Raymond De Felitta's Sundance 2000 Audience Winner is a sweet little romantic drama set in the insular Italian and Irish neighborhoods of 1956 Staten Island. Narrated with the conversational ease of a bar story, it stars Michael Rispoli as Buddy, blue-collar Italian American with big dreams, a golden voice, and a history of failed business schemes. His latest scheme involves turning a two-story firetrap into a bar with an upstairs apartment, but first he has to evict the squatters he inherited with the house: an abandoned young Irish mother (Kelly Macdonald) and her half-black child.

Steve Buscemi, an icon of the independent film world for years, took the opportunity to write, direct, and star in this wistful low-budget gem. He plays Tommy, a Long Island loser who gets tossed from his job as a mechanic for questionable financial antics. He spends his days at a local bar, drinking his life away even as he denies that he's doing any such thing.

Italy's magical fantasy of midlife crisis and rebirth in Venice, the city of lovers, swept the Italian film awards and charmed all of Europe. Director Silvio Soldini turns the tourist mecca of piazzas, canals, and stone bridges into a quaint little village out of time and fills the film with the charm of the city and the gentle quirks of his delightful cast. Licia Maglietta is winning as Rosalba, the frustrated and ignored middle-aged mom who impulsively takes a vacation from her family.

Well-to-do, sophisticated couple, Elsa and Michele, have a 20 year-old daughter, Alice, and enough money for Elsa to leave her job and fulfill an old dream of studying art history. After she graduates, however, their lives change. Michele confesses he hasn't worked in two months and was fired by the company he founded years ago. Elsa overcomes her initial shock by pouring extra energy into facing the crisis, while Michele, exhausted by an unsuccessful job hunt, lets himself go, alternating between vivacity and apathy. The growing distance between them eventually leads to a break-up.

As proprietor of a bookstore in Genoa, the warm and intelligent Agatha (Licia Maglietta) dispenses literary wisdom to her adoring customers. When a younger man heeds her advice on books and falls madly in love with her, Agatha revels in the passion of the affair, creating an emotional energy that pops light bulbs!

Director Anna Maria Tatò couldn't have chosen a better title for her portrait of Italian legend Marcello Mastroianni, the great actor and her companion for 22 years. Mastroianni is not so much a subject as a host in the tour of his life, regaling the audience with anecdotes and pondering his career with a seriousness leavened by an amiable self-deprecation.

Bernardo Bertolucci's massive epic, a history of Italy from 1900 to 1945 as reflected through the friendship of two men across class lines, is one of the most fascinating, if little seen, of his films. After beginning with Robert DeNiro as wealthy landowner Alfredo, and Gerard Depardieu as labor leader Olmo, the film returns to 1900 with the death of composer Giuseppi Verdi and the birth of the two friends. The opposing class interests of their grandfathers, padrone Burt Lancaster, and laborer Sterling Hayden, is quickly established in the enmity between the characters.

Directors: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, Mario Monicelli, StenonCast:Adriana Asti, Silvana Mangano, Toto, Ninetto Davoli

The first of Pier Paolo Pasolini's highly acclaimed films, and the winner of numerous film festival prizes, ACCATONE uses a talented cast to present a vivid picture of the Roman slums. Based on one of the filmmaker/poet's novels, this story of a pimp, his friends, his enemies and his girls is realism at its earthiest. It is brutal, realistic, unsentimental and bustiling with life. Particularly effective is the use of Bach on the soundtrack which provides ironic counterpoint to the world of pimps, prostitutes and street fighters.

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS, a wild comic fable, stars the beloved stone faced clown Toto as an Italian everyman, and Ninetto Davoli as his good natured but empty headed son. Pasolini uses a comic crow, which philosophizes amusingly and pointedly about the passing scene, as a counterpoint to the performers, representing humanity, as they progress down the road of life. Pasolini presents a tragic fable which shows two delightful innocents caught, like many Italians, between the Church and Marxism.

A woman is raped outside a tenement while her neighbors tune out the screams with their TVs… an avant-garde theatre troupe enacts the Death of God and the annihilation of the human race… a smiling Italian youth cavorts on a Rome thoroughfare while bombs explode around the world… two couples discuss war and revolution in an idyllic rooftop garden… a professor leads his students in a mock debate about Vietnam that threatens to escalate into genuine bloodshed…

Like the visions of a fickle television viewer switching channels from escapist violence to newscast genocide to politica