The one and the only Marcello Mastroianni reunited with the irrepressible master of Italian cinema Federico Fellini seventeen years after 8 1/2 for a story about—what else?—the arthouse dreamboat being beset by woman of all kinds, as an aging playboy soul-searches in a newly feminist Italy.

The final film by Luchino Visconti (La terra trema, The Leopard) offers a welcome return to the resplendent period dramas that followed his neorealist period. Visconti was an aristocrat with Marxist tendencies, and L’innocente is a sublime critique of the immoral excesses of the upper classes.

El maestro Federico Fellini satiriza la torre de marfil de la música clásica en esta divertida obra tardía, donde el ensayo de una pieza de Nino Rota estalla en una cacofonía de egos heridos. Autorreferencial, la estructura de un documental televisivo constituye una meta-crítica del propio medio.

Starring Burt Lancaster and Marcello Mastroianni, this past Palme d’Or contender is set in post-fascist Naples, where food prices are inflated but women’s bodies come cheap. War is often erotic in Liliana Cavani’s films—and here its economically, politically fraught aftermath plays out sexually too.