Best movies like Rossini! Rossini!

Pasquale Bellachioma, the unfortunate Police Commissioner, creates a "master stroke" that can finally put it to light before their superiors, but the results is continuous failure.

The life and loves of great composer Giuseppe Verdi are played against a background of the great operas of the 19th Century. A tender love story of his successful and turbulent life, with more than 20 excerpts from his acclaimed operas.

A poor musician hires a courtesan to pose as his wife so he can "give" her to a wealthy count in return for patronage.

The famous composer's life and his career. His love story with Isabella Colbran, the soprano who was to become his wife and the singer in all his operas up to the unfortunate day she lost her voice.

Nine-year old Reliana witnesses Rossini's efforts to salvage his seemingly cursed new opera, the Barber of Seville.

Roger Daltrey of The Who stars as 19th century genius pianist Franz Liszt in this brash, loud and free-wheeling rock 'n' roll fantasia centered around an imagined rivalry between Liszt and composer Richard Wagner-- painted here as a vampiric harbinger of doom and destruction.

American actress on vacation in Italy falls for her friend's married Italian lover.

Famed composer Gustav Mahler reflects on the tragedies of his life and failing marriage while traveling by train.

We are all equal before the law, but some are just more equal than others.

Vincenzo dedicates his life to the bookshop he owns in Paris and to his daughter Albertine, forced to stay home because of an accident occurred to her a few years earlier. One day Yolande, an exuberant, eccentric, funny and beautiful girl, bursts into Vincenzo’s shop. Charmed by her vital energy, the man starts feeling again emotions he’s been chocking-off for too long, and which will make him question his melancholic and somehow suspended way of facing life.

Niccolò Vivaldi is a cello player and he plays in Arena di Verona Orchestra. But he is not the first and neither the second cello. He is frustrated. Nobody can remember his face, nor his name. Niccolò is married to Costanza, who is really beautiful and he takes some pictures of her naked. Later he shows the pictures to a friend and so he feels better. He starts to write a comic opera called "Il merlo maschio" only to discover later he had written Rossini's "La gazza ladra". To maintain his self-esteem he can only show his wife...

A biopic of 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, who created immortal verses while struggling with a debilitating illness and isolation.

15 years after the monumental "I mostri" which was a great example of Italian sketch comedy, 3 of the greatest Italian directors ever (Risi, Monicelli, Scola) the best Italian writers ever (Age, Scarpelli) the best Italian actors ever (Tognazzi, Gassmann, Sordi) one of the most beautiful woman in the world (Ornella Muti) participate to this great tribute.

A composer rushing to meet a deadline meets a beautiful woman who says she is his biggest fan. However, it turns out that not only is she not a fan, she is a secret agent who has her own reasons for wanting to meet him.

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.

Produced in Italy in breathtaking Technicolor, this biographical story of Puccini (played by L'avventura's Gabriele Ferzetti) spans his creative life from early student days to the height of success, including his early flop Madama Butterfly and his incomplete Turandot. Along the way he encounters three women who change his life, including a sexy, beautiful singer (Two for the Road's Nadia Gray) whom he drops for a small town girl (Sirocco's Marta Toren), and a servant girl who commits suicide over him. Well-selected excerpts from Manon, La Boheme, Madama Butterfly and Turandot are featured along with other Puccini music, including the voice of Beniamino Gigli. Sets, costumes and production values are first class, all sumptuously filmed by Claude Renoir.

Combining musical and dance numbers with comedy sketches (performed by members of The Armando Curcio Company and The Gauthier Ballet Troupe)without any plot, this is more of a revue than a movie, along the lines of The Ed Sullivan television series in the U.S.

This film has the typical air of Italian action/gangster comedies from that period - it is a perfectly charming and funny sort of comedy. The cliches of black and white are wonderfully maintained in this movie as the good guys are clever and witty and the bad ones are bad and pretty dumb. The "Shakespearian" dream of the "good" Mafioso a bit stupid but then a film like that seems in need of a few blunders.

