Editorial Review

With its subtle mixture of wartime hardship, comedic interludes, and a hallucinatory hint of Italian magic realism, Read more

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Reviews (11)

excellent movie, speedy delivery
The movie is first rate and I was delighted with how quickly it arrived.

Love obscure foreign films.....but
This movie is just such a snooze and full of random
this movie and "Cinema Paradiso": a choice of dreams
I was stunned by the "editorial review" above stating: "the dreamy nostalgia, while not satisfying as 'Cinema Paradiso'...". How curious for me is the fascination of the american public with "Cinema Paradiso", a mediocre, sentimental telenovela crafted to make people sigh and cry (just above the level of "The English Patient").
Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    2. Movie   

Features

• NTSC

Reviews (2)

One of the top ten gem movies of the eighties !
Two films of the Tavianni brothers are to my mind part of this legendary choice . This one and the night of the shooting stars .
Italian immigrants find Hollywood, hope, and tragedy
This film places two young Italian immigrants in a true historical setting of moviemaking in the early1900s.The two handsome young architects leave Italy to find work in America because their father's architect business had been failing, and they promised him they would make money in America and then bring him over.When the young men arrive, no one will hire them for the type of skilled work they are capable of, and end up with humiliating jobs that keep them stuck in poverty.Read more

Subjects:  1. Feature Film-drama   

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Reviews (3)

Extremely Bizarre, but in a good way
I watched Kaos last night for my Italian Culture class. There are 4 parts but the first 3 struck me particularly. The first one "L'otro Figlio" or "The Other Son" was a sad story but I really liked it. The main character for this segment, Mariagracia, gave a riveting performance.
"from our land of tears"
Produced by Raitelevisione Italiana, this film set in Sicily and directed by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, consists of four stories based on Luigi Pirandello's "Le Novelle per un Anno", and has some spectacular cinematography by Giuseppe Lanci and a gorgeous score by Nicola Piovani. Italian Beauty
This is an excellent, beautiful Italian movie. In 4 different parts, which are movies on their own, the Taviani-brothers tell the gripping, sometimes hilarious stories of Italian fellowmen from their history and from present times. Stunning landscapes, rich colours, excellent acting and mere suspense make this movie to one of the tops of Italian filmhistory. For me it is already a classic and the best untill now of the highly talenhted Taviania-brothers. Go, and see. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign Film - Italian    2. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    3. Movie   

Features

• NTSC

Reviews (4)

Sentimental Horse Exhaust!!!
Phew...how did the Taviani brothers pull this one off? Well it does have pretty clothes, handsome actors & lovely surroundings. Kind of a Vogue/R�alit�s ambiance. But the corny sentimental, romantic & very SILLY family legend, good grief! This is the Italian equivalent of one of those 1970s Jane Seymour TV-movie bodice-rippers. Llovetrain
Fiorile provides a very entertaining and thought provoking story for any viewer whether he be a casual movie goer wanting to be entertained, or a critic looking for a different perspective on human nature and the way he interacts with the rest of society. An intelligent, well-made film.I loved it.
The acting is excellent and the story is unique.I thoroughly enjoyed watching "Fiorile."Beware, you may need a few tissues during this film! ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Drama    2. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    3. Movie   

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Reviews (4)

Sentimental Horse Exhaust!!!
Phew...how did the Taviani brothers pull this one off? Well it does have pretty clothes, handsome actors & lovely surroundings. Kind of a Vogue/R�alit�s ambiance. But the corny sentimental, romantic & very SILLY family legend, good grief! This is the Italian equivalent of one of those 1970s Jane Seymour TV-movie bodice-rippers. Llovetrain
Fiorile provides a very entertaining and thought provoking story for any viewer whether he be a casual movie goer wanting to be entertained, or a critic looking for a different perspective on human nature and the way he interacts with the rest of society. An intelligent, well-made film.I loved it.
The acting is excellent and the story is unique.I thoroughly enjoyed watching "Fiorile."Beware, you may need a few tissues during this film! ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Drama    2. Foreign Film - Italian    3. Movie   

