L’assassino

Among the great wave of film debuts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that of Rome-born director Elio Petri is often overshadowed by those of his contemporaries both in Italy and abroad. Even in terms of Petri...

Trial of the Road

In her 2007 study of the Russian war film, Denise J. Youngblood argues that while Soviet society was in a state of stagnation in the 1970s, the Soviet war film certainly was not: “The thematic gap between the w...

I Magliari

Released two years before his international breakthrough Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (1959) is the story of immigrant Italian workers seeking their fortune in late Adenauer-era West G...

Lucky Luciano

As Gian-Piero Brunetta has noted, Francesco Rosi’s Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) saw the Neapolitan filmmaker return to the narrative model of his first major success Salvato...

Europa Europa

Who was my friend? Who was my enemy? How could they be kind to me and at the same time kill others so horribly? What set us apart? A simple foreskin? - Solly Perel in Europa, Europa Among the many extraor...

Senso

Released in 1954, Senso was Visconti’s fourth feature and is recognised as a milestone in the director’s career. Not only did it mark a decisive move away from the neo-realism of Ossessione (1942) and La terra ...

Broken Lullaby

In his 1993 biography Ernst Lubitsch: Trouble in Paradise, Scott Eyman argues that the term “The Lubitsch Touch” is “as insultingly superficial a sobriquet as that of calling Hitchcock ‘The Master of Suspense’”...
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Russian Ark

Russian Ark/Russkiy kovcheg (2002 Russia 99 mins) Prod Co: Egoli Tossell Film/For a Film/The Hermitage Bridge Studio Prod: Andrei Deryabin, Jens Meurer Dir: Alexandr Sokurov Scr: Anatoli Nikiforov, Alexa...