Commedia all'italiana — Italy laughing at itself
The Italian comedy tradition from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) is the template — a heist film where everyone is incompetent. Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso (1962) is a road movie that ends like a tragedy. Ettore Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974) is a love letter to cinema itself. Pietro Germi, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Manfredi — the golden age of Italian screen comedy, sharper and darker than Hollywood ever dared.
We All Loved Each Other So Much
My Friends
Big Deal on Madonna Street
La Dolce Vita
Nights of Cabiria
Amarcord
Divorce Italian Style
The Marquis of Grillo
Fantozzi: White Collar Blues
Day for Night
Crooks in Clover
Nothing Left to Do But Cry
For Love and Gold
PlayTime
Marriage Italian Style
My Friends Act II
They Call Me Trinity
The Executioner
Seven Beauties
Mon Oncle
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Trinity Is Still My Name
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob
Swept Away
The Scopone Game
Bianco, rosso e Verdone
The Brain
My Name Is Nobody
Roma
Juliet of the Spirits
Otras colecciones canon
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
80s horror everyone has forgotten
Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
Korean cinema essentials beyond Parasite
Post-Soviet cinema — Russia & Eastern Europe after 1991
The Romanian New Wave
Essential anime that isn't Studio Ghibli
Slow cinema — the long-take canon
70s American paranoia — the post-Watergate canon
First features by directors who later mattered
Documentaries that hold up as cinema
Scandinavian noir beyond the Stieg Larsson franchises
Iranian new wave — Kiarostami, Farhadi, and the rest
Argentine cinema — beyond Wild Tales
British kitchen-sink and what it became
First features directed by cinematographers
German New Wave — Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff
Hong Kong action — Woo, Lam, Tsui, To
Spaghetti westerns — Leone, Corbucci, Sollima, and the second tier
Mumblecore — the American indie movement nobody named
Czech New Wave — Forman, Chytilová, Menzel, before they fled
French New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rivette, Rohmer
Blaxploitation — Shaft, Pam Grier, and the 70s Black cinema boom
Dogme 95 — von Trier, Vinterberg, and the vow of chastity
Australian New Wave — Weir, Miller, Armstrong, Campion
African cinema — Sembène, Sissako, Mambéty, and beyond
Italian neorealism — the rubble and the real
German expressionism — shadows, angles, madness
Taiwanese New Cinema — Hou, Yang, Tsai, and the island's quiet revolution
New Queer Cinema — Haynes, Araki, Van Sant, and the 90s insurgency
Wuxia and martial arts — flying swords, hidden masters