Considered by many the first neorealist masterpiece, Visconti’s bombshell debut is a sexy, sweaty adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, blending a torrid saga of lust, murder, and betrayal with an earthy evocation of underclass life.

In Visconti’s Sicilian masterpiece, a fisherman’s budding leadership of the local labor force threatens the price-fixing schemes of wholesalers all too willing to put down an incipient rebellion.

Visconti deftly blends showbiz satire with heart-tugging pathos in this neorealist melodrama, starring Anna Magnani as a delusional Roman stage mother obsessed with making her daughter a movie star.

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.

Marcello Mastroianni is a lonely flâneur who meets and falls in love with fragile Maria Schell amidst the fog-shrouded night world of the Tuscan canal city of Livorno in Visconti’s ravishing adaptation of a classic short story by Dostoevsky.

Luchino Visconti’s rich, expansive masterpiece, the story of a mother and her grown sons who head north from Lucania in search of work, has an emotional intensity and tragic grandeur matched by few other films.

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.

With Sandra, Visconti traded The Leopard’s elegiac grandeur for something grittier and pulpier—the Electra myth in the form of a gothic melodrama, starring Claudia Cardinale as a woman who returns to her ancestral home in Tuscany and has a reckoning with her family’s dark wartime past.

Visconti brilliantly translates Albert Camus’s landmark work of existential humanism to the screen in this shattering adaptation.

Visconti’s symphony of decadence chronicles the downfall of the Essenbecks, a wealthy German family (led by Dirk Bogarde and Ingrid Thulin) with business to the Nazis.

Visconti’s exquisite adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella is a piercing meditation on mortality, sexuality, beauty, and the longing for youth, starring Dirk Bogarde in a career-capping performance of tragic vulnerability.

Visconti’s remarkable film about the life and death of Bavaria’s King Ludwig II is an opulent, complex study of romantic ambition in the era of 19th century decadence starring Helmut Berger.

One of Visconti’s most profoundly personal films is a provocative essay on class, art, sex, and death, starring Burt Lancaster as a retired professor whose dignified solitude is upended by a turbulent marchesa and her bisexual boy toy.

In his final film, Visconti offers a poisonous variation on the theme that consumed his career—the moral decay of the soul-sick aristocracy—while achieving a masterful synthesis of stylistic splendor and emotional intensity.

Visconti directs Anna Magnani, Romy Schneider, and Silvana Mangano in this potent trio of offbeat, often comic shorts drawn from omnibus films We, the Women; Boccaccio ’70; and The Witches.