The best Italian movies of all time: from ‘Bicycle Thieves’ to ‘The Great Beauty’

Director: Federico Fellini

By the early ’60s, Federico Fellini had fully abandoned neorealism in favour of more symbolic, emotional and thematically complex filmmaking. His flights of fancy had grown increasingly fancier and flightier, reaching their peak with 8½, a kind of ‘psychological autobiography’ about a director in the throes of artistic inertia. Marcello Mastroianni is Fellini’s avatar, a filmmaker who can’t seem to make a movie and prefers to retreat into his own head, revelling in memories and fantasies while battling his own creative anxiety. The irony, of course, is that Fellini was more than capable of making a movie. And this is his most definitive.—Matthew Singer

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci’s towering examination of one young, ambitious right-wing thug – played by Jean-Louis Trintignant with blank malice – may be his finest film. Set during the Mussolini regime, and employing some of the most gorgeous art deco mise-en-scène imaginable, Bertolucci uses the baroque style of the 1930s to convey – and undermine – the spirit of fascism. As Trintignant’s troubled antihero prepares to carry out an assassination attempt on a former professor, the loss of his soul becomes painfully clear. The film’s legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro would go on to work with Francis Ford Coppola – in part because of Coppola’s love for this film.—Christina Newland

Director: Roberto Rossellini

One of films most closely associated with Italian neorealism, Rome, Open City is a film-school staple – and for good reason. Filmed in the crumbling ruins of the city in the aftermath of World War II, Rossellini synthesised his experiences, and those of his friends, into a complex story of Romans under Nazi occupation. The phenomenal Anna Magnani makes the biggest impression. The heartbreaking sequence in which her man is rounded up by Germans and she is caught in the crossfire powerfully drives home the price paid by brave resistance members during the war.—Christina Newland

Director: Luchino Visconti

The best-looking film in all of cinema? With its gorgeous colour palette, smokeshow cast (Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale), glittering ballroom sequence and Risorgimento-era set pieces that spill over with chaotic action, The Leopard would surely be right up there with The Conformist in any People Magazine poll. But its themes of decay and revolution, adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel and embodied in Burt Lancaster’s ageing aristocrat and Delon as his impetuous nephew, make it a kind of 19th century Succession too. Visconti, the son of Milanese aristocrats who turned to Marxism during the war, knew more about this stuff than most, but he never lets the politics obscure the humanity – helped by a Lancaster performance full of sorrowful dignity.—Phil de Semlyen 

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Power couple Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman’s finest creative partnership is a key moment in modern cinema. From the somewhat mundane story of Bergman and George Sanders’ crumbling marriage during a trip to Naples, it works through mood and metaphor to ascend from emotional emptiness to spiritual transcendence. Daringly, Rossellini allows much tetchy unease before the ancient landscape's history and traditions gradually impact the seemingly listless central duo. Voyage to Italy is a truly contemporary vision – a waymarker for Antonioni and the French New Wave, and a testament to vulnerable togetherness confronting time and mortality.—Trevor Johnston

Director: Sergio Leone

Sill the best film with a ‘Once Upon a Time in…’ prefix (sorry Midlands, Hollywood), Sergio Leone’s takes everything you love about his Dollars trilogy – big landscapes, bigger close-ups, violence, comedy – and adds extra breadth, depth and stature. From its unparalleled title sequence as three hired killers wait the arrival of The Man (Charles Bronson) on a train, it debunks the mythology of the Hollywood Western – hero Henry Fonda as a cold killer – operating as an operatic eulogy to the genre, enriched by Ennio Morricone’s ground-breaking score. A strong contender for the greatest Western ever made.—Ian Freer

Director: Francesco Rosi

Francesco Rosi takes on the life of infamous Sicilian bandit in a fascinating story told with typical passion and polemical fire. Using flashbacks and flashforwards, after introducing Giuliano lifeless in a pool of his own blood, Rosi gives us a kaleidoscope of different viewpoints on this ’50s-folk-hero-turned-public-enemy, refusing to lead the viewer to take sides so much as to probe their own feelings for the bandit’s deeds. The film isn’t exactly entry-level in its deep ties to Italian politics and history, but it’s worth sticking with. And don’t take my word for it: it’s one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.—Christina Newland

Director: Federico Fellini

How many films have caused fights in the cinema aisles? Legend has it that a brawl broke out when Fellini’s La Strada premiered at the Venice, which seems extreme for a movie about a circus clown (Fellini muse Giulietta Masina) and her marriage to Anthony Quinn’s abusive strongman. But this was a seismic moment in the director’s career, when he moved away from neorealism and toward a surrealist sophistication that would come to be known as ‘Felliniesque’. Some critics saw it as a betrayal. Three quarters of a century later, La Strada just feels sublime – a melancholy, searching tone poem about the loss of innocence that laid a path for masterpieces to come.—Matthew Singer

Director: Mario Bava

If only all film debuts were as good as Mario Bava’s. Black Sunday is an atmospheric gothic horror, released in 1960 and banned in the UK until 1968 for its graphic violence, considered too gruesome at the time. Based very loosely on Nikolai Gogol’s story ‘Viy’, the film follows the wrath of the powerful witch-vampire Asa (played by Barbara Steele in one of her first big-screen roles), who places a curse on her family after they execute her for Satanism. And for being a vampire. And a witch. And being too… horny? Few horrors deliver performances as haunting as Steele’s in Bava’s creepy classic.—Anna Bogutskaya

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

No one can make a dying relationship seem quite as cinematic as Antonioni. La Notte dresses up Marcello Mastroianni’s jaded writer and Jeanne Moreau’s disillusioned wife to the nines and sets them lose on an urbane Milan, where louche soirées, existential angst, and a sexily inscrutable Monica Vitti await them. Antonioni’s existential mood pieces aren’t for everyone, but these levels of seductive languor are hard to resist. Emotionally sparse but never blank, and with cut-glass black-and-white compositions, it’s easy to see why La Notte was one of Stanley Kubrick’s favourite films.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, The Pentagon put on a screening of The Battle of Algiers to gain insights into counter-terrorism techniques. It’s easy to see why. Gillo Pontecorvo’s film about the struggle for Algerian independence from the French is a clear-eyed how-to of guerrilla warfare, told through a mixture of documentary stylings and Ennio Morricone-scored poetry. Yet what stands out is the even-handedness on display, as Pontecorvo brilliantly explores the perspectives and problems on both sides (Jean Martin’s French paratroop commander is unforgettable). Paul Greengrass’s favourite film, it was also shown to the Algerian football team to instil underdog revolutionary zeal before a World Cup match against England. The result was – obviously – a nil-nil draw.—Ian Freer

Director: Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini’s copper-bottomed masterpiece is an odyssey through decadence in seven episodes as gossip columnist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) looks to find himself in a morally bankrupt ’60s Rome. Fellini puts indelible imagery – a statue of Christ being flown over Rome, Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain – at the service of a masterful study of paralysing ennui, the pursuit of misplaced values, and the loss of self. It’s one of those rare films that gifted the world a word – Walter Santesso’s hyperactive photographer is named ‘Paparazzo’ – but more importantly delivers a rich, unforgettable experience, a film so full it makes most films look anaemic by comparison.—Ian Freer

Director: Dino Risi

No one grumbles about ‘fucking Merlot’ but make no mistake, without this commedia d'italia classic there’d be no Sideways. In fact, Dino Risi’s astute and stinging comedy of male inadequacy, not to mention the odd-couple dynamic at its heart, makes Il Sorpasso a blueprint for just about any offbeat road-trip movie. Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant play a high-living gadabout and the meek law student he takes under his wing. Cue girls, booze, beaches, and all the ingredients for a frisky coming-of-age adventure – at least, until it all comes crashing down in an ending that goes off like a hand grenade in a martini glass.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica’s working-class tragedy is made all the more crushing by its mundanity. The story couldn’t be simpler: a downtrodden man in postwar Italy finds a job posting advertisements, but his employment is dependent upon owning a bicycle; when his is stolen, he and his young son set out across Rome to find it. One of the most affecting illustrations of the cycle of poverty and crime ever made, it was shot with non-professional actors and achieves the neorealists’ aim of capturing life as it actually happens. In a cruel twist, star Lamberto Maggiorani was laid off from his factory job after the movie’s release. As his own character says: ‘You live and you suffer.’—Matthew Singer

