An Italian mer-boy swims away from his boring undersea life to the 1950s surface, where he meets an exciting new friend. Sunny but slight animated adventure revisiting ideas done much better by Pixar elsewhere. Still, it looks great, there’s a lovely Sacha Baron Cohen voice cameo, and there’s openness to a gay reading of the central relationship, which is an interesting element.
Here’s the trailer.
A vengeful gladiator and a young noblewoman find love against the odds in 1st century Italy. Cheesy disaster-themed tosh (though never quite camp, Kiefer Sutherland’s panto villain aside), mashing up Titanic and Gladiator to cliched CG-tastic effect. A medium-budget B-movie, and unashamedly so.
Here’s the trailer.
A deaf teenager tries to summon her dead mother, but attracts other entities instead. Good-looking Italy-set horror flick that doesn’t hold back with creepy imagery taken from a hundred evil child/gothic scare/J-horror movies. Wobbles toward the climax, but some lovely touches throughout, even if the script is a collection of best bits from elsewhere.
Three years in the life of Italian politician Giulio Andreotti as his career collapses. A dazzling, swaggering, operatic approach to its unpromising-sounding subject matter pays dividends, as Sorrentino finds ways to unlock a private man. A touch impenetrable without knowledge of the actual events, but remarkable nevertheless.
Five sets of lives criss-cross, linked by Camorra gang-related activity in the same Naples housing project. Based on a non-fiction expose, this is an astonishing piece of work: heartfelt, brutal, unsympathetic. The ages of man, scattered between the stories. The best of its type this side of City of God.
In 1944 Italy, a US army troop behind enemy lines find a crashed spaceship. Engaging-enough low-budget SF/horror/war hybrid, with a witty script and a keen sense of its modest production values.
A dramatisation of the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. Well-acted, good-looking though insubstantial retelling of a famous case; not quite a serious drama or a straightforward thriller, and the weaker for the indecision.
A nurse tries to encourage a boy to speak after the death of his mother. Good-looking but slow mystery/horror with a hundred borrowings (everything from The Others to Rebecca) and a straightforward though inevitable resolution.
255 Review 