The best Massimo Bonetti’s drama movies

Gaetano and Delia, a separated couple, try to pick up the pieces of their broken love, recalling all the faults and the mistakes which led them to where they are now.

The Night of San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars, is the night when dreams come true in Italian folklore. In 1944, a group of Italians flee their town after hearing rumours that the Nazis plan to blow it up and that the Americans are about to arrive to liberate them.

Five stories center on a werewolf, a feudal landlord, peasants, a ghost, and a mother and her sons.

The life of the virgin and martyr Santa Maria Goretti

A story of how World War II affected the lives of a German family and an American family, both of whom had sons and fathers fighting in the war.

At a farmhouse, a large family cooks mountains of food for the next day's engagement party for Silvia and her city fiancé, Angelo. Her parents feud about infidelity; an aging salesman who rents a cottage from them arrives with a young French woman; in Bologna, Angelo's mother frets that her son is marrying beneath him; his sisters are less critical. Early the next morning, the four of them go by train to the farmhouse, joined by Angelo's married, unpregnant sister. The day-long dinner is riotous, couples display affection and impatience, children chase angels. Angelo's family stays the night, and his sister Linda has a visitor. A silver elephant makes the perfect gift.

Based on Leo Tolstoy's novel, Father Sergius, Night Sun stars Julian Sands as Sergio, a nobleman in 18th-century Italy who is expected to marry a duchess, Nastassja Kinski. Upon learning that she was previously the King's mistress, Sergio turns his back on society and becomes a monk. While at the hermitage he tries to resist all sexual temptations before him and soon becomes known as a miracle worker. Eventually he succumbs to a young seductress and knowing he is undeserving of the adulation, leaves the hermitage to travel around as a homeless beggar.

The annual film festival in Venice is, of course, an ideal place to make a film (how come no-one has thought of it before). Everything is there in Pupi Avati's Festival: the famous hotels Des Bain and Excelsior on the Lido, the shimmering sandy beach which captivated Visconti. The film was made last spring and exploits the presence of passing film stars such as Jack Nicholson. We see the hysterical press conferences, where journalists and experts ask intelligent questions-without listening to the answers.

Falcino, a small town in the south of Italy. No one sees. No one hears. Nobody talks. But everyone knows. And so they all become accomplices of a tragedy against women, against kids, against a family. A story of violence and slavery. Indifference is stronger than their conscience. Maria, a young mother of a family, lives with her husband Gerardo and her two children, Rocco e Carmela, on her father-in-law's farm: "grandpà" Giuseppe. Gerardo decides to emigrate to Austria to earn more money so as to allow a more comfortable life for the family. This absence will be the beginning of a nightmare that will lead Maria and her daughter to be victims of abuse of an unscrupulous ogre (monster).