Director: Sergio Corbucci

This desolate, subversive western may be the high-point of Corbucci’s career thanks to its ice-cold atmosphere and brilliant performances. Klaus Kinski is a scene-stealer in the role of a ruthless bounty killer who believes it’s his ‘patriotic duty to exterminate’ outlaws – while Jean-Louis Trintignant is quietly compelling as his opponent: a mute avenger who survived a throat-slitting as a child. Silvano Ippoliti’s alpine cinematography is frequently breathtaking, and would later serve as a key influence on Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight — a film with which it also shares a composer in Ennio Morricone. —James Balmont

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

A huge influence on Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s take on the birth, teachings and death of Christ is the perfect antidote to the bloated Hollywood epics of the ‘50s. Employing techniques from the neorealist movement (Pasolini gets fantastic mileage from the faces of non-professional actors), it takes Christ out of beatific religious representations and puts him into the real world, raw, violent and politically-informed as it is. Unbelievably moving, whatever your faith.—Ian Freer

Director: Luchino Visconti

‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ has been much-adapted but never bettered than in Luchino Visconti’s unauthorised take on James M Cain’s pulpy noir. Massimo Girotti is the handsome drifter who catches the eye of Clara Calamai’s bored tavern landlady, only for the pair’s affair to go torridly wrong. Somehow, this brilliantly clammy thriller is Visconti’s first film – he was put onto the novel by Jean Renoir while working as the Frenchman’s assistant director – and its real Po Valley locations and gritty, hard-bitten characters paved the way for neorealist flicks to come. Oh, and he made it in the middle of a world war.—Phil de Semlyen 

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

A modern companion piece to La Dolce Vita updated for the Berlusconi era, Paolo Sorrentino’s sensory overload sends another jaded journo, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), through the morass of the Eternal City, bobbing from one decadent party to another. From the costumes to his music choices Sorrentino’s filmmaking is bravura, Luca Bigazzi’s camera zooming and swooping, adding to the operatic quality of a film that skates on love, loss and, towards the end, a profound melancholy. Emotional emptiness has rarely been this satisfying.—Ian Freer

Director: Dario Argento

An American girl (Jessica Harper) enrols at a prestigious ballet academy in Germany, only to discover something sinister within its walls. It’s the stuff of fairy tales; indeed, Argento has noted Disney’s Snow White as an influence. Argento floods the screen with garish primary colours, including sprays of unnaturally red blood, and his grisly set pieces still retain a quality of stained-glass beauty. What elevates Suspiria into the horror pantheon, though, is Italian prog-rockers Goblin’s shuddering soundtrack. Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake upped the gore, added political subtext, and had Thom Yorke doing the score, but there’s no improving upon the original.—Matthew Singer

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Antonioni’s seminal film of the moneyed classes defined mid-century alienation. He reshuffles the rules of cinema in the process, offering a missing-person mystery where finding the missing person is almost beside the point. At its centre, among the ominous coves and inlets of the Aeolian Islands (40-odd kilometers from where Rossellini filmed Stromboli), a woman vanishes and her elegant best friend (Monica Vitti, in one of her defining roles) tries to find her. Pauline Kael disdainfully referred to it a ‘come dressed as the sick soul of Europe party’, but this peculiar and languorously-paced film changed the face of ’60s cinema.—Christina Newland

Director: Sergio Leone

Shot in Spain with American stars, sure, but as Italian as a bowl of pasta, this gunslinging classic is peak Sergio Leone. The Roman first two Dollars films are trifles compared to the sweep and slyness of his third entry. The irony of the title, of course, is that all these dudes are bad. It’s also so much cooler than many of those older films. Clint Eastwood’s poncho-draped Man With No Name? The close-ups? Ennio Morricone’s twangy, whistling, operatic score, which is arguably more famous than the movie itself? The climatic cemetery shootout? It’s a landmark of iconographical radness, admired by the likes of Tarantino and Scorsese, but never quite matched.—Matthew Singer

Director: Luchino Visconti

A tapestry of melodrama and social realism, Luchino Visconti’s beautiful, sweeping tale of the Parondi family is a heartbreaker. The story follows the migration of a mother and her five strapping sons from the South to find work in Milan: Alain Delon, young and angelic, is Rocco, who attempts to curb the worst impulses of his more freewheeling brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) and the neighborhood sex worker (Annie Girardot). Visconti explores the changes in Italian social life at this period of economic prosperity, where the bright lights of the big city offer the potential for ruin.—Christina Newland

