Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

christopher-underwood This is a good, solid, beautifully photographed crime thriller. My misfortune was to pick this film to watch the night after watching, Illustrious Corpses. Now that Italian political crime thriller made in 1976 and based upon a book by Leonardo Sciascia is a near faultless classic with deep undertones and a broad scope that is simply a joy to watch. This, it turns out, is another film based upon another book by Leonardo Sciascia from 1967. How much more sensible it would have been to watch this one first. The thing is there is nothing wrong with this film except it is also about too easily explained killings that the lead character sets out to investigate and in the process overturns a hornets' nest, but there is much less action, intrigue and politics. Gian Maria Velonte is excellent as the professor who takes it upon himself to get involved when most people seem not to care. Interestingly this was the film that helped to lift this actor into more 'serious' films, after having made many spaghetti westerns, one of the last being face to Face also from 1967 when he also played a professor.

Eumenides_0 Elio Petri's We Still Kill The Old Way opens with a beautiful aerial shot of Sicily that establishes the importance of the island's natural landscape to the story. Wherever characters go, the sea or Mount Pellegrino always appear behind them. It's a beautiful landscape, mocking all the ugliness bubbling in its urban centres.The town pharmacist, Manno (Luigi Pistilli – fans of Spaghetti Westerns will immediately recognize his face) receives a letter threatening him of death. It's the sixth that month and he's still alive so he doesn't take it seriously. But the next day, during a hunting trip he and his friend, Prof. Roscio (Salvo Randone), are murdered.We could say that one of the film's theme is indifference. Most people seem indifferent to the double homicides. They certainly regret the death of Prof. Roscio, which was probably accidental, a typical example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are no regrets for Manno, the town philanderer. You mess with another man's wife, you get old-fashioned justice. When the relatives of a young girl Manno was seeing are arrested, the case seems closed. No point asking more questions. As Jack Nicholson says in Chinatown, let sleeping dogs lie.Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté) refuses to let sleeping does lie and starts investigating. An intellectual loner and leftist sympathiser, Laurana, a teacher, is different from his townsfolk. Analysing one of the death letters, he discovers the letters were cut from the L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper. Knowing that the suspects are illiterate and discovering that very few people receive this newspaper in town, he continues his investigation to have the men freed.His investigation makes him to grow close to Luisa Roscio (Irene Pappas), the deceased's widow, and her cousin, the lawyer Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), who's taken the defense of the suspects. Through Luisa, Laurana discovers that Prof. Roscio was actually the target and the death threats against Manno just a pretext. It seems the professor had discovered evidence that someone important in town was involved in corrupt businesses.The story is sadly predictable and takes us through a web of intrigues involving the clergy, the senate, the town's influential men, and possibly the Mafia (although the word itself is never spoken). It's the typical story of a naïve man who stumbles upon corruption and dark secrets in an apparently idyllic place. How much of the story's weakness is due to the original novel by Leonardo Sciascia or the adaptation by Petri, Ugo Pirro and Jean Curtelin, is anyone's guess. But Sciascia, a celebrated author in Italy, did express disappointment over the screenplay.The strength of the movie lies in the cast. Gian Maria Volonté is unstoppable and perfectly captures Laurana's naïveté and aloofness. He's an erudite person but inattentive, incapable of seeing what goes on around him. This flaw is his doom and leads directly to the climax, the best part of the story, an act of betrayal so unexpected and emotionally cruel that I was heartbroken for Laurana.Irene Pappas also gives a fine performance as the widow Luisa (funny, in every movie I've seen her she always plays a widow. In defence of her lack of variety, she does look great in black). Less expansive than Volonté, Pappas acts mostly with her vivid eyes, revealing a personality that has little to say but is always calculating. Her expression of uncertainty and regret at the end of the movie, which is also the beginning of her wedding, encapsulates her character's essence and, like the beautiful landscape that contrasts with the horrible crimes, is at odds with the finale's festive tone.Elio Petri, Gian Maria Volonté and Ugo Pirro met for the first time in this movie. So it's of historical curiosity to their fans. Although they went on to make masterpieces together, the simplistic We Still Kill The Old Way is not to be sneered at, even if it tastes like a mere appetiser for their future successes.

Giuseppe Lippi Although drawn from a powerful novel by Leonardo Sciascia, this results in an oversimplified, well-meaning social mystery set in 1965 Sicily, where two men are killed during a hunting party. A leftist professor (Gian Maria Volonté, a much better actor in the later Petri offering "Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto") decides to investigate the murders, only to find himself entangled in a spiderweb of corrupt politicians, "mafiosi" killers and sinister Church connections: the anonymous letters received by the victims - and, in due time, by the professor himself - were made with clippings from the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano". There is also a fascinating dark lady character, a victim's widow, played by the splendid Irene Papas, whose black-stockinged legs wink through the whole film to the shy, undecided professor. When he resolves to take the woman, in a love scene near the end of the movie, it is unfortunately too late... The film can still be seen with some fun, but it's far from a serious rendition of the novel and it's not perhaps among the best Mafia movies made in Italy at the time. It's curious to note how so-called "spaghetti westerns", for instance, were often much more effective in describing corrupt politicians and Mafia-governed southern towns than their "mainstream" counterpart, like this typically engagé movie. I found also irritating the use of Cinemascope combined with low angles, continuous camera movements and extremely close shots, so that the narrative pace is fragmented and, more often than not, disturbed.

susanascot Paolo Laurana is a kind of leftist intellectual who chances to be intrigued by a mysterious double murder in the Sicily of mid Sixties. In his personal detection for murder's instigators, he will run into a plot in which both politicians and mafia racketeers are involved. So curiosity will become a very dangerous affair. Taken from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), A ciascuno il suo (1967) is a film where high rank acting is at its top. Cast (Gianmaria Volonté, Irene Papas, Gabriele Ferzetti, Salvo Randone, Luigi Pistilli. Mario Scaccia, Leopoldo Trieste) is perfect and well-combined, direction (Elio Petri, 1929-1982) is powerful and impressive. If compared to the novel, Elio Petri's film (written with Ugo Pirro) may seem short of that illuministic pessimism that breathes through Sciascia's books, but Laurana's rationalistic search for truth retains that `bitter taste of intelligence' which is one of the major feature of Sciascia's characters. A key film to understand historical condition of Italy in the Sixties.