Franco Citti

This series of nine vignettes adapted from Boccaccio’s timeless classic explores infidelity, sexual discovery, and deception in medieval Naples.

Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.

In this erotic comedy inspired by the classic folk tales, a series of travelers share their stories of bravery, tragedy, romance, and mystery.

After mercenaries capture and torture an African pacifist, the regime hesitates to assassinate him, fearing his martyrdom.

Two 19th-century rogues, undaunted by vulgarization of the holy, compete with one another by telling tales of life's excesses.

Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Highlighting director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed, MAMMA ROMA offers an unflinching, neorealistic look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy. Though initially banned in the country for obscenity, today the film remains a classic, featuring a powerhouse performance by one of cinema’s greatest actors and offering a glimpse at Pasolini in the process of finding his style.

Stalked by a killer after witnessing a murder, a woman and her boyfriend must unmask the maniac before they become the next victims.

Glimpses of Chaucer penning his famous work are sprinkled through this re-enactment of several of his stories.

The adopted son of a preacher comes upon a village that is under the thumb of a deranged ex-Confederate officer, who is - among other things - stealing land from the locals with phony land grants.