The best Io Apolloni’s movies

This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.

French novelist Henri-Francois Rey adapted his novel Les Pianos Mecaniques with director Juan Antonio Bardem for this French/Italian/Spanish co-production, set in Spain. Vincent (Hardy Kruger) is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a seaside village on the Costa Brava. He enters into an affair with nightclub owner Jenny (Melina Mercouri), but their relationship changes when she falls for alcoholic author Pascal Regnier (James Mason), who is struggling to resume his writing career. Vincent eventually returns home, leaving Jenny to stay on with Pascal and his young son Daniel (Didier Haudepin). Their love enables him to start writing again.

Young Jesus is taken on a vacation by his parents (Rita Blanco, Adriano Luz) to a deserted beach resort. They accidentally fall into overnight wealth after Jesus digs in the sand, uncovering a large drug stash. Others characters intersecting here include an alcoholic actress, a philandering banker, a general trafficking in arms, priests who close their church and head north as hitchhikers, politicians who watch an all-girl production of Julius Caesar, and beggars who recite a children's story in a huge heap of trash.

Hipólito is a self-made man, who went up in life in devious ways, and used for profit the social turmoil when Portugal changed from a monarchy into a republic, and then to a military regime. Finally, he is forced into exile. Back in 1935 to family, friends, and lovers, he is in a mix-mesh of lies, and scheming, again.

Johnny Durán, who is seventeen years old and son of a multimillionaire, arrives to Madrid for hollidays. In the capital he become friend of a group of boys and girls with whom he shares great moments; but soon he realice that they are a clan of thugs and decides to distance themselves. He also meets Paula, daugther of an italian family that is travelling, and they both feel atracted by each other. Since then, started happening a serie of unexpected events which the guy will have to solve with tenacity and responsibility.

In 1974, not long after the death of Portuguese dictator Salazar, who had ruled Portugal from the early '30s to the late '60s, a group of disgruntled Army officers held a coup. They were even more disgruntled when they realized how the coup was being manipulated by leftist officers to instigate genuine elections and establish a constitution for the first time in Portuguese history. Though their intent was to form a radical socialist state, circumstances prevented this, and a genuine parliamentary democracy emerged. This film explores the circumstances of a right-wing businessman during those times. The man is an old-fashioned authoritarian, whose attentiveness to the needs of his mistress, wife and son is crude where it exists at all.