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Rossellini’s tempestuous drama stares you square in the face and dares you to call it romantic. The filmmaker’s lover (and then wife, and then ex-wife) Ingrid Bergman plays Karin, a Lithuanian refugee at the end of the war, who ties the knot with a hulking Italian ex-POW (fisherman-turned-thesp Mario Vitale) to escape her internment camp. Back on his Sicilian island, she finds this jagged world of hostile fishermen suffocating and plots to escape. A brooding drama that threatens to explode like the simmering volcano on which it’s set, it gave Italian cinema one of its most famous endings.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Pietro Germi 

This bitumen black comedy has a sky-high concept that modern Hollywood would kill for. An impoverished Sicilian aristocrat (Marcello Mastroianni) plots to kill his wife (Daniela Rocca) by setting her up to have an affair to take advantage of an Italian legal loophole that a wronged husband will get off lightly if he murders his missus (and her lover) in the act. Winner of the Best Screenplay Oscar, it’s a darkly funny satire that deliciously skewers Sicilian macho mores. And then some.—Ian Freer

Director: Mario Monicelli

One of the great First World War movies – sadly, tough to track down in English-subtitled form – Mario Monicelli’s masterpiece plays like a kind of ‘All Quiet on the Italian Front’ or a tragicomic version of Paths of Glory. It tackles notions of patriotism and duty with a smirk that really rubbed critics up the wrong way when it was first released, before shrugging the controversy off to win a Golden Lion. Nestled within its huge battles scenes (Dino De Laurentiis was its super-producer) and gnarly depictions of trench warfare, it’s really a buddy movie in which Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi take a Matthieu-and-Lemmon-ish approach to military service: grousing, shirking and cheating, before finally finding their nobility in the face of ruthless Austrian troops.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Taking its name from an Italian turn of phrase that loosely translates as ‘happy as Larry’, this fable of ’70s class warfare and friendship in rural (and later, urban) Italy is moving and sharp by turns. An innocent-minded young man, played with dimwit sweetness by Adriano Tardiolo, is a farm labourer working under a near-feudal system. He befriends the wealthy son of the marchioness who runs the estate he works on to poignant – and eventually disastrous – effect. Showing the negative effects of money and exploitation on ordinary people, Alice Rohrwacher’s film might be called social commentary were it not so charmingly weird.—Christina Newland

Director: Roberto Rossellini

This stirring World War II anthology movie – six vignettes that loosely follow the Allied advance north through Italy – combines gritty social realism with straight-up war movie beats that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood flick. It’s occasionally uneven but boasts a kind of incremental power that creeps up on you when the credits roll. There are villainous Nazeees, daring partisans and doughty American G.I.s, but also a spiritual and emotional rawness to its harrowing action scenes and war-weary characters. Paisan – or ‘compatriot’ – is as a powerful statement of what it means to be Italian as any film on this list.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Some movies break your heart. Vittorio De Sica’s wound the soul. More sentimental than Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D. is the poignant face of neorealism. It’s a movie about the callousness of society, couched in the story of a poor old man and his dog. Kicked out on the street after failing to make rent, the titular pensioner (Carlo Battisti) is driven to despair, pulled back only by the loyalty to his adorable fox terrier. It is perhaps the most unvarnished film in a genre that stripped cinema to its bones, and in that way represents neorealism’s peak. The movement never produced another classic after it.—Matthew Singer

Director: Mario Bava

Imagine if Austin Powers was played completely straight, and about twice as psychedelic. Danger: Diabolik – a cult classic of the Bond-aping Eurospy genre – is what you’d get. Mario Bava’s adaption of one of Italy’s most popular comic book series, concerning the capers of the titular, costumed super-criminal and the authorities attempting to thwart him, is full of flashy cars, underground lairs, and gonzo gadgets — like ‘exhilarating gas’ and an aeroplane with a trapdoor. Amid all the scantily-clad ladies, there’s also a cigar-chomping crime lord played by Thunderball villain Adolfo Celi.—James Balmont

