THIS week, there’s a nice little Italian place opening on the Upper West Side — Lincoln Center, which kicks off the annual festival “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema” starting tonight.
The opening-night feature, “Brave Men,“ stars Donatella Finocchiaro as a deputy head of an organized crime outfit (the Godmother?)
Posing as a perfume company exec, she attracts the attention of her childhood best friend, now a judge (Fabrizio Gifuni) who is returning to the southern city of Lecce after years up north. Time has passed, but he’s never let go of her in his mind. A drive for justice mixes with lust and shootouts in a suspense melodrama.
Other highlights of the fest, which runs through June 11 (find tickets at filmlinc.com and at the Walter Reade Theater box office) include:
“Giovanna’s Father”: Period piece set in the Fascist ’30s. A professor (Silvio Orlando) tries to put his world back together after a hideous crime is committed by his unhinged daughter.
“The Sicilian Girl”: Another true-life crime thriller from the land that brought you “Gomorrah,” this time from the point of view of a 17-year-old girl who grows up in a mob family and decides to break her silence and rat out her own kind to stop the killing.
“Lecture 21”: Another professorial drama. This time an academic (John Hurt) famous for his “lecture 21” on Beethoven’s Ninth, disappears, inspiring a student (Noah Taylor) to chase after him on a crazy trek that leads through the Italian Alps.
“I Am Alive”: Bizarre David Lynchian mordant comedy about an unemployed man so desperate for work he takes a strange gig at a country villa, where he’s expected to baby-sit a dead girl. What’s Italian for “I miss life before the recession”?
“Effedia: On My Awful Way”: Late singer Fabrizio De André, known as “the Italian Bob Dylan,” gets his due in a loving documentary.
“The Past Is a Foreign Land”: A poker thriller about a pair of card cheats who get mixed up in a drug deal.
“As God Commands”: A boozy, semi-employed man and his 11-year-old son are scraping out a living in a small town in the north when they come under threat from their only friend — a brain-damaged man who turns dangerous when he comes to believe that the boy’s girlfriend is the porn actress he worships.
