2025 for Italian cinema was unusual and interesting. From the Venetian plains to the nocturnal alleys of Rome, from Buzzati’s revisited myths to the anxieties of the twentieth century, passing through history and adventure, family and impossible passions: each film tells a world, and each world has its own language, its own rhythm, its own mystery. Between alcoholic road movies and lost summers, between ghosts of war and kung fu stages, the Italian cinema of 2025 paints a portrait of courage and vulnerability, of humor and melancholyof stories that push us to look outside and inside ourselves. Here, the best titles of the season: works that remain on the skin, that leave their mark, that make you want to sit in the theater, turn off the phone and listen to the world told on the screen.
“The cities of the plain” by Francesco Sossai
Carlobianchi and Doriano, two fifty-year-olds with no prospects, share a single obsession: drink the last glass. During a night spent wandering by car from one bar to another in the Venetian plain, they accidentally meet Giulio, a shy architecture student. The comparison with these two unlikely mentors will profoundly mark his way of looking at the world, love and the future. The cities of the plain it’s a nocturnal road movie that proceeds at the slow, dazed pace of a sobering up hangover. Premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the section Un Certain Regardthe film directed by Francesco Sossai received the Cinecittà Golden Ticket at the Giornate Professionali di Cinema in Sorrento and the Navicella Italian Cinema Award at the Cinematografo Awards. Received enthusiastically by critics and audiences, it has become one of the most popular Italian works of the season and is available on MUBI from January 9th.
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“The tree” by Sara Petraglia
Bianca is 23 years old and it already seems too old to her. He left his parents’ house, he should go to university but he never goes. His obsessions are few and precise: the passing of time, cocaine, Angelica. Since they live together, everything accelerates and precipitates, including their friendship, which breaks down into dependence and ends up confused with love. Bianca fills a notebook with notes for her books, but would like to write everything down: that youth hurts and is already on the verge of ending, that friendship can break the heart, that we continually lose something. Yet, perhaps, between the night streets of Rome, the kids of Naples and the silent tree that can be glimpsed from the window of the house, nothing will really be lost. The Tree is Sara Petraglia’s debut film, with Tecla Insolia and Carlotta Gamba.
“Orpheus” by Virgilio Villoresi
Orpheus is a loose film adaptation of Poems the comic by Dino Buzzatipublished in 1969 and considered the first Italian graphic novel. In this work, Buzzati – among the central figures of twentieth-century Italian literature – reworks the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern keysetting it in a Milan suspended between dream and dystopia and crossed by the key themes of his research: art, love, mystery, eroticism, melancholy and the relationship between life and death. Free reinterpretation of the first Italian graphic novel, Orpheus marks the debut of Virgilio Villoresi, a young talent of international animated cinema. A visionary journey into the depths of a man’s psyche in search of his lost belovedwhich fuses live action and animation in all its forms, reinventing a century of the avant-garde in a work of love, death and cinematic wonder.
“The tasters” by Silvio Soldini
Haunted by the fear of being poisoned, the Führer recruits a group of local women to sample his meals. Picked up at dawn together with the others, Rosa enters a routine suspended between hunger and the fear of dying. Alliances, friendships and silent pacts are born among the tasters; the young Berliner struggles to be accepted and, when she finally succeeds, an unexpected event overwhelms her. The bond with an SS officer awakens a forbidden feeling in her: perhaps love, perhaps just the desperate need to feel alive, despite everything. Filmed in German and set in 1943 Germany, The tasters tells a little-known page of the Second World War. Produced by Lionello Cerri and Cristiana Mainardi, the film is based on the novel of the same name by Rosella Postorino, winner of the Campiello Prize and inspired by the true story of Margot Wölk, the only survivor among the women forced to taste the meals intended for Adolf Hitler. Wölk revealed his story only in 2012, at the age of 95, shortly before his death.
“The forbidden city” by Gabriele Mainetti
Mei, a young Chinese woman with a mysterious past, arrives in Rome in search of her missing sister. Marcello, a cook, and his mother Lorena run the family restaurant, suffocated by the debts left by their father Alfredo, who ran away with another woman. When their destinies cross, Mei and Marcello find themselves facing ancient cultural prejudices and ruthless enemies, in a struggle in which revenge and love become inseparable. The forbidden city it is a visually powerful work with an international scope, a kaleidoscopic journey between kung fu and Tarantinian suggestions set in the criminal heart of Rome. At the center, the meeting between two souls on the run – a young restaurateur crushed by debt and a woman who has arrived in the capital to find her sister – united by an unpredictable destiny that drags them into an adventure with no holds barred, against armies of criminals and against deeply rooted cultural barriers.
“A film done well” by Franco Maresco
Filming of Franco Maresco’s film dedicated to Carmelo Bene are abruptly interrupted after yet another accident on set. Producer Andrea Occhipinti stops everything, exasperated by endless takes and constant delays. Maresco, already author of Belluscone e The mafia is no longer what it used to beaccuses the production of “filmicide” and disappears. His friend Umberto Cantone tries to mend the rift, calling as witnesses all those who took part in the project, giving life to an investigation that becomes an opportunity to retrace the personality and ideas of the most corrosive and apocalyptic author of Italian cinema. What if, in the meantime, far from everything and everyone, Maresco was really finishing his film, which has become the only way to give shape to the anger and horror he feels for the world?
“The Infinite” by Umberto Contarello
The life of a moderately successful screenwriter collapses like an earthquake, leaving him barely standing and with nothing. The infinite recounts the wandering and painful days of this survivorintent on giving meaning to his existence: he is looking for a job even though his career is now in decline, he tries to mend the relationship with his daughter after the divorce, he helps a talented young screenwriter. He faces the new house, too big for his solitude, and deals with the bureaucratic tasks from which he had always escaped. Between tears and smiles at the absurdities of life, he fleetingly meets unknown people. The only constant company is a light melancholy like the absence of gravity of the astronauts, which coexists with a subtle hope, similar to a distant sound. In the end he will discover that life had collapsed a long time ago and cannot be rebuilt, but once the bills have been settled and the debts have been paid, the possibility of a future opens up for him. Sweet and melancholy, but capable of leaving room for hope, The infinite is Umberto Contarello’s directorial debut, co-written and also produced by Paolo Sorrentino.
“How do you move, you make mistakes” by Gianni Di Gregorio
“There is something that human beings cannot do without: family. It is the source of the greatest love, but also of the most demanding challenge, capable of crushing our personal ambitions and desires for freedom and peace”, comments Gianni Di Gregorio. Is being able to avoid every hassle of everyday life really enough to be happy? A seventy-year-old professor seems to have found serenity: a beautiful house, a decent pension, friends to joke with, and a partner to spend a few days with. He devotes himself only to simple pleasures, until His routine is upset by the arrival of his daughter in marital crisis and his two very cumbersome grandchildren. New worries and anxieties, of course, but also new affections. Thus begins an adventure between the love lives of others and his own, which will lead him to understand that love is always worth it, even when it involves tribulations, sacrifices and suffering. The film reflects on love and the inevitable tendency of human beings to intertwine their destiny with that of others, with all that this entails: hardship, joy and the feeling of having truly lived.
“Heads or tails?” by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis
At the beginning of the 20th century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show arrived in Rome to sell the myth of the frontier to Italians, with blank rifles and cowboy shows. In the setting of a legendary taming competition between cowboys and Italian cowherds, Rosa, the young wife of a local lord, falls in love with Santino, the cowherd who won the challenge. After her husband’s murder, Rosa and Santino flee together, but Justice is sold to the highest bidder and a large bounty is placed on Santino’s head. Pursued by Buffalo Bill, Rosa dreams of the real America, far from advertising posters and fake bison, but her dream will have to clash with harsh reality. Because, as in every self-respecting western ballad, fate flips the coin… and often the truth remains buried underground. The film, directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, was presented in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and in Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival.
“The master” by Andrea Di Stefano
Summer, late Eighties. Happy, thirteen years old, after years of hard training and strict rules, he is finally preparing for the national tennis tournaments, carrying all his father’s expectations on his shoulders. To guide him as best as possible, his parent entrusts him to the self-styled former champion Raul Gatti, who even boasts an eighth-final finish at the Foro Italico. From game to game, their journey along the Italian coast, between defeats, lies and bizarre encounters, will lead Felice to discover the taste of freedom and Raul to glimpse the possibility of a new beginning. An unexpected, deep and unrepeatable bond is born between the two, like certain summers that come only once and never return. The Masterdirected by Andrea Di Stefano, with Pierfrancesco Favino in the role of Raul Gatti and the young Tiziano Menichelli, was presented at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
Margherita Bordino
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