Director: Federico Fellini

You could include every Federico Fellini film on this list – easily. But if you must start somewhere, start with Amarcord, the maestro’s homage to small-town Italian life set in the 1930s, when the country was under Mussolini’s rule. Low on plot but long on humour (Fellini loved a fart joke), Amarcord is a portrait of the sentimental education of youngster Titta, as he comes of age surrounded by the eccentric characters of his town. Autobiographical in parts, but fantastical in others, it skewers the doctrines of fascist Italy while lovingly remembering the era that Fellini himself grew up in.—Anna Bogutskaya

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Mike Leigh describes this Palme d'Or-winning pastoral as ‘extraordinary on a number of levels’. One of them is the captivating detail and authenticity of its vision of rural life. Like Clarkson’s Farm with more relatable characters, it spans a year on one Bergamo farm in the late 1890s, as crops are planted, animals slaughtered, and new generations welcomed into the ranks of its four hard-toiling families. It was filmed over four months on an old farm, with Ermanno Olmi drawing on his grandmother’s memories of her younger days as a peasant (jotted down in notebooks) to craft an soft-spoken and slow-burn tribute to life on the land.—Phil de Semlyen 

Director: Luchino Visconti

Neorealism’s On the Waterfront, Visconti’s rugged tale of Sicilian fishermen is a punch in the gut that leaves even other great filmmakers winded. Martin Scorsese lists it among his all-time favourites, and its ability to make you first understand, and then care about, its hard-pressed characters is timeless. It’s a deeply sad film in which poverty is depicted as an absence – of joy, family comforts, and solidarity – and whose mariners, constantly lowballed by wholesalers in a way that the actual fishermen who played them could probably relate to, are slowly beaten down by a rigged system.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Italy’s foremost purveyor of modernist alienation, Michelangelo Antonioni is best known in the English-speaking world for 1966’s Blow Up, an enigmatic murder-mystery set in Swinging London. But his films set in bourgeois Italian society made his name, and L’Eclisse (‘The Eclipse’) may be their pinnacle. It’s set in a bleak Rome, shorn of Via Veneto glamour. There’s the icy elegance of Monica Vitti, drifting around the city after a nasty break-up, meeting Roman stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon) and not-quite starting a new affair. Enigmatic and mood-oriented, it requires patience. But its feeling of despair, backdropped by the noise and artifice of contemporary society, is all-encompassing.—Christina Newland

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Few films are as shudderingly erotic as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem. A devilish Terence Stamp is a mysterious visitor who arrives at the front door of a bourgeois Milanese family and quickly inveigles his way into beds of everyone in the household, before suddenly vanishing again. lf Theorem has defied analysis since its controversial release in 1968, and remains ambiguous: we’ll never truly know if Stamp’s visitor is a destructive or liberating force – even Pasolini’s comments on it were contradictory. The film’s influence can be felt on everything from Tom Ripley to Saltburn, but nothing else comes close: Theorem is timeless.—Anna Bogutskaya

Director: Mario Monicelli

Like Rififi on nitrous, this crime caper is a giddy pisstake of the stony-faced heist thrillers that were everywhere in America and France at the time. Writer-director Mario Monicelli wasn’t just a comedy master – later, he’d make fierce political screed I Compagni (‘The Organizer’) – but his gift for overseeing finely-tuned slapstick courses through this very breezy, very silly classic. Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatori and Marcello Mastroianni are among five burglars attempting to rip off a Roman pawn shop, only to get it all horribly wrong. It was pipped to a Best Foreign Film Oscar by Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, which probably made sense in context.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Described by one critic as ‘maybe the grimmest movie I’ve ever seen’, Pasolini’s depiction of the life of a Roman pimp is not a rollicking LOL-fest. Yet, in its jagged juxtaposition of the spiritual (the Bach score) with the amoral (everything else), it’s a piercing glimpse at life on the fringes of an otherwise booming society. The director rejected the term ‘neorealism’ for his debut film, but it’s hard not to see the grasping Accattone – played by first-timer Franco Citti – as desperate kin to Bicycle Thieves’ dad or the fisherman in La Terra Trema. He’s one cinema’s most irredeemable characters, but for all his calculating, contemptuous treatment of his sex-worker girlfriend (Silvana Corsini), he’s still recognisably human.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Francesco Rosi 

