Set in 2002, an abandoned 5-year-old boy living in a rundown orphanage in a small Russian village is adopted by an Italian family.
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.
In a time of war and disease, a young officer gallantly tries to help a young woman find her husband.
A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
Glimpses of Chaucer penning his famous work are sprinkled through this re-enactment of several of his stories.
Gino, a drifter, begins an affair with inn-owner Giovanna as they plan to get rid of her older husband.
Unemployed Antonio is elated when he finally finds work hanging posters around war-torn Rome. However on his first day, his bicycle—essential to his work—gets stolen. His job is doomed unless he can find the thief. With the help of his son, Antonio combs the city, becoming desperate for justice.
Ci vuole del tempo
In 1943, Vincenzio and Maria take their children to his father's Tuscan farm. Vincenzio commutes to Rome where he's a physician and, in the hospital basement, prints an anti-Fascist paper. His brother is in the Resistance; his father supplies food to a local monastery where 12 fugitives hide. All is seen through the eyes of the oldest child, Paulo, who's about 7 and the only lad at school who doesn't wear a Fascist Youth uniform. For Paulo and his siblings, it's great fun playing with their nonno, finding herbs in the fields, watching a maid's tryst with a soldier, teasing a silent monk. Then the war reaches the farm when Italy surrenders and the Germans exact revenge.
Based on Ruggero Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci. The film recounts the tragedy of Canio, the lead clown (or pagliaccio in Italian) in a commedia dell'arte troupe, his wife Nedda, and her lover, Silvio. When Nedda spurns the advances of Tonio, another player in the troupe, he tells Canio about Nedda's betrayal. In a jealous rage Canio murders both Nedda and Silvio. The only actor in the cast who also sang his role was the celebrated Italian baritone, Tito Gobbi, but the film is largely very faithful to its source material, presenting the opera nearly complete.
Lucia (Natassja Kinski) is a volatile, exciteable young woman. She forms a romance with Carlo (Stefano Dionisi), who is somewhat callow and is very skittish. Their romance is not an easy one, but they are assisted in coping with its ups and downs by their mutual friendship with Franco (Franco Citti), an older, wiser and more stable man.
Out of prison after a five-year stretch, jewel thief Tony turns down a quick job his friend Jo offers him, until he discovers that his old girlfriend Mado has become the lover of local gangster Pierre Grutter during Tony's absence. Expanding a minor smash-and-grab into a full-scale jewel heist, Tony and his crew appear to get away clean, but their actions after the job is completed threaten the lives of everyone involved.
Set in the Bronx during the tumultuous 1960s, an adolescent boy is torn between his honest, working-class father and a violent yet charismatic crime boss. Complicating matters is the youngster's growing attraction - forbidden in his neighborhood - for a beautiful black girl.
A rising Boston gangster (Ben Barnes) endangers those around him when he starts to make moves without the knowledge of his boss (Harvey Keitel).
In 1987, Ricardo is seventeen years old. This summer, Ricardo has a busy schedule: lose his virginity, find a way to get into bars, get a car and spend time with his friends. In order to make fast money, Ricardo decides to use his Italian connections to take a shortcut via the world of crime. But things don't go so smoothly.
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.
An American narcotics agent is murdered in Italy. The head of the department decides to hire Larry Stanziani, 'The Cobra'. Larry, a former agent and now a third-rate private detective, uses the opportunity to get even with an old enemy, but soon he finds out he's facing a relentless organization
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
The film takes place over the course of a single night: the longest night of the year, between December 21 and 22 (the winter solstice), when the sun sets around 4:30 p.m. and rises the next day at 7:30 a.m. A long night in which the stories, destinies, anxieties, and dramas of a provincial town in the south (Potenza) intertwine, even if only briefly. Fifteen hours of uninterrupted darkness in which human destiny becomes exceptional, as the night causes the anchors of the day to be lost and four personal stories suddenly accelerate.