Ferreri’s third feature, and the last he directed under the Franco regime in Spain, about an old man who wishes to buy an electric scooter, established him as a European master of black humor.

Starring Marina Vlady as a newlywed who wants to have a baby and Ugo Tognazzi as her boorish husband, The Conjugal Bed is an implacable parable about maternal desire as dictated by society and religion to all women.

In Ferreri’s unforgettable polemical tale set in the circus world, Annie Girardot stars as Maria, an extremely shy orphan living in a convent who is almost totally covered with hair—and who marries an enterprising showman.

A wedding march in four sketches rich with bravura and caustic humor, written for the legendary Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi, Ferreri’s longtime collaborator.

One evening, a successful industrial manager (Marcello Mastroianni) finds himself asking: How much air can a balloon contain? He will seek the answer through the night as this odd question grows into a desperate and increasingly metaphysical quest.

A mix of pop art and existentialist philosophy, Dillinger Is Dead, about the nocturnal wandering of an industrial designer on the brink, is one of Ferreri’s most famous films—and probably his greatest masterpiece.

In one of Ferreri’s most desperate films, the survivors of a plague that has eradicated almost all of humankind (Anne Wiazemsky and Marzio Margine) need to decide whether they should have a child or refuse to repopulate a toxic planet.

An exemplary work of absurdist cinema, L’udienza follows a furloughed young soldier’s efforts to confess a terrible secret to the pope, leading him to meet an assortment of wild characters (portrayed by Claudia Cardinale, Michel Piccoli, and others).

In one of Ferreri’s signature films, four rich men (Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli, and Ugo Tognazzi) gather in a magnificent Parisian villa for a gastronomic blowout—but, in fact, they have decided to die together.

A burlesque and anachronic revisiting of the Battle of Little Bighorn transposed to the center of Paris, Ferreri’s political farce lights the fuse of a glorious icon of American mythology.

Among Ferreri’s most underrated films, The Last Woman follows a tragic romance between a single father (Gérard Depardieu) and his child’s young caregiver (Ornella Muti).

In Ferreri’s first film shot in the United States, Gérard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni star as two men trying to understand the world in which they live and coping with the decline of man and the rise of woman.

One of Ferreri’s gentlest films, this 1980 Berlinale Silver Bear–winning film stars Roberto Benigni as a kindergarten teacher who falls in love with the mother of one of his students.

In Ferreri’s radical portrait of an artist, inspired by the short stories of Charles Bukowski, Ben Gazzara stars as a drunken poet who wanders the streets of Los Angeles.

Ferreri’s long-standing engagement with the feminism of his day finds one of its strongest expressions in this film about a love triangle, starring Hanna Schygulla, Niels Arestrup, and a pregnant Ornella Muti.

A humanitarian organization sends six trucks loaded up with supplies and provisions to combat starvation in the Sahel desert—but the true colors of the group’s volunteers are revealed when they yield to their pettiest, most selfish impulses.

Adelina (Ingrid Thulin), once crowned a beauty queen, has lost her teeth in the nursing home. She falls in love with another patient, and their mutual desire shocks all of the home’s young nurses and employees.

In Ferreri’s last romantic masterpiece, a down-on-his-luck piano player in a bar meets the perfect woman and begins an intense love affair, only for her to decide abruptly to leave him.

In Ferreri’s final fiction feature, a middle-aged, half-broke salesman becomes convinced that his meticulously maintained diary could become a literary masterpiece.