Giorgio Nocella Movies
- 1983
The inhumanity of heroin in this 1983 film is not completely different from the soon-to-break AIDS epidemic, in that seduction disguises death within its pleasures, and death rarely comes immediately or painlessly. Drawn by boredom or pushed by the crush of an uncaring environment, a few teens become hooked on heroin in this story that is set in Ostia, a bleak Roman seaport, a wasteland of the industrial age. The teens have battered, black-and-blue arms that reflect their surroundings and their similarly mangled lives of prostitution and/or armed robbery. One teen convulses from a bad mix of cocaine (with the monument to the dead filmmaker Pasolini in the background - he was killed in Ostia in 1975). While the dying teen is sped off to the hospital, her lover's fate is not much different than her own, and only slightly more violent. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
A divorced middle-aged Italian film director (Tomas Millian) is seeking meaning and love in both his life and his film. He becomes involved with an aristocratic woman, but trouble ensues when he begins to receive anonymous threats demanding that he abandon the relationship. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the director begins seeing an actress who works in experimental plays. She too leaves after telling him that she is carrying another man's child. In his quest for meaning, all the director manages to find is meaningless sex and lots of metaphors for isolation and abandonment: fog, open doors, empty landscapes. ~ John Voorhees, Rovi
- Starring:
- Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, (more)
Director Francesco Rosi earned a Best Foreign Film Academy Award nomination for his drama Tre Fratelli (Three Brothers), an adaptation of a work by Andrei Platonov. When the matriarch of an Italian family dies, the husband brings his three boys, each of whom are facing difficult personal problems, back to their farmhouse. Raffaele (Philippe Noiret) is a judge who fears being executed over the politically unsettling case over which he is presiding. Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) is quite religious and dreams of helping troubled teenagers. Nicola (Michele Placido) is a worker involved in a labor dispute as well as a failed marriage. Each of the men grieves in his own way, while also wrestling with the other emotional issues that are pressing on them. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
- Starring:
- Philippe Noiret, Michele Placido, (more)
Lafayette (Gerard Depardieu), a young-ish misfit Frenchman and Nocello (Marcello Mastroianni), an older misfit Italian, live in a run-down section of New York City and are friends. Lafayette works for Flaxman (James Coco), an excitable antiquarian who owns and runs something called the "Roman Museum," by means of which he upholds the standards of a former age. Lafayette also works for a women's lib group, which one day decides to "rape" him to see how the shoe fits on the other foot. Rather than being much bothered, Lafayette starts a liaison with the woman who actually had sex with him. In this rambling tale, these men are shown to have great difficulty enduring intense emotions, and the situations that arise force them to confront this difficulty repeatedly. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Gérard Depardieu, Marcello Mastroianni, (more)
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