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.

Cinema maestro Federico Fellini gleefully satirizes the ivory tower of classical music in this playful late work, where the rehearsal of a Nino Rota piece erupts into a cacophony of sore egos. Brilliantly self-referential, the structure of a TV documentary forms a meta critique of the medium itself.

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.