Chiara Caselli Movies

A fresh-faced law student and a crafty card shark form a volatile friendship based on mutual treachery in Maximum Velocity director Daniele Vicari's adaptation of Gianrico Carofiglio's best-selling novel. At first, all fast friends Giorgio (Elio Germano) and Francesco (Michele Riondino) were interested in was playing a little poker and making some extra cash, but it didn't take long for greed to take hold and before long the pair had begun their fateful descent down the slippery slope of criminality. After realizing the profit they could make by rigging the game, the two con artists realized that in order to maintain their lavish lifestyle they would have to get creative. Before long, Giorgio and Francesco were dealing drugs and making a killing. But the further down the rabbit hole they ventured, the more detached Giorgio grew from his middle-class family and the more unpredictable his partner in crime became. By the time a sinister, more violent side of Francesco's personality began to emerge, it was far too late for turning back. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Italian director Carmine Amoroso's politically tinged, slice-of-life seriocomedy Cover Boy... Last Revolution details the wild, unpredictable, and bittersweet experiences of Ioan (Eduard Gabia), an illegal Romanian immigrant who passes into Italy undetected and attempts to eke out a life for himself in the land of Caesar. After an introductory montage of stock footage dramatizing Romanian political history -- including the fall of Ceausescu -- Amoroso moves into Ioan's personal story. When his father, Florin (Gabriel Spahiu), is shot dead in Bucharest, Ioan accepts an invitation from a friend to travel with him to Italy, but en route, authorities discover the friend's illegal immigrant status and promptly deport him, leaving Ioan to fend for himself. In a seemingly chance encounter, the young traveler meets Michele (Luca Lionello), a fourtysomething who promptly invites Ioan to share a room with him -- never admitting his sublimated gay attraction to the newcomer. For a time, Ioan struggles to keep himself afloat with menial jobs -- until a sexy and enterprising young fashion photographer notices Ioan and sees in him Milan's freshest modeling sensation. She thus ensures that Ioan's life will never be the same. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Director Dario Argento, best known for his stylishly bloody horror films, revisits the style and themes of his early directorial efforts in this tense crime thriller. A prostitute (Barbara Lerici) discovers one of her customers has a taste for much rougher sex than she's willing to give him; trying to sneak away from her john, she accidentally walks off with one of his scrapbooks, from which she discovers her client apparently committed a series of unsolved murders almost 20 years earlier. The john tracks down the prostitute and murders her to insure her silence; this awakens in him the desire to kill again, and soon he's once again leaving a bloody swath across Italy. Ulisse Moretti (Max Von Sydow), the police detective who investigated the earlier wave of killings, is brought out of retirement when clues link the new murders to those committed in the early '80s, and the aging cop finds his sometimes foggy memory jolted back to recognition by the growing number of bloody victims. Meanwhile, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), whose saw his mother being killed by the murderer as a boy, learns that the killer is back at work, and sets out to investigate the case on his own. Non Ho Sonno features an original musical score by the rock band Goblin, who also wrote music for a number of Argento's best-known films. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Rolando Stefanelli directs this drama about Romano (Stefano Dionisi), a hard-drinking loser hailing from Rome. Without a penny and without many options, Romano accepts an offer to transport a large amount of hashish to Amsterdam for his buddy Italo (Vittorio Amandola). Needing an escort to make the sojourn look legitimate, Romano asks his girlfriend, but she steadfastly refuses. Out of desperation, he invites Alba (Chiara Caselli), who he had a turbulent two-year relationship with previously. Both quietly hope that they can make amends, but Romano's compulsive lying as to the true nature of the trip and his general lack of sobriety strains their relationship. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Chili-born Italian director Marco Bechis's second feature is a political drama based on his experiences with the military regime of Argentina (1976-1980) when he lived there. Maria (Antonella Costa) is a militant activist in an organization that is fighting the oppressive dictatorship. She teaches reading and writing in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in an area of shantytowns. She lives in a decrepit rooming house with her mother Diane (Dominique Sanda), who rents out some rooms. One of the lodgers, a shy young man named Felix (Carlos Echeverria), is in love with Maria. He seems to have come from nowhere and is supposed to be working in a garage. One morning, Maria is kidnapped by a military squad in civilian clothes in front of her mother and is taken to the garage 'Olimpo,' one of the many well-known torture places in the city, which operate to the general indifference of the inhabitants. Tigre, the head of the center (Enrique Pineyro) appoints their best man -- Felix -- to the job of making Maria talk. Felix is overcome by his feelings for Maria, but Maria is determined to exploit the situation for her survival. Tender love scenes between Maria and Felix enhance the story, but the intensity never reaches the heights of some of the classics of the world cinema with a similar theme, such as The Night Porter. Bechis exerts too much control over his characters and narrative to allow an emotional rupture. 52nd Cannes Film Festival, 1999. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Rovi

The journey in this road movie begins in Sicily as Giovanni (Roberto De Francesco) heads for compulsory military service in Bolzano, near the Austrian border, although his cousin (Renato Carpentieri) wants him to skip out on military service so they can go into business together in Australia. Arriving early in Bolzano, Giovanni meets Loredana (Chiara Caselli) and follows her to Cortina where he runs out of money. His odyssey through life, love and friendships continues as he pushes onward through Tuscany, Rome, and Venice, eventually finding a freighter headed for Australia. Shown at the 1997 Venice Film Festival, this film is also known as Five Stormy Days. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi

The many ways in which men are fascinated, compelled, and confused by their attraction to women are explored in this four part drama. As a filmmaker (John Malkovich) tries to sort out his plans for his next film, he considers several stories about women and the men who love them. Silvano (Kim Rossi Stuart) meets Carmen (Ines Sastre) and immediately asks her for a date, but despite his attraction, he can't follow through on his feelings for her. The director spies a woman on the streets (Sophie Marceau) and follows her obsessively, but when he finally meets her, he's disappointed, despite their mutual physical attraction. Roberto (Peter Weller) and his wife Patricia (Fanny Ardant) have to deal with their anger about each other's infidelities, as well as their problems with their lovers, Olga (Chiara Caselli) and Carlo (Jean Reno). And Niccolo (Vincent Perez) falls in love at first sight with a young woman (Irene Jacob), unaware that she is studying to become a nun. Par-Dela Les Nuages was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film after a massive stroke derailed his directorial career in 1985; Wim Wenders served as his collaborator on the project. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In this cynical comedy, an renowned, out-of-work, unpublished "underground" writer from formerly Communist Poland is driven to unusually desperate measures in order to get his work published. Stan (Jiri Menzel) has been living in the attic apartment of his ex-wife's home, which he shares with a journalist friend (Andre Dussolier). One day, he has an accident which convinces his ex-wife and her current husband (Anna Romantowska and Pierre Arditi) that he's suicidal, and they hastily contact a media representative to see if some sort of publicity can't be arranged so that Stan's work can be published and they can benefit, if not from the money, then from their association with him. The organization they contact says that they will be happy to publish his writings, if he will commit suicide live, on television, in St. Peter's square, while the Pope is delivering an address. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Isabella is the much-loved child of a movie producer, growing up in the 1950s. Key moments in her life are seen as she returns each summer to her family's vacation home on the seaside in Tuscany. The argumentative family has its ups and downs, some of them as a result of successes or reverses in the father's moviemaking career. Practically the only member of the family who doesn't fuss and quarrel all the time is Isabella's mother, her father's second wife. All her siblings are the children of the first wife. Isabella has a "toy" that any movie buff would love to play with: a movieola, a machine usually reserved for film editors who can view the film or films they are working on at their own pace, stopping or reversing the action and running it at any speed. The films she plays on hers indicate what stage she is at in her life, as she grows from an insecure girl to a confident woman. This family drama and coming-of-age story is based on the recollections of filmmaker Fiorella Infascelli, who grew up in the household of her producer father Carlo Infascelli. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Several different stories are brought together by the end of this film, which chronicles how a number of Italians spend, or mis-spend their Saturday evenings prior to becoming acquainted during an auto collision. In one appealing story, a stripper agrees to do her act for a group of well-heeled teenagers while their parents are away. When the mother of one of them returns and calls the cops on her, the boys who arranged her performance run away with her, and she and the lads become friendly. In another story, two adrenaline-addicted, druggy girls allow themselves to be picked up by a pair of novice womanizers. In another story, the stakes in a poker game grow uncomfortably high and involve bets which have nothing to do with money. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this coming-of-age drama, based on a novel by Charles Juliet, François is a sensitive and thoughtful student at a military boarding school in 1948. He is fourteen and an orphan, and the French are still fighting in Indochina, as they will continue to do for many years. He believes he will be sent to fight there when he graduates, and he is sure he will die in that far-away place. While he sees himself as stubbornly principled, others, including the school's bullies, simply see him as stubborn and a nuisance besides. In fact, his humiliation by the school's bullies is so constant that one of his persistent fantasies is to become a skilled boxer and trounce them all. That is one reason why he has become fixated on one of the school's military instructors, a handsome sergeant who was a championship boxer. While there may be an unformed erotic component to his fixation, it does not manifest overtly but adds fuel to his sexual initiation with the sergeant's wife. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi