One of the most remarkable films ever made about the Italian working class, Ermanno Olmi’s The Fiancés (I fidanzati) is also a love story of sorts. More particularly, it’s about the strain placed on an engaged couple by their separation once the man, Giovanni, relocates from Milan, where he works as a welder in a […]
Daily Archives: June 10, 2008
I am adding the entry below to my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain & Portugal List. Austere, sad, overwhelming, Ermanno Olmi’s Il mestiere delle armi is one of the great war films. Revolving around Giovanni de Medici, who led papal troops in Charles V’s early sixteenth-century war against the Pope, it owes something […]
Writer-director Andreas Kleinert’s moody, melodramatic Im Namen der Unschuld reflects dislocations wrought by German reunification. The setting is the former East Germany—a small town on the Baltic Sea. Anna Loeser, a former professor of literature, is a voluntary patient at a mental hospital. Marie, her college-age daughter, is murdered in the woods, her body dumped […]
Dennis Grunes 