Luchino Visconti

The most savagely subversive film by the iconoclastic auteur Luchino Visconti employs the mechanics of deliriously stylized melodrama to portray Nazism’s total corruption of the soul. In the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power, the wealthy industrialist von Essenbeck family and their associates—including the scheming social climber Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the conniving matriarch Sophie (Ingrid […]

Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from Luchino Visconti (The Leopard) is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death. A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to […]

From Luchino Visconti — the master director of such classics as La terra trema, Bellissima, and The Leopard — comes this epic study of family, sex, and betrayal. Alongside Fellini’s La dolce vita and Antonioni’s L’avventura, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers [Rocco e i suoi fratelli] ushered Italian cinema into a new era, one unafraid […]