Italian Cinema Bel Paese, Brutte Storie

Italy doesn't make films about life. It makes films that are life — noisy, beautiful, corrupt, and stubbornly human. This list spans thirty years of Italian cinema and refuses to be tidy about it. There's operatic crime and quiet domestic grief. There's Sorrentino's baroque melancholy and Virzì's warm, sharp-eyed humanism. There are films about the Mafia, films about fathers who fail their children, films about marriages collapsing at the dinner table.

What holds it together is a certain honesty about the country — its beauty and its rot, its passion and its avoidance, its ability to laugh at exactly the wrong moment.

Start with The Best of Youth or Perfect Strangers. If you already know those, go straight for The Consequences of Love or Our Life.