This year’s edition of Open Roads, Film at Lincoln Center’s annual survey of new films from Italy, includes the latest by master director Gianni Amelio, one of the mainstays of the festival circuit since arthouse hits Open Doors (1989), Stolen Children (1992) and Lamerica (1994). In Battleground, Amelio sets his sights on World War I, where two friends, both doctors in a hospital for wounded soldiers, take opposite tacks in treatment: Stefano looks for fakers to send back to the front line while Giulio tries to help patients desperate to go home. When the deadly Spanish flu breaks out, both men must deal with another unpredictable mortal danger. Amelio’s messy, complicated and disturbing exploration of human behavior provides no pat or easy answers. 

 

 

Francesca Comencini’s The Time It Takes is a touching if occasionally saccharine reminiscence about growing up the daughter of Luigi Comencini, one of the most successful filmmakers during Italy’s cinematic golden age. Francesca dramatizes life with a famous father as something that was simultaneously wondrous and strange, culminating in her drug addiction before straightening herself out and becoming a filmmaker in her own right. There are delightful moments on the set of Luigi’s films, and the splendid performances of Fabrizio Gifuni (Luigi), Anna Mangiocavallo (young Francesca) and Romana Maggiora Vergano (adult Francesca) help smooth over the film’s lapses into sentimentality.

 

 

The horrific results of domestic abuse are harrowingly rendered in Familia, Francesco Costabile’s vivid adaptation of a memoir by Luigi Celeste, whose estranged father returns to continue brutalize his mother (a magnificently shellshocked Barbara Ronchi)—while Luigi joins a group of skinheads to separate himself from his awful home life. The film’s bluntness, culminating in a fatal meeting between father and son, is almost too on the nose, but Costabile’s unflinching depiction of the fallout from abuse is undeniably compelling.

 

 

The Great Ambition, Andrea Segre’s absorbing political biopic about Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, is centered by an extraordinary performance by Elio Germano as Berlinguer, who was at present at the many upheavals in 1970s Italian politics, culminating in the kidnaping and murder of prime minister Aldo Moro. 

 

 

Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia’s Sicilian Letters is a cleverly constructed crime drama, based on real events, that pits Carello (the great Toni Servillo), a disgraced former politico, against his godson Matteo (Elio Germano, excellent), a mob boss on the run, who begin corresponding and become friendly again—but their relationship is, as current parlance has it, very complicated. 

 

 

Ferzan Özpetek’s latest film, Diamonds, was a huge hit in Italy, and it’s not hard to see why. Luisa Ranieri and Jasmine Trinca—luminous actresses both—play sisters who run a successful fashion house in 1970s Rome, and the film follows their attempts, as often comic as dramatic, to deal with their most difficult client: an Oscar-winning costume designer. Although it’s an overstuffed 135 minutes, Diamonds is an entertainingly high-gloss soap opera that’s a valentine to cinematic costumes as well as the unbreakable bond among women. The large, mainly distaff ensemble is perfection, but Özpetek intrudes on his characters too often by appearing onscreen to diminishing returns.