The side of a Naples apartment block crumbles and collapses into the street, crushing a man and injuring a small boy. From that starkly dramatic opening, Francesco Rosi’s vigorous and angry drama maps out a system in which men like Rod Steiger’s corrupt politician and real estate developer, Edoardo Nottola, flourish by cutting corners and making dodgy back-room deals. Rosi’s camera never gets too close to the potential hero, a communist councilman played by real-life politician Carlo Fermariello – mainly because his story has no heroes. Instead, Steiger, all seedy menace in the best film of his Italian phase, looms over it like the Teflon face of greed and corruption.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Lina Wertmüller

Lina Wertmüller was a towering and iconoclastic figure of Italian cinema, in part because she was a woman in film at a time when the primary genre flicks of the time – giallo horrors and poliziotteschi crime films – were often misogynistic and male-dominated. Her best work follows a left-wing Sicilian labourer who refuses to support a local Mafioso and must escape – only to start a second family entirely. His cowardice and eventual abandonment of his ideals, though, make his attempt to fight off Mafia influence near-impossible. A painful allegory about conflicting political and personal loyalties, with intimations of sexual violence, it’s not for the faint of heart.—Christina Newland

Director: Ettore Scola

Two of Italy’s greatest film stars, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, combine to heart-wrecking effect in a romance told in real-time that’s a rare mix of deeply poignant and sharply political. Appearing without a skerrick of their trademark glamour, the two play a weary housewife and her gay neighbour, Mastroianni’s haunted writer, who meet in their modernist apartment block when her myna bird escapes. The title holds a bitter double meaning: it’s set on the day Adolf Hitler visited Benito Mussolini in Rome, and the trumpeting of fascist speeches soundtracks the pair’s encounters. Despite presenting it in the sepia of a faded family snap, director Ettore Scola’s film still feels strikingly modern.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Luchino Visconti 

A great, sexy swoon of a movie, Luchino Visconti’s opulent melodrama wears a battered heart beneath its finery. The filmmaker, using colour for the first time, locates it in a historically sensitive moment, balancing affairs of the heart with those of the state in a way that would also echo through his later masterpiece The Leopard. Italian starlet Alida Valli plays Contessa Livia Serpieri, an unhappily married woman who falls for Farley Granger’s dashing but feckless Austrian officer (a role originally earmarked for Brando). Opera-filled 1866 Venice is a hotbed of revolt and repression, in which the fat lady will inevitably sing for the headstrong contessa.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Dario Argento

Boasting a striking use of colour, an excess of peeping tom camera angles, and perhaps the most outrageous bass line in the history of film scores (the culprits: prog-rock titans Goblin) is Dario Argento’s gruesome giallo masterpiece. The set-up is classic: in Turin, a British jazz musician witnesses a terrible murder committed by a cloaked figure – but the subsequent crime scene investigation turns out to be a real head-scratcher. As strange occurrences take place soon after, the question remains: whodunnit?—James Balmont

Director: Giuseppe Tornatore

Ah yes, the sentimental favourite about the cute boy, crusty projectionist and the kissing montage! But if you’ve only seen the Oscar-winning two-hour version, you're missing out. When the original cut tanked in Italy at 155 minutes, panicked producers chopped it down, delivering a global hit which essentially gutted Tornatore's intentions. The 173-minute director’s cut reveals a darker, more profound movie, the wee kid’s grown-up self now a famous film director carrying deep psychological scars. Full disclosure is given to traumatic past events; the famous smooching clip fest now a bitter reminder of all the emotions he’s unable to feel. Played against Ennio Morricone’s soaring score, it cuts so much deeper.—Trevor Johnston

Directors: Paolo & Vittorio Taviani

This Cannes prize winner, shot in the Tuscan hometown of the Taviani brothers, plays like a fairy tale, thanks to its use of natural light and dream sequences. Like much of the directors’ work (which often tackled Italy’s political struggles and classical literature), it’s based on tragic true events: in 1944, the cathedral in San Miniato was hit by an explosive that killed 55 men, women and children. The Night of the Shooting Stars – an ideal entry point to the BFI’s retrospective of their work – follows a small group of locals who had sensed the impending danger, choosing to flee across the rustic countryside in hope of salvation from the approaching fascist threat.—James Balmont

