Top up your watchlist... 31 classics of Italian cinema
From Argento to Fellini, get a grounding in the best of Italian film – all available with a free 14-day trial on BFI Player.
L’assassino (1961)
Director: Elio Petri
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Elio Petri’s dazzling first feature stars Marcello Mastroianni as dandyish antiques dealer arrested for murder by a Kafkaesque police force.
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
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Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece about the last years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from the perspective of both the revolutionaries and the French authorities.
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
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Vittorio De Sica’s story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a classic of post-war Italian cinema.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969)
Director: Dario Argento
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Dario Argento’s hugely influential thriller, about a murder witness who becomes amateur detective, added sex and style to the murder-mystery and kick-started Italy’s ‘giallo’ genre.
City of the Living Dead (1980)
Director: Lucio Fulci
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Lucio Fulci’s sensationally gory zombie horror finds undead hordes overtaking a sleepy New England town, with only a reporter and a local psychic to stop them.
Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)
Director: Michele Soavi
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Michele Soavi’s compelling concoction of anarchic Evil Dead-style horror-comedy, tragic romance and gore.
Django (1966)
Director: Sergio Corbucci
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Sergio Corbucci’s iconic and hugely influential western follows the titular coffin-dragging drifter as he becomes embroiled in a mortal feud.
La dolce vita (1960)
Director: Federico Fellini
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Federico Fellini’s masterpiece depicting seven hedonistic days in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as he searches for the sweet life.
8½ (1963)
Director: Federico Fellini
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Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of writer’s block with this magnum opus about a film director experiencing his own creative crisis.
Germany, Year Zero (1948)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
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The concluding part of Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated war trilogy, set amid the war-torn ruins of Berlin.
Gomorrah (2008)
Director: Matteo Garrone
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Matteo Garrone’s unnervingly authentic Naples crime drama won the Grand Prix at Cannes before inspiring a hit TV series.
L’innocente (1976)
Director: Luchino Visconti
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Luchino Visconti’s final film is a brilliant and disturbing drama set against the opulent backdrop of decadent, late 19th-century aristocracy.
Journey to Italy (1954)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
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Roberto Rossellini’s acerbic but finally very moving masterpiece about marital crisis boasts great performances from Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders.
Marriage Italian Style (1964)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
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Sophia Loren and Marcelo Mastroianni are irrepressible as a long-married couple in this exquisite and timeless comedy of our all-too-human foibles.
The Mask of Satan (1960)
Director: Mario Bava
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Italian horror classic from acclaimed Italian horror auteur Mario Bava, about a beautiful witch, Asa (Barbara Steele), who rises from her grave to take revenge upon her enemies.
Medea (1970)
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
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Pier Paolo Pasolini directs opera singer Maria Callas in a vivid adaptation of Euripides’s Greek tragedy.
La notte (1961)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
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Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a couple re-examining their emotional bonds.
Paisà (1946)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
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Roberto Rossellini’s ambitious and enormously moving follow-up to his breakthrough Rome Open City.
Le quattro volte (2010)
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
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Michelangelo Frammartino’s quirky, wordless account of rural Calabrian life is elegant, touching and funny, a philosophical poem to enduring tradition.
Red Desert (1964)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
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Antonioni’s mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman (Richard Harris).
Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
Director: Luchino Visconti
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Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s epic drama follows a mother and her five sons who move from a small town to Milan, changing their lives forever.
Rome, Open City (1945)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
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Roberto Rossellini’s landmark of Italian neorealism is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made.
A Special Day (1977)
Director: Ettore Scola
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Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni deliver the finest and most nuanced performances of their careers in this understated masterpiece from director Ettore Scola.
Stromboli (1950)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
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In her first collaboration with Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman stars as a refugee who marries a fisherman and moves to a barren island.
Suspiria (1977)
Director: Dario Argento
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Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric gothic nightmare blends operatic violence, disorienting dream logic and hyper-real visuals to create a horror classic.
Theorem (1968)
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
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Pasolini’s classic about a handsome, enigmatic stranger (Terence Stamp) who arrives at a bourgeois household and seduces an entire family.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)
Director: Ermanno Olmi
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Ermanno Olmi’s Palme d’Or-winner, about the hardships faced by peasants in late 19th-century Lombardy, is a masterpiece of neorealism.
Two Women (1960)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
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Sophia Loren won an Oscar for her performance as a mother trying to protect her daughter in wartime Italy, in Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic.
Umberto D. (1952)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
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Vittorio De Sica’s heartbreaking classic about a destitute old man in Rome, trying to survive with only his faithful dog Flike for company.
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
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The irrepressible De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) also directs this Oscar-winning film of three comic tales of love and sex in three cities.
The Wonders (2014)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
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An enchanting, otherworldly coming-of-age drama about a teenage girl who enters her unwilling family into a TV talent show.
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