Features

• Color
• Subtitled
• NTSC

Subjects:  1. Foreign    2. Foreign Film - Italian    3. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    4. Movie   

Editorial Review

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani first garnered critical attention with this adaptation of Gavino Ledda's autobiography, winning both the Golden Palm and the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1977.Gavino's father pulls him out of elementary school at the age of 6 to force him into the life of a Sardinian shepherd, often severely beating him.Yet Gavino's illiteracy spurs him on to eventually earn a university degree on Sardinian dialects. And it's his journey from the cruel, solitary, animal world of shepherding under the yoke of his tyrant Padre, to that of a writer and a linguist that forms the body of this tale.But more, it's a showcase for the talents of the Taviani brothers, whose style keeps us distant from their subject, like a child watching an ant colony.Read more

Features

• Color
• Subtitled
• NTSC

Reviews (10)

Some strange moments, but good, if it's your kind of movie.
No matter how preserving, redemptive, or moving, this 1977 Cannes Festival winner comes across, it has it's strange, weird, sick moments. The story encompasses abuse, brutality, bestiality,religion, oppression, etc.The directors, the Taviani brothers, are great at depicting this barbaric existence.
Harsh but exhilirating
There's no shortage of grit and unpleasantness in Padre Padrone, the kind of film you really couldn't make today - violent child beatings, animals beaten, killed or worse on screen (I really wasn't expecting the montage of donkey and chicken molesting) and a distinct lack of any sentimentality. But the Taviani Brothers' film is still one of the best I've seen this year, turning what could easily have been an exercise in miserablism into a remarkable and occasionally anarchic but always imaginative piece of pure filmmaking. From its great opening, where the real Gavino hands the actor playing his father the stick he will use to beat him as a child, there's an intelligent audacity that manifests itself in a world where animals and even music have voices if you know how to listen: the battle of wills between Gavino and a goat played out in voice over, or the voice overs of the school children whose laughter at Gavino's fate turns to horror as they realize they are next are just two great examples. Some shots manage to be strangely beautiful in spite of their context or even, odd as it sounds, their visual quality - the tracking shot of leaving the village, the long take of the father hurrying home to kill his son. The film also has a superlative use of sound, creating a sense of place out of the sounds as much of the sights in Gavino's first night in the pasture.
father and son relation as never seen before
A great movie full of deep intense moments,fomented by the nasty character of Abramo,the possessive and controlling father of a young Gavino who too soon discovers what's the real life is made of.Filmed in the deeper side of an almost ancient and beautiful Sardinia countryside this film will move you deeply.
Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign    2. Foreign Film - Italian    3. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    4. Movie   

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Subjects:  1. Foreign Film - Italian   

Features

• Color
• Subtitled
• NTSC

Reviews (4)

