car, spend time with his friends. In order to rapidly make money, Ricardo decides to use his italian inheritance and take a shortcut in the medium of crime. But things will go wrong...

When his mother eloped with an Italian opera singer, Louis Mazzini was cut off from her aristocratic family. After the family refuses to let her be buried in the family mausoleum, Louis avenges his mother's death by attempting to murder every family member who stands between himself and the family fortune. But when he finds himself torn between his longtime love and the widow of one of his victims, his plans go awry.

Glimpses of Chaucer penning his famous work are sprinkled through this re-enactment of several of his stories.

A Place of Our Own

Josie Alibrandi is 17 and doesn't know where she belongs. This year, however, everything is going to change. Josie will face her fears, uncover secrets and even discover the true identity of her father.

Roberto, a shy law student in Rome, meets Bruno, a forty-year-old exuberant, capricious man, who takes him for a drive through the Roman and Tuscany countries in the summer. When their journey starts to blend into their daily lives though, the pair’s newfound friendship is tested.

After five years of marriage, Diana discovers the joys of adultery, claiming that she can save her failing relationship through betrayal.

Toscana

Intransigent magistrate Viola Orlando is targeted by her rivals who set her twin sister Rosa — a high-class prostitute and pornographic photo-novel star — up to impersonate Viola and demolish her reputation. To complicate things even further, Viola is torn between enforcing the law or giving up her seat on the bench to marry her childhood friend.

An anthology of four comic moral tales about the hypocrisies surrounding sex in 1960s Italy: frothy young love and office politics in the big city; milk advertisements that begin to haunt an aging prude; a trophy wife enduring her husband's very public affairs; a lucky ticket-holder at a small town fair.

While his girlfriend recovers from a medical procedure, a corrupt lawyer becomes entranced by the grand visions of a mob boss.

A former priest has become bored to the point of impotence by the easy availability of beautiful women. He misses the shame of the priesthood which made sex more enjoyable, and this leads to his strange fascination with photographing asses. He gets involved with a sexy married woman, but he is more interested in her virginal maid.

A rich older man dies during a massage (you see, uh--never mind). His young widow (Lucrezia Love) decides she needs some male help in managing her deceased husband's estate (for some reason she doesn't ask the family lawyer who she spends all her time rolling around in the hay with), so she summons her younger step-brother to come stay with her and her "little stepdaughter" (Gloria Guida). Of course, Guida's character ends up being attracted to her new "uncle" and plots to get "his bird in her bush" by, among other things, arranging for him to witness a steamy lesbian encounter between her and a friend in a, uh, steam room. To resist this temptation, the "uncle" marries Guida off to another guy while he in turn marries her friend, but they still can't resist each other.

A film in 5 segments. The first is about a trafficker who takes a German tourist to an illegal sex market in a working-class neighborhood. The second involves an elderly man courting a young adult film star. The third, a thief seduces a man's wife. The fourth involves an Italian immigrant in Germany who is fired and subsequently offered work as a porn actor. Finally the last segment involves a baron who convinces his wife into a swinging.