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

The flashy, baroque storyteller of modern Italian cinema, Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Youth) goes straight for the heart of the country’s corruption with this loud, grotesque, powerful biography of politician Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo). Andreotti was the seven-times Italian Prime Minister who was accused of all sorts of nefarious doings, including collusion with the Mafia, but always managed to remain untouchable. Sorrentino mounts his own trial by cinema, and his verdict is ‘guilty’. His muse Servillo plays Andreotti as an extremely creepy presence in an unedifying but extremely entertaining tour of a sick Italian system, where the worlds of politics, religion and business are all stained with blood. It gets right under your skin.—Dave Calhoun

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

A capsule description makes it sound like a pisstake, so you'll have to trust us this is a wonderful, unique film about life, the universe… and especially charcoal. In rural Calabria, a remote village has its religious festivals, an elderly goatherd tends his flock, kids are born (the goat kind), trees get turned into charcoal, and a whip-smart collie watches everything. Frammartino’s patient camera allows us to sense how the human, animal, vegetable and mineral work in concert as they’ve done for centuries. We get time to ponder, time even to ponder what we’re pondering. No special knowledge is required to appreciate it, just an open mind and an open heart.—Trevor Johnston

Director: Gabriele Salvatores

Not to be confused with the Notting Hill restaurant, Mediterraneo is a peach of a picture that mines gold from a simple idea. In the midst of World War II, an Italian unit is washed ashore on a deserted Greek island after its ship is sunk by the Allies. It turns out the islanders, fearing the worst, have been in hiding and their emergence sees them welcome the Italians into fold, the latter discovering the meaning of community. Cue romances, football and living a life without the rigors of military strictures. Still gorgeous some 30 years on.—Ian Freer

Director: Lucio Fulci

If giallo gorehound Lucio Fulci had retired at the end of the 1970s, he might be best known for an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark. No shade on the excellent Zombie Flesh Eaters, but Fulchi’s bloody masterwork arrived two years later. It’s set in Louisiana, where a woman inherits a creepy hotel built on a gateway to Hell. But the horrors here are imaginative in a way few of Fulci’s Eurotrash peers could match. Mind you, what he’s imagining is spiders ripping off eyelids, faces melting, and undead corpses shambling around with their heads blown off. It’s up there with the nightmarish best of Argento and Bava.—Matthew Singer

Director: Francesco Rosi

This chilling conspiracy procedural delivers harsh truths about basket-case 1970s Italy. In a masterclass of understatement, Lino Ventura exemplifies crumpled integrity as the detective investigating the murders of high-profile judges, potentially uncovering a web of political iniquity – if he survives long enough. Euro-arthouse character stalwarts provide thespian heft, while Rosi brilliantly exploits the visual contrast between classical and modernist architecture to ponder whether humanity has really lost its way… or perhaps was always so venal and corrupt. Like Italy’s answer to The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, it remains dismayingly relevant.—Trevor Johnston

Director: Matteo Garrone

Italian-American filmmakers have sometimes fallen under the spell of mobsters, valorising their lifestyles in all sorts of cannoli-fuelled ways. There’s no glamorising here, as Matteo Garrone, one of Italy’s finest modern-day filmmakers, crafts a vivid, if tundra-bleak crime tableau from a piece of investigative journalism from Roberto Saviano, surely Italy’s most courageous reporter. Gomorrah will probably not feature strongly on the Camorra’s Letterboxd account, as its five interlocking story threads depict Naples’ answer to the Mafia as corrupting, gun-toting thugs. With mopeds their main MO for drive-by shootings, you will never look at the humble scooter the same way again.—Phil de Semlyen

Director: Nanni Moretti

This devastating, unsentimental drama plays a little differently from much of Roman writer-director Nanni Moretti’s early work, often more playful or blackly comic. As usual, though, Moretti himself stars. Here, he’s a successful Rome therapist who is suddenly – horrifically – forced to deal with the accidental death of his own teenage son. It’s a tragedy that blows an unforgiving hole in the fabric of this middle-class family, and Moretti deals with it in a forensic and horribly believable fashion. The film won him the Palme d’Or and heralded the beginning of a second, sometimes more serious chapter in an ongoing career defined by taking wry looks at the mysteries and miseries of everyday life.—Dave Calhoun