Cinemascope

 It often takes distance to relook at an infamous tyrant’s hideous rise, along with the toxic idea of fascism (or its codification, to be mo...

 Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia , on paper, shouldn’t work, as at its most elemental it’s about a white, ageing, well-off, conservative, heter...

  Umberto D. – Italian Neorealist movement’s final definitive film and Vittorio De Sica’s personal favourite – alternated between extreme d...

 Visconti pioneered neorealist cinema and Rossellini took it to exalted heights; but it was Vittorio De Sica who gave this profoundly influe...

 Luchino Visconti’s ambitious opus Ludwig – butchered by distributers during its release and restored to its mammoth original runtime of 4 ...

 Luchino Visconti adapted Death in Venice from Thomas Mann’s novella – the vaunted central chapter in his ‘ German Trilogy ’, sandwiched be...

  The Damned was a scintillating outlier in Luchino Visconti’s oeuvre. Daringly provocative and subversive, packed with outré plot developm...

 Luchino Visconti, whose superb debut film Ossessione launched Italian Neorealism, made perhaps that movement’s purest expression with his ...

  The Hawks and the Sparrows ingeniously harboured parallel tracks, as it was both informed by the austere aesthetics and social commitment...

 Taking inspiration from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s landmark cinéma vérité documentary Chronicle of a Summer , Pasolini crisscrossed Ital...

 Pier Paolo Pasolini – who was already an acclaimed poet, established writer and prolific editor by then, and had also dabbled in cinema, ha...

 Giorgio Bassini’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Garden of Finzi-Continis was as much a haunting Holocaust novel as a stirring ode ...

 Ermanno Olmi’s tender, low-key, delicately strung and achingly beautiful masterpiece Il Posto – shaped from his personal experiences – rem...

 Gillo Pontecovro – former chemistry student, anti-fascist partisan during WW2 and Marxist journalist after the war who was catalysed into f...

 Elio Petri’s agitational and subversive cinema – and in turn Italian political cinema from its “years of lead” period, of which he was a le...

 The title for Elio Petri’s blistering comedy Property Is No Longer A Theft can be taken both at face value and with a heavy dose of irony;...

 Elio Petri’s filmography can be roughly divided into two categories – relatively restrained films (albeit, not completely bereft of stylist...

  L'Assassino , Elio Petri’s solid if underrated debut, combined three aspects of his filmmaking that’d manifest more markedly in his la...

 Expressions of grief and guilt evoked a feverish pitch and guttural howl in Marco Bellocchio’s emotionally turbulent and nakedly personal f...

 Marco Bellocchio’s tour de force media satire Slap the Monster on Page One was a confluence of thrilling genre cinema and radical politi...