Italian cinema experienced an extraordinary period of renewal between 2021 and 2024. Established directors such as Paolo Sorrentino, Marco Bellocchio, Nanni Moretti, and Matteo Garrone returned with ambitious new films, while a generation of emerging filmmakers brought fresh perspectives to the screen.
The most memorable movies from these years explored family, migration, political power, gender, faith, friendship, and Italy’s relationship with its past. They ranged from intimate dramas and inventive comedies to historical epics, documentaries, and visually daring fantasies.
This selection is not based solely on box-office results. It brings together films that earned important awards, appeared at major international festivals, attracted widespread critical attention, or captured something distinctive about contemporary Italy.
For a broader perspective, readers can also explore our guide to the history of Italian cinema and our overview of Italian cinema in the new millennium.
Important Italian Movies Released in 2021
1. The Hand of God (È stata la mano di Dio)
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Paolo Sorrentino’s deeply personal coming-of-age drama takes us to Naples during the 1980s. Filippo Scotti plays Fabietto Schisa, a quiet teenager growing up in an eccentric and affectionate family while the entire city celebrates the arrival of football legend Diego Maradona.
A sudden tragedy changes Fabietto’s life and eventually draws him toward cinema. Sorrentino combines autobiography, humor, grief, and Neapolitan vitality without presenting his memories as a conventional biographical narrative.
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. It remains one of Sorrentino’s most emotionally direct works and an evocative portrait of Naples.
2. Freaks Out
Director: Gabriele Mainetti
Set in Nazi-occupied Rome, Freaks Out follows four circus performers whose unusual physical characteristics are revealed to be extraordinary powers. When their circus owner disappears, they must decide whether to escape or confront the forces hunting them.
The film combines war drama, superhero fantasy, grotesque comedy, and adventure. Its elaborate production design and visual effects demonstrated that Italian filmmakers could create an ambitious genre spectacle without abandoning emotionally grounded characters.
Beneath the fantasy is a story about discrimination, exploitation, friendship, and the courage to embrace what makes a person different.
3. A Chiara
Director: Jonas Carpignano
Fifteen-year-old Chiara enjoys a close relationship with her family in the Calabrian town of Gioia Tauro. When her