Clara Bindi Movies

Legendary French screen actress Isabelle Huppert headlines this sumptuous, passionate tale, adapted from a novel by belletrist Pascal Quignard (All the Mornings of the World). Huppert stars as Ann, a gifted and brilliant, middle-aged musician whose sense of security falls to pieces when she stumbles onto her husband, Thomas (Xavier Beauvois), kissing another woman. Without hesitation, she abandons him and takes a headlong rush into the arms of a new life. Guided by her musical intuition and the emotional support of a male friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), Ann suddenly realizes how necessary it is for her to latch onto a new identity. She thus embarks on a transnational journey that ultimately takes her to the island of Ischia, Italy, and a palatial house called the Villa Amalia that will change her life. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

In writer/director Paolo Sorrentino's second feature, The Family Friend (L'Amico di Famiglia), Giacomo Rizzo stars as Geremia de Geremei, a sixtysomething tailor who lives with his mother in a disgusting and decrepit flat. Though wealthy from the money that he has culled via loan-sharking, Geremia is a thoroughly miserable wretch, driven into the throes of destruction by his own incredible selfishness and his obsessive infatuation with a beautiful local girl, Rosalba (Laura Chiatta), whom he meets when asked to assist with her wedding. Geremia agrees, but takes the bride off alone and pressures her into sex, little realizing that he's sowing the seeds of his own downfall. Meanwhile, a bidet supplier attempts to goad Geremia into giving him a massive loan -- an amount that Geremia could never possibly fork over. Throughout the film, Sorrentino packs in numerous surrealistic touches, from the sight of a nun buried up to her neck in sand (accompanied by an aural assault on the soundtrack) to a grotesque glimpse of Rizzo with a potato poultice around his head to the jarring sight of Geremia's village, built by Mussolini on an Italian swampland. In the process, Sorrentino manages to create his own distinct world and thoroughly unforgettable characters. He also pulls off an incredibly difficult feat, by enabling the audience to care about a markedly unpleasant central figure. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Generally considered to be the foremost example of Italian Gothic horror, this darkly atmospheric black-and-white chiller put director Mario Bava on the international map and made the bewitching Barbara Steele a star. Steele plays Princess Asa, a high priestess of Satan who is gruesomely executed in 1600s Moldavia by having a spiked mask hammered into her face. Before she dies, Asa vows revenge on the family who killed her and returns from the grave two centuries later to keep her promise. In a striking resurrection scene replete with bats, scorpions and fog, Asa rises from the tomb to claim her bloody vengeance. With vampires, bubbling flesh, dank crypts, undead servants and torch-bearing mobs, the plot is a little ripe, but the visuals are Bava's primary consideration. The atmosphere is so heavy and the imagery so dense that the film becomes nearly too rich in texture, but the sheer, ghastly beauty of it all is entrancing. Although this was only the second of Bava's twenty-six films as director, it is undoubtedly his best and the one upon which most of his considerable reputation rests. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi