Top up your watchlist... 31 classics of Italian cinema

Director: Elio Petri

Elio Petri’s dazzling first feature stars Marcello Mastroianni as dandyish antiques dealer arrested for murder by a Kafkaesque police force.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece about the last years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from the perspective of both the revolutionaries and the French authorities.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica’s story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a classic of post-war Italian cinema.

Director: Dario Argento

Dario Argento’s hugely influential thriller, about a murder witness who becomes amateur detective, added sex and style to the murder-mystery and kick-started Italy’s ‘giallo’ genre.

Director: Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci’s sensationally gory zombie horror finds undead hordes overtaking a sleepy New England town, with only a reporter and a local psychic to stop them.

Director: Michele Soavi

Michele Soavi’s compelling concoction of anarchic Evil Dead-style horror-comedy, tragic romance and gore.

Director: Sergio Corbucci

Sergio Corbucci’s iconic and hugely influential western follows the titular coffin-dragging drifter as he becomes embroiled in a mortal feud.

Director: Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece depicting seven hedonistic days in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as he searches for the sweet life.

Director: Federico Fellini

Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of writer’s block with this magnum opus about a film director experiencing his own creative crisis.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

The concluding part of Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated war trilogy, set amid the war-torn ruins of Berlin.

Director: Matteo Garrone

Matteo Garrone’s unnervingly authentic Naples crime drama won the Grand Prix at Cannes before inspiring a hit TV series.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti’s final film is a brilliant and disturbing drama set against the opulent backdrop of decadent, late 19th-century aristocracy.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini’s acerbic but finally very moving masterpiece about marital crisis boasts great performances from Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Sophia Loren and Marcelo Mastroianni are irrepressible as a long-married couple in this exquisite and timeless comedy of our all-too-human foibles.

Director: Mario Bava

Italian horror classic from acclaimed Italian horror auteur Mario Bava, about a beautiful witch, Asa (Barbara Steele), who rises from her grave to take revenge upon her enemies.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini directs opera singer Maria Callas in a vivid adaptation of Euripides’s Greek tragedy.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a couple re-examining their emotional bonds.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini’s ambitious and enormously moving follow-up to his breakthrough Rome Open City.

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

Michelangelo Frammartino’s quirky, wordless account of rural Calabrian life is elegant, touching and funny, a philosophical poem to enduring tradition.

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni’s mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman (Richard Harris).

Director: Luchino Visconti

Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s epic drama follows a mother and her five sons who move from a small town to Milan, changing their lives forever.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini’s landmark of Italian neorealism is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made.

Director: Ettore Scola

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni deliver the finest and most nuanced performances of their careers in this understated masterpiece from director Ettore Scola.

Director: Roberto Rossellini

In her first collaboration with Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman stars as a refugee who marries a fisherman and moves to a barren island.

Director: Dario Argento

Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric gothic nightmare blends operatic violence, disorienting dream logic and hyper-real visuals to create a horror classic.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s classic about a handsome, enigmatic stranger (Terence Stamp) who arrives at a bourgeois household and seduces an entire family.

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Ermanno Olmi’s Palme d’Or-winner, about the hardships faced by peasants in late 19th-century Lombardy, is a masterpiece of neorealism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Sophia Loren won an Oscar for her performance as a mother trying to protect her daughter in wartime Italy, in Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica’s heartbreaking classic about a destitute old man in Rome, trying to survive with only his faithful dog Flike for company.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

The irrepressible De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) also directs this Oscar-winning film of three comic tales of love and sex in three cities.

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

An enchanting, otherworldly coming-of-age drama about a teenage girl who enters her unwilling family into a TV talent show.

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