Italian films shine at the 2025 London Film Festival
From Bellocchio to Sorrentino, great directors back to their best lead an impressive year
After a couple of years in which few Italian films were shown at the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival, this one, which recently finished and which broke all attendance records, screened several, including films by great Italian directors bringing their best work in years.
After two disappointing films, Paolo Sorrentino returned to form with La Grazia, and another starring role for the great Toni Servillo playing a liberal Italian president, not this time based on anyone real, nearing the end of his term of office and deciding whether to grant clemency to two killers in extenuating circumstances. Mourning his wife but assisted by his daughter, he relaxes in an opulent villa listening to hip hop on his headphones. As in Sorrentino’s best work this is a beautiful and original film with an eccentric and compelling lead character.
Another masterpiece was delivered by Gianfranco Rosi whose Sotto le nuvole is a gorgeous and deeply moving black and white documentary about Naples, whose centuries of tumultuous history have played out beneath the fumes of Vesuvius. At the heart of this film are the patient and dedicated staff of the fire brigade fielding calls ranging from panicked earthquake enquiries to an eccentric asking the time to a harrowing call from a woman attacked by her husband. We also visit raided Roman tombs, the stores of the archaeological museum, the seismic monitoring station and follow a team of racehorses training in the sea.
The great veteran director Marco Bellocchio, still prolific at 85, brought the first two episodes of his six part series Portobello, about the arrest of the popular TV host Enzo Tortora for association with the Camorra in an infamous miscarriage of justice in the 1980s. The full series will air on HBO Max early next year.
The fascinating experimental film maker Pietro Marcello returned with Duse, a conventional but powerful account of the last years of the great actress Eleonora Duse, with a bravura performance by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, as she emerges after the First World War for her final tours and is reunited with her former lover Gabriele D’Annunzio, interspersed with vividly colourised archive footage.
The impressive Italian contributions also included the satirical road movie Il rapimento di Arabella, the folk horror fable La valle dei sorrisi and the outrageous giallo pastiche Reflection in a Dead Diamond, a French co-production, while lovely Italian settings were the best thing about two major American releases: George Clooney as Jay Kelly, a movie star finding himself in Tuscany and Paul Mescal as a gifted chorister in the golden Roman light of The History of Sound.