"This tragedy comes as deliverance."
"Elective Affinities" is set in 19th Century Italy. Widow Carlotta (Isabelle Huppert) and Edouard (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meet again after a twenty-year separation. Their interrupted love affair immediately resumes, and they marry quickly. The blissful couple retreat to Edouard's Tuscany villa, but when he announces that he's invited his friend, architect, Ottone to stay, Carlotta is concerned that their solitude will be ruined. And it is .... Slow, very slow
I was going to write a review of this, but there is little I can add to Peter Shelley's very perceptive review.I will relate my experience with the video.I chose it more or less at random, as I sometimes do (in this way I try to extent my horizons, or at least to come face to face with something different), but partially because it starred French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose work I admire.As I shifted in my seat through the languid development, I thought how odd and how out of sync with a modern story this is!Strangely coy and even "Victorian" for an Italian movie!After some time it occurred to me that the only explanation is that it was adapted from an eighteenth century novel!For some reason The Sorrows of Young Werther came to mind.When I discovered that Elective Affinities was indeed based on a novel by Goethe, I was very pleased with myself until I noticed on the video jacket a reference to Goethe that I must have read and forgotten. don't vote for this one
This 1996 Italian-French co-production by the Taviani brothers is like an imported box of eaten chocolates - pretty but empty. Based on a novel by Goethe, the story reads like a folk tale with a weak ending. The title refers to a love quartet in a Tuscan villa where an aristocratic married couple become involved with the husband's best friend and the wife's goddaughter, and their affections are traded. The Taviani's gives us a laboured chalk-board explaination of this equation, but also a sex scene with imagined interchangeable partners. Goethe gets all mystical in having the product of the night born by the wife, but with features of the best friend and goddaughter. The child however gets an unintentional laugh since it's thick red hair makes it resemble Chucky from the Child Play series. The film is hampered by a narration by Giancarlo Giannini and dubbing of the actors, since it appears only Fabrizio Bentivoglio as the best friend is speaking Italian, and the others French. In spite of my disappointment over the dubbing of Huppert in particular, and her being saddled with an unflattering black wig, she manages to invest her wife with humour and pathos. Ironically the dubbing of Jean-Hugues Anglade as the husband and the Taviani's direction make him less mannered than usual, though his scenes of physical injury recall his indulgent death scene in Queen Margo. The opening image of a drowned statue of Venus made me think this would be a story of female suffering, and though this image is never given any resonance, there is a disproportionate guilt about the situation as Huppert feels guilty and Anglade does not. We may already think that any man who is prepared to give up Isabelle Huppert is a fool but when he also displays no grief over the death of a family member, all empathy goes out the window. The Taviani's style saves this from being a total failure. They provide some nice editing dissolves, a dance on weak wooden boards of a bridge, and a shocking act of refusal to eat. The final image of a child servant crying over a loss like an animal in the wilderness might have worked better if the story had come together in a more satisfying way, and I could have done without the running gag of the same servant carrying luggage according to her employer's whim. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign    2. Foreign Film - Italian    3. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    4. Movie   

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Reviews (2)

a story of finding
I saw the translated version in my country, so I did not hear Julian's voice. But I like the story itself. It has the same atomosphere of Russian film, and it just fit very well the hero's life searching. To Sergio, honour, dignity and faith are important, but he failed in appoaching it. It may be a life's tragedy, but we also adore his honesty, his searching and his pay. The film has good shot utiliazing and music, which made the film like a slowly flowing river and it flowed into the audience's heart.

Julian, What Were You Thinking?
Julian Sands is an actor whose work range from slightly bizarre to fabulous in period costume.As a fan, I've followed his career for years, however, Night Sun is not one of his better performances.The film isstandard period melodrama with too much costume and little content. Although Sands attempts to bring life to a dreary storyline, he'soverwhelmed by the maudlin and predictable characterization.Nothing worksin this film, and perhaps most obnoxious is the dubbing.We all know whata beautiful voice Sands possesses, and to hear him dubbed is plainlyirritating.The film is easily bypassed for better performances by thistalented actor, and better storylines in film worth the attention such as ARoom With A View. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign    2. Foreign Film - Italian    3. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    4. Movie   

Features

• Color
• NTSC

Editorial Review

With its subtle mixture of wartime hardship, comedic interludes, and a hallucinatory hint of Italian magic realism, Read more

Features

• Closed-captioned
• Color
• Original recording reissued
• NTSC

Reviews (11)

excellent movie, speedy delivery
The movie is first rate and I was delighted with how quickly it arrived.

Love obscure foreign films.....but
This movie is just such a snooze and full of random
this movie and "Cinema Paradiso": a choice of dreams
I was stunned by the "editorial review" above stating: "the dreamy nostalgia, while not satisfying as 'Cinema Paradiso'...". How curious for me is the fascination of the american public with "Cinema Paradiso", a mediocre, sentimental telenovela crafted to make people sigh and cry (just above the level of "The English Patient").
Read more

Subjects:  1. Foreign Film - Italian    2. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    3. Movie   

Features

• Color
• Letterboxed
• Subtitled
• NTSC

Reviews (1)

Intriguing tales
This Taviani Brothers film is actually a two-part work in which both pieces are based on stories by famed Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.
Read more

Subjects:  1. Comedy    2. Foreign    3. Foreign Film - Italian    4. Foreign Film [Dub Or Subtitle]    5. Movie