Martha Eggerth heads the cast of Casta Diva, but the central character is famed Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, here played by American actor Phillips Holmes. Paying but scant attention the facts, the film concentrates on Bellini's colorful love life. Evidently the film went through several rewriting processes, as witness the curious performances of Donald Calthrop and Arthur Margetson, whose characters do complete about-faces halfway through the story. Amidst so many British accents, Martha Eggerth's Polish intonations seem out of place, but she photographs beautifully and sings quite well. Casta Diva was attractively filmed on location in Naples. Not to be confused with the 1954 remake (by Gallone himself) or to the English language version "The Divine Spark" (also directed by Gallone and starred by Eggerth).

The amorous adventures of Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, an army officer who finds pleasure with beautiful women in life-threatening situations.

Roberto Razzi, skeptical and convinced atheist, is the conductor of the Futuro program, in which he unmasks the most common tricks and deceptions that make the miracle cry out to everyone.

Three episodes. Episode 1 - The Refrigerator (Monicelli). A married couple of two poor emigrant workers spend almost all their money to buy a refrigerator (a must in the '70s). The purchase is too expensive for their family balance sheet. To earn some money they decide to go for prostitution. The wife is not so unhappy to the perspective. Episode 2 - The Room (Sordi). To celebrate ten years of marriage a couple decides to spend a quick holiday in top luxury hotels in Sardinia. But the fashion luxury VIP world is too hard to enter; they soon will end in prison. Episode 3 - The Lion (De Sica). Two adulterous, Antonio and Giulia, are blocked by a lion, staying on the exit in the place they met. They both have to come back home, but couldn't move because of the lion’s presence. The critical situation soon drives them to their limit, revealing their real essence.

Leone is a rich and powerful man whose loneliness drives him to hire a cast of actors to play the family he never had. On Christmas Eve, reality and make-believe start to get blurred.

Four different directors present lighthearted stories about married Italian couples and their dilemmas with jealousy, sex and love.

The end of a love story, told in fourteen different styles: from comedy to western, from noir to thriller, silent movie and so on.

Based on the tragicomedy written by Edoardo de Filippo in 1931, Christmas at the Cupiello's captures a life episode of a middle-class Italian family around Christmas. Shot in Neapolitan language, the movie has a whimsical charm.

Enea chases after the myth he bears in his name; he does so to feel alive in a dead and decadent age. He does so together with Valentino, a newly baptized aviator. The two, in addition to dealing and partying, share youth. Lifelong friends, victims and perpetrators of a corrupt world, but moved by an incorruptible vitality. Beyond the boundaries of rules, on the other side of morality, there is a sea full of humanity and symbols to be discovered. Enea and Valentino will fly over it to the furthest extremes. However, drugs and the underworld are the invisible shadow of a story about something else: a melancholy father, a brother fighting at school, a mother defeated by love and a beautiful girl, a happy ending and a happy death, a palm tree falling on a glass world.

A drama based on the life of 18th century Italian lyricist Lorenzo da Ponte, who collaborated with Mozart on his "Don Giovanni" opera.

In Pietro Mascagni's tragic opera, a soldier returns home from war to reclaim his former fiancée, only to find that she's married someone else in his absence, leading to jealousy, betrayal, and murder.

Based on a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott and set against the backdrop of feudal Scotland, "La Donna del Lago" is one of Gioacchini Rossini's finest operas -- yet it's rarely performed. This video gives viewers a rare opportunity to see the work in its entirety. Filmed at Italy's famed Teatro alla Scala in 1992 and staged by German film director Werner Herzog, the opera features vocalists Ricardo Muti and June Anderson in leading roles.

The Teatro Regio di Torino from Italy stars in this 1985 performance of Rossini's classic opera. Leading the all-star cast are Lella Cuberi, Daniela Dessi, Rockwell Blake, and Antonio Savastano. The orchestra is conducted by Gabriele Ferro.

The life and work of master Italian filmmaker Mario Monicelli (1915-2010).