Annie Gorassini Movies

An ambitious Italian financier (Vittorio Gassman) will stop at nothing to further his economic expansion. He forsakes old friends, relatives and his wife as he compromises his integrity in the pursuit for more money. He becomes a shameless bootlicker for a wealthy man who can help his financial gains. The ambitious money-grabber gets what he wants in the way of money, but sabotages everything else in his greed, leaving him a rich but lonely recluse in this ironic drama. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Cult Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci's second "Franco & Ciccio" comedy of 1965, this science fiction-themed farce casts popular comedians Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia as a pair of bumbling Russian cosmonauts aboard the spaceship Popov. Their ship loses contact with base, and Soviet space program officials are loathe to face the international humiliation of losing two astronauts, so they send up a second spaceship, a twin of the first. Locating a pair of Italian thieves (also played by Franchi and Ingrassia) who are dead ringers for the lost cosmonauts, the Russians kidnap them and send them up in the duplicate rocketship. Upon their return, the thieves are welcomed as the real thing by their wives and families, but that's when the confusion begins, as the original spaceship returns with the real cosmonauts, setting up a number of farcical situations. Monica Randal and Linda Sini co-star with Enzo Andronico, Maria Silva, and Lino Banfi (credited here as "Pasquale Zagaria," perhaps to fulfill contractual obligations in the Italian-Spanish co-production). The boys returned under Fulci's direction a month later in I Due Parà. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Fresh off of the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque." 8 1/2 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s, inspiring such later films as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and even Lucio Fulci's Italian splatter film Un Gatto nel Cervello (1990). ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi