ItalianamericanMovies like Italianamerican
- Key Features:
- Documentary, Family history, Italian culture, Interview, New York City, Immigration, Director-driven, Martin Scorsese, Autobiographical, Cultural heritage
- Tone:
- humorous, earnest, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Documentary viewers, Italian-American community, Film history enthusiasts, Martin Scorsese fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Reflection → Affection
Italianamerican

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese interviews his mother and father about their life in New York and family history back in Sicily.
Italianamerican
World-renowned director Martin Scorsese narrates this journey through his favorites in Italian cinema.

A Milanese businessman is beside himself when his son tells him he's going to marry the daughter of a pizza maker from Naples.

"The Family," an album with a velvet cover, is meant to touch the extended family of man. Formal portraits, bookends in this 80-year saga, enclose the central story, which opens with the baptism of Carlo, a baby in his grandfather's lap, and ends with Carlo as a grandfather with a baby in his arms. And never once do we get out of the house, whose rooms provide the film's structure. Comfort or passion? Carlo couldn't really decide until it was too late.

A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.

Encouraged by his girlfriend Ellie, Sebastian and his Italian immigrant father, Salvo, spend the 4th of July weekend with her wealthy and exceedingly eccentric family. The gathering soon develops into a culture clash, allowing father and son to discover the true meaning of family.

A documentary on the life and career of one of the most influential film directors of all time, Steven Spielberg.

When an Italian man comes out of the closet, it affects both his life and his crazy family.

The true story of Rocco Granata, an Italian coal miner's son who followed his passion for music against his father's wishes and social barriers.

When Debora's ex-husband, a popular neomelodic singer, loses his life in a stage dive, she worries that her 11-year-old son Ciro may be showing symptoms of depression. Taken to a child psychologist, shy Tommaso, Ciro eventually confesses to him that it's not his father's death that has got him down, it's love for his classmate, the cute Ludovica. The two make a deal: Tommaso will help Ciro to win the affections of Ludovica, while Ciro will give Tommaso a hand at having a chance with his mother.

Three Italians travel to their hometown to vote for elections: Pasquale is a Southern immigrant living in Munich who's genuinely happy to come back to Italy, even if just for a few days, but the country he dreams of is far from reality; Furio travels to Rome with his family, but his niggling attitude threatens to push his wife Magda over the edge; young Mimmo is also going to Rome, but the trip is repeatedly interrupted by worries about his grandma's health.

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.

A family of Irish immigrants adjusts to life on the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen while also grieving the death of a child.

Riko is an honest and hardworking man who can count on a group of real friends and a loving wife. Things change after he loses his job and experiences a midlife crisis.

During the bombing of Naples in World War II, a cynical businessman helps a naive prostitute, who spends the next two decades desperate to have him reciprocate her feelings.

Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined.

Parent-teenage children clashes in 21st century Italy.

When a Danish chef travels to Tuscany to sell his father's business, he meets a local woman who inspires him to rethink his approach to life and love.

After losing his beloved mother, a man risks everything to honor her by opening an Italian restaurant with actual nonnas — grandmothers — as the chefs.

Leo and Angela Russo live a simple life in Queens, surrounded by their overbearing Italian-American family. When their son finds success on his high school basketball team, Leo tears the family apart trying to make it happen.

Marty, a butcher who lives in the Bronx with his mother is unmarried at 34. Good-natured but socially awkward he faces constant badgering from family and friends to get married but has reluctantly resigned himself to bachelorhood. Marty meets Clara, an unattractive school teacher, realising their emotional connection, he promises to call but family and friends try to convince him not to.

Missing the train is very bad. Seeing it leave with your children and those of your friends you had to accompany on vacation is a whole other story ... that of the crazy pursuit from Turin to Sicily of a father and grandfather as different as they are unreliable.

A suburban American woman inherits her grandfather’s Mafia empire and, guided by the Firm’s trusted consigliere, defies everyone’s expectations, including her own, as the new head of the family business.

An intense portrait of the iconic filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian and musician Woody Allen: his life, family and friends; his writing and directing habits, and his relationship with performers.

In early 1860s New York, Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon is released from prison and returns to the Five Points, seeking revenge against his father's killer, William Cutting, a powerful anti-immigrant gang leader. He knows that revenge can only be attained by infiltrating Cutting's inner circle. Vallon's journey becomes a fight for personal survival and to find a place for the Irish people.

The history of American popular music runs parallel with the history of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, with each male descendant possessing different musical abilities.

Egocentric bandit Salvatore Giuliano fights the Church, the Mafia, and the landed gentry while leading a populist movement for Sicilian independence.

The story of a leading political man, suddenly telling “all the truth” after a serious illness and therefore overwhelming lifes of anyone surrounding him…

In the immediate post-war period, amidst the rubble of a poverty-ridden Naples, two kids, Carmine and Celestina, try to survive as best they can by helping each other out. One night, they secretly board a ship bound for New York to reach Celestina’s sister, who emigrated to America several years earlier. The two children join the many Italian emigrants seeking a new life in America and arrive in an unknown metropolis, which, after several misadventures, they will learn to call home.

Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.

On his deathbed, a powerful Mafia boss names his estranged son heir to his criminal empire: however, his men discover too late that the son at issue is an idiotic manchild.

As a young New York couple goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes.

A slice of life story that follows a large Italian family on Christmas Eve as they prepare for the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes, reminisce about the past and seek love in the future.

To mark the recent thirtieth anniversary of Sergio Leone’s death, this documentary sets out to pay tribute to one of the great legends of world cinema. The singular artistic vision of Sergio Leone has transcended national borders, creating the Spaghetti Western genre and transforming the international cinematic panorama forever with his innovative stylistic and narrative solutions, which have now become part of the language of the movies. The film, which is enriched with precious archive footage from the Cineteca di Bologna, including rare audio recordings and film clips shot behind the scenes, sees for the first time the direct participation of the Leone family and has interviews both with Leone’s longtime collaborators and with icons of Hollywood who have been profoundly influenced by his work.

An aimless college graduate jumping from one job interview to another — killing time in between with his wisecracking and deadbeat room-mate — falls in love with an actress.

When Jan decides to marry his girl-friend Sara, he is not aware of his opponent: her father, who is an Italian.

Giorgio and Tito, father and son. A successful journalist and a lazy teenager apparently impossible to understand. Giorgio's dream is to take Tito to the Nasca Hill in Liguria, but Tito prefers to spend his entire day with his group of friends, eating, talking about nothing and playing video games. Until one day when he suddenly informs his father that he would join him in this trip. After a series of accidents and misunderstandings, at the end, somehow father and son will find the way to communicate … or at least they will try.

Two proud and estranged brothers, a disputed inheritance and a past that comes back. When he hears about the passing of his father - whom he has not seen in many years - Salvo returns to his native Sicily. He intends to convince his brother Lillo to sell the family farm and save his pizzeria, which is about to go bankrupt - a secret that he has kept even from his wife and children. But things will not be easy and Salvo will have to come to terms with his choices. A bittersweet comedy about family relations and how one never stops growing up, not even at fifty.

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino in conversation about The Irishman.

Giuseppe Di Noi, an Italian surveyor living in Swiden, gets arrested at the border while going back to Italy with his family for a vacation. But can someone tell the man why?

A middle-aged man’s relationship with a young model is questioned by his daughter, who’s dating an older man herself.

Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.

A father and his son who lived seperated for some time meet each other one day and try to talk their problems over and understand their diametrical differences.

Barbara and Matteo are two Italians who live in Miami, managing a small restaurant overlooking the sea. Barbara is pregnant and the happy event brings their respective parents together in Miami: Massimo, Matteo's father, who has recently become a widower and has a hotel in Cortina, and Angela, Barbara's mother, who instead has a chain of restaurants and is separated from her husband. At first, the incompatibility between the two is sky-high. Then, while events, misunderstandings and plots of various kinds revolve around them, the ice slowly begins to break and affinities emerge when the two find themselves busy restoring peace between their children, who have entered into a crisis due to the birth of the little girl.

Giulio suddenly finds himself having to change his life when his wife, after discovering his betrayal, asks for a separation and, suddenly, the reality around him is no longer the same. Forty years old and father of two children, Giulio is forced by circumstances to say goodbye to family and economic well-being and to study new solutions in order to stay afloat and not drown in a new poverty made of double rents and double bills to pay, solitary lunches in fourth-rate restaurants, children's wishes not to be ignored and creditors to hide from.

Getting ready for the wedding that will unite two very different families- the humble Italian taxi driver Cristoforo Colombo and his wife Rosy, and the rich Italian-Americans Alessandro and Patricia Di Giacomo.

A Hungarian family forced to flee the Communist country for the United States must leave a young daughter behind. Six years later, the family arranges to bring the absent daughter to the United States where she has trouble adjusting. The daughter then decides to travel to Budapest to discover her identity.

A human-rights activist takes in an illegal immigrant and her daughter, then shocks his family when they learn that he has married the sexy 28-year-old.

A Mexican-American master chef and father to three daughters has lost his taste for food but not for life.

A sudden tragedy hits a wealthy middle-class family from North-East Italy. Tensions, hidden secrets and small hypocrisies emerge.

An intimate conversation between filmmakers, chronicling De Palma’s 55-year career, his life, and his filmmaking process, with revealing anecdotes and, of course, a wealth of film clips.

37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.

Lucky Luciano is one of the bosses of the Mafia. He orders the slaughter of 40 other responsibles, therefore becoming the only boss. But a few years later he is put into jail. In 1946, he got a pardon and is sent back to Sicilia. There, he begins becoming one of the chief of the Mafia. The US Army seems to refrain from interfering.

After growing up poor in Salmonella, Vincenzo Cortino installs himself as the preeminent, if bumbling, Mafia don of the New World. But now he must pass on power to one of his two sons: either level-headed veteran Anthony or vituperative loose cannon Joey.

Michele Casali is a middle-class professor in Fascist Italy who teaches at the same high school attended by his only daughter, Giovanna. A shy and sensitive girl, her insecurities are only magnified by Michele's overprotectiveness—reaching a point of no return.

A bohemian artist travels from London to Italy with his estranged son to sell the house they inherited from his late wife.

Petra heads to New York in search of her older sister after a long time of being separated. They are both movie actresses and heirs of the wounds of the Brazilian dictatorship. But Petra has only a few clues: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary...

The story of an encounter between a bourgeois man and a poor woman, because their teenage children fall in love.

Valentino Tarocco invents a new life as a famous Milanese designer. He has removed all connection with the past, but an accident will bring him back to his twenties, causing him to recover his Apulian dialect and love for his origins.

Renata Bella feels like a failure at life and career. But when Renata attends a seminar on selling real estate, she finally finds True Love. Sam Sharpe, while a top-notch, successful salesman, is much older than Renata. She is swept away by his excessively flamboyant style and irrepressible nature. The very traits she finds romantic, however, lead to repeated conflict with her family, especially her beloved father Joe, leaving Renata trapped in the middle.

Enrico is a struggling journalist in the Rome of 1945. He receives a phone call informing him that his younger brother Lorenzo has died. Enrico recalls their long and difficult relationship; he was brought up by their poor but warm-hearted grandmother, Lorenzo was raised as a gentleman by a wealthy local aristocrat. Reunited in the Florence of the 1930s, Enrico becomes his spoilt brother's keeper, forever haunted by a sense of guilty responsibility towards a man he both hates and loves.

An ambitious mobster plans an elaborate diamond heist while seducing the daughter-in-law of a ruthless mob patriarch as a determined police commissioner closes in on all of them.

A very extended family gathers for the Christmas holidays, after the death of the breadwinner Leonardo Sereni, famous singer. The eldest son Julius, with his wife Marina, has a panettone factory.

A long love story, seen through the memories of one young couple. The journey through the years of two individuals, united, divided, happy, unhappy, deeply in love, or in love with others, in a single stream of emotions and shades of feeling. Over the course of the film, he learns that love can indeed last, while she learns to live with nostalgia.

Carlo descends on his former lover's unsuspecting family and the scheming Rocco tries to break up his old rival Marcello's wedding.

A comedy about generational conflict between two parents who do not want to grow old and a seventeen year old daughter who wants to become an adult. During a weekend with some friends in their country house in Tuscany, Marcello and Marina, relieved that the love affair of their teenage daughter Rose with another boy, Luke, is over, prepare to meet their daughter's new boyfriend. The problem is that the two adults, who still feel pretty young, do not know what to expect, and what they are about to discover will leave them speechless ...

Tommaso is an American expat film director living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film.

Michele is a superficial man with nothing but contempt for other people and who lives only to show off his wealth on social media, until he finds himself mistaken for a North African immigrant in Eastern Europe and deported.

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.

Giacomo befriends a con man, believing that he is the reincarnation of his dead father.

A young fashion blogger and an aspiring songwriter seem to have not that much in common, but when Cupid’s arrow hits them, every difference fades away and overnight they decide to get married. Even their fathers do not have anything in common: Gaetano is a strict mayor from Southern Italy, while Diego is a rich entrepreneur from the North. Between the two forthcoming in-laws, instead, is hate at first sight. They seem to agree on one single common goal: prevent this marriage at any cost! After fighting by any means in a struggle that will also involve their two bizarre families, will they manage to say no to the wedding?

Paolo is an outgoing and handsome real estate broker married to Simona, a beautiful woman from the rough outskirts of Rome who has become an author of spicy bestsellers and is pregnant with their child. Betta, Paolo’s sister and her husband Sandro organise a dinner party with Paolo, Simona and their childhood friend, the eccentric musician Claudio. During the lively gathering Paolo reveals what he would like to name his son, causing reactions to steam up and a torrent of revelations to follow reaching climactic proportions.

Three Italian retirees embark on a journey to find a new country to live in.

Martin Scorsese’s portrait of writer and social commentator Fran Lebowitz, celebrated for her sharp wit and observations on modern life. Filmed at New York’s Waverly Inn and intercut with archival footage and interviews, the documentary captures Lebowitz’s distinctive worldview through her spontaneous monologues and public appearances.

An estranged family gathers together in New York for an event celebrating the artistic work of their father.

Sandra returns to her childhood village to take care of family business, but childhood memories and secrets soon overcome her.

Two stories of Italians abroad: in Dubai, a truck driver who smuggles Ferraris for a living teaches the tricks of the trade to his young disciple; in Russia, a clumsy dentist experiences the consequences of sex tourism.

An aging American millionairess journeys to Rome each year with her chauffeur George to play the card game scopone with destitute Peppino and his wife Antonia.

A boy and a girl fall in love but their fathers take a strong dislike to each other, clashing repeatedly during the preparations for the upcoming marriage.

The Tucci family discovers that they have not really lost all their money and, refusing to pay Italian taxes, decides to turn Torresecca into a tax haven, relying on a post-Italian unification bureaucratic oversight.

A blocked screenwriter, Ezio, is trying to finish a story about two off-kilter families thrown together when their teenage children announce they’re getting married. So Ezio writes himself into the story with a romantic part—a development his characters welcome, as they’ve got some ideas of their own for bigger and better roles.

A small-time hood must choose from among love, friendship and the chance to rise within the mob.

An endearing light comedy about a woman who spontaneously becomes a resident of Venice after her family left her behind. While enjoying the wonderful people she meets she achieves a new life and the first time independent of her family.

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.

During the annual Christmas gathering at the family home, the parents surprise their children by announcing their decision to move in with one of them and pass on the house.

From childhood to fatherhood, Piero learns things the hard way while growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Livorno.

A woman taking a cab ride from JFK airport engages in a conversation with the driver about the important relationships in their lives.

Bill is an ailing larger-than-life father being taken care of by his son Sam, who has returned home to care for him. While home, Sam falls for a local woman, Kate. At the same time, Bill starts to fall for her mom, Tina.

Primo and Secondo, two immigrant brothers, pin their hopes on a banquet honoring Louis Prima to save their struggling restaurant.

A portrait of the life and career of Robert Downey Sr. (1936-2021), the visionary and fearless US filmmaker — father of actor Robert Downey Jr. — who in the sixties and seventies laid the foundations for countercultural comedy.

An extended family reunites on an idyllic island to celebrate their grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary. However, a storm causes them to get stuck in there longer than expected, causing secrets and long-held grudges to break out.

Alex, Ivo and Pacifico three Sicilian twin brothers are reunited for their father's funeral.

A loving young couple discover they're expecting a child, but the man isn't too keen on introducing her girlfriend to his family. Is it because he has a vampire father, a witch mother, a ghostly grandma, and a zombie uncle?

A young black woman discovers that her father was a sperm donor, and if that wasn't bad enough, he's white.

Irene lives in Rome. When her mother ask to, she go back to Rimini, her hometown, to take care of her autistic brother, Omar. She soon discover that Omar knows very well what to expect from the future, but in order to achieve his dreams, he need to be independent, which is why Irene begins a tender crash course to teach him adult life.

A common day in the actual Italy, narrated by the different stories of seven different people, it's the starting point for an overview to the 21st century's italian society, among corrupt politicians, unfaithful husbands, hardcore soccer fans and dishonest businessmen.

Armando is the daddy, Cristiano is the adult son. Each of them lives his life in a different way respect the other: Armando is an old play-boy and often he "buys" his women with his money; Cristiano is a shy guy who lives in a community with other guys like him. The movie proceeds showing us, ironically, the differences, the different ways to think, to act, to treat the women between father and son.

The story of Danièle Delpeuch and how she was appointed as the private chef for François Mitterrand.


