This year’s edition of Open Roads, Film at Lincoln Center’s annual survey of new films from Italy, includes the latest by Nanni Moretti, one of the mainstays of the festival circuit since his early triumphs like 1994’s Ciao Diario. Unfortunately, A Brighter Tomorrow is one of his most unfocused efforts. Moretti plays a director busy on his current film and who wants to make a long-cherished pet project but is upset that his producer wife (Margherita Buy) is working on someone else’s film. Moretti’s casualness extends to mild jokes about the movie industry, and supporting turns by the likes of Mathieu Amalric amount to little more than winking at the viewer. Buy is always an asset, but Moretti doesn’t do nearly enough with her; the result is watchable but far from essential.

 

 

In I Told You So, the sophomore feature by Ginevra Elkann, Rome seems to be on fire as a heatwave in January is affecting everyone, including the kaleidoscope of characters Elkann intercuts among for 100 intriguing but ultimately exhausting minutes. In a large and talented cast that includes Valeria Golino as a former porn star turned YouTuber, Danny Huston as a priest and former heroin addict and Greta Scacchi as his exasperated sister who comes to town with their mother’s ashes, only Alba Rohrwacher as a desperate single mom who doesn’t want to lose her son gives a compelling but not over the top performance. 

 

Rohrwacher is also superb in Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror, a fractured character study about a woman with amnesia who rebuilds her life through reenacting scenes from films starring beloved Italian star Monica Vitti. It sounds like a credulous idea, and it is, for the most part—although Rohrwacher gives a beautifully modulated portrayal of mental illness (and does a great Vitti impersonation as well), Torre never makes this stab at credible psychological drama anything more than a stunt.

 

While Stefano Sollima’s Adagio is a suffocating film noir about a teenager who becomes enthralled with the corrupt cops and criminals he falls in with (including stark turns by Adriano Giannini, Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo), Pietro Castellito’s Enea stakes much the same terrain with more assurance. Castellito Jr.—his father, the great actor Sergio Castellito, plays the father here—confidently makes himself an unlikeable but sleazily charming protagonist who sells drugs on the side; if it at times bites off more than it can chew, Enea has a stylishness that underscores its satirical sleaziness.

 

 

With The Beautiful Summer, Laura Luchetti has a made an empathetic and sensitive coming-of-age saga about 17-year-old Ginia (a starmaking turn by the terrific Yile Yara Vianello), who is simultaneously confused and happy at her attraction to Amelia (the smoldering Deva Cassel), a headstrong model for local artists. The 1938 Turin setting is both evocative and quietly chilling, as Mussolini’s fascists hover in the background; Luchetti’s gorgeously realized feature, one of the best surprises of this year’s Open Roads, is scheduled to be released stateside by Film Movement later in 2024. 

 

In There’s Still Tomorrow, actress Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut, Delia, an ordinary mom with two teenage children, stoically puts up with her husband’s unending and unapologetic physical and emotional abuse—until she receives a letter that can change her fate. Shot in striking B&W and cannily changing aspect ratios, Cortellesi’s darkly comic drama not only gets the details right of a small Italian village during the 1940s U.S. army occupation, but Cortellesi herself gives a performance of great empathy and comic grace, the emotional center of an ambitious and satisfying paean to quotidian women everywhere.