A pimpish young man who finds labour work to be ideological suspect tries to make ends meet by manipulating his lovers into sex workers in Pasolini’s harsh, unflinching debut feature, as his talky ‘neo-neorealist’ film offers a stinging commentary on Italy’s social and moral disintegration.
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
A tale of beauty and decay, Visconti’s cinematic requiem for Thomas Mann sees Dirk Bogarde, in a quiet, despairing performance, playing an ageing composer obsessed with the perfect looks of a teenage boy, accompanied generously by Mahler’s heart-aching ‘Adagietto’.
Half-baked with its ideas, Sorrentino’s polished and aesthetically pleasing anti-myth can’t seem to find a compelling story out of the ‘mythology’ of Parthenope, as a young woman pursues intellectualism instead of leveraging on her seductive beauty.
Guadagnino’s intoxicating adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novella about the sensual connection between two men exudes profound feelings that coalesce and ache the body, mind and soul, boasting what could be a career-best performance by Daniel Craig.
Guadagnino’s meta faux-documentary is messy, tonally jarring and insensitive, but Tilda Swinton as actress-narrator-interviewer makes it more palatable to accept as his debut feature reconstructs a ghastly real-life murder with curious sensationalism.
Delon’s star-making turn draws us into a tricky narrative about an even trickier trickster, as themes of impersonation and immorality are explored in this elegant adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’.
Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas admirably in Larrain’s elegantly shot biopic about the troubled final days of the famous opera singer, though it somewhat suffers from a contrived script.
A breathtaking film to look at, this understated Venice Grand Jury Prize winner explores war and gender as a deserting soldier causes tension in a remote Italian commune hidden away in the mountains, and thus spared from the horrors of WWII.
A past-present diptych by Bellocchio that isn’t always tonally executed well, but it remains intriguing as a work about “how we got here” and “where do we go”, as the story of the sinful nun Benedetta and another about an old, vampiric man haunt its similar locale.
Eternality Tan 