Bernardo Bertolucci’s singularly ambitious, sprawling account of the contemporaneous development of fascism and communism in Italy as expressed through the shifting relationship of two childhood friends (Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu) is one of cinema’s great historical epics.

Marcello Mastroianni is an aging political revolutionary questioning his commitment to the cause of liberating the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in this hallucinatory, 19th-century-set period oddity, which features an inspired Ennio Morricone score.

Gianni Franciolini’s blockbuster is a rich and lively satire on power about the last king of Naples before the unification of Italy, featuring an all-star cast led by the two great De Filippo brothers, Peppino and Eduardo.

Toni Servillo and captivating comedians Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone lead the stellar cast in this adventure comedy about two Sicilians who, for less-than-noble reasons, join Garibaldi’s volunteers to liberate Sicily and immediately desert—a bitter reflection of an Italy that got off to a rocky start.

Luchino Visconti reached new heights of epic grandeur with his sweeping, Palme d’Or–winning account of political upheaval and generational sea change in Risorgimento-era Italy, starring Burt Lancaster as the patriarch of a ruling-class Bourbon family in the last gasps of its dominance.

A tragic episode from the Risorgimento—the peasant uprisings brutally suppressed by the army—is brought to light in Florestano Vancini’s bold and unflinching film, shot with the immediacy of a documentary.

In the midst of a season of political cinema, the Taviani brothers explore new formal approaches by adapting Brecht’s teachings to the screen in a dramatic tale of revolutionary illusions, centered on an anarchist who attempts to spark a revolt in a village in Umbria but fails and is arrested.

Luchino Visconti’s lavish, operatic Risorgimento-set melodrama about a 19th-century Venetian countess torn between loyalty to her country and a dissolute Austrian officer is a key link between the neorealist grit of his early work and the grand-scale historical spectacles to come.

Mario Martone’s stirring drama centers on a young goatherd living on the island of Capri in 1914, alongside a commune of free-spirited Northern European artists and intellectuals who have retreated to the lush Mediterranean idyll to put their fledgling ideologies into practice.

This clever Belle Époque Italian western turns a tour of Italy undertaken by Buffalo Bill (John C. Reilly) and his gang of cowboys into a surprising and anti-conventional depiction of the clash of capitalism, spectacle, and political power in early-20th-century Italy.

A story of greed and disillusionment in 19th-century Tuscany, from an elegant and sophisticated director, is illuminated by contemporary insights thanks to the presence of the very young Jean-Paul Belmondo and Claudia Cardinale.

A disorienting, harrowing account of fighting on the Alpine Front during World War I, between 1916 and 1917, Francesco Rosi’s anti-war war film remains a gritty and chaotic provocation.

In this enveloping adaptation of a Jack London novel, Martin Eden is a dissatisfied prole with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university student.

Five episodes, spanning from 1900 to 1943 through the Belle Époque and the fascist era, tell the story of Italy through romantic tales—some comic, some tragic.

A bearded and bespectacled Marcello Mastroianni gives one of his finest, most sincere performances in this rousing, up-with-the-people paean to resistance about a tense textile factory strike in turn-of-the-century Turin.

A bittersweet and nostalgic comedy about the world of Italian bureaucracy during the Belle Époque, depicted with inspiration drawn from period illustrations and featuring cameos by numerous stars.

Laura Samani’s solo debut feature is a richly traced drama about a woman’s efforts to resurrect her stillborn daughter, imbued with the air of an unsentimental fairy tale, and set in 1900 in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.

On the surface, a nostalgic film about the director’s adolescence, this film—one of Federico Fellini’s and Italian cinema’s masterpieces, and winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film—is also a sweeping anthropological portrait of fascism as a pathology of Italy.

A young man becomes a bandit under fascism, but even after liberation, his thirst for justice leads the authorities to persecute him. This forgotten epic fresco of Southern Italy was censored to remove politically sensitive scenes and was not seen in its original version until 2012.

A seminal depiction of life in the age of fascism, Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, one of the great political films of its time and an enduring psychological autopsy of the fascist mindset, follows a repressed man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who gets caught up in the hegemonic fascist regime.

This classic, Oscar-winning drama, set amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, chronicles the plight of the wealthy, intellectual Finzi-Contini family, whose estate serves as a gathering place for the local Jewish community amid growing anti-Semitism.

Giancarlo Giannini won the Best Actor prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival for his turn in Lina Wertmüller’s tragicomic tale, set in the early 1930s, of an anarchist who plans to assassinate Mussolini with help from a Roman sex worker.

The film that announced Italian neorealism—and Roberto Rossellini and Anna Magnani as major forces in international cinema—this devastating look at life in Nazi-occupied Rome sent shockwaves through the world and retains its devastating, paradigm-shifting power.

She’s a conservative Mussolini supporter; he’s a homosexual enemy of the state. But after a chance meeting, the two share a life-changing day in 1938 that will challenge their assumptions about people, politics, and sexuality. Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren deliver virtuoso performances.

A widow (Sophia Loren, in an Oscar-winning role) and her daughter find peace (and an affable Marxist played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the countryside during World War II, but their idyll is shattered on their way back to Rome.

At the end of World War II, the arrival of a deserter in a small mountain village disrupts the delicate balance of the community. Maura Delpero’s intimate film about a remote world offers a modern and thought-provoking take on the past and the relationships between men and women.

The life of Benito Mussolini receives one of its most probing, sophisticated treatments at the hands of Marco Bellocchio through his focus on the figure of Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s first wife, whom he abandons during his rise to power.

A throng of tobacco farmers working on an estate live in a state of extreme deprivation, but nothing is what it seems in Alice Rohrwacher’s transfiguring and transfixing fable, which touches on perennial class struggle and enters the realm of parable.