Giovanni Bertolucci

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.

A much-missed Ennio Morricone composed the score to this steamy Spanish-Italian sex film, starring a world-weary Marcello Mastroianni and a young Nastassja Kinski at the height of her charms. A cult erotic drama about incest, age gaps, and absent father figures that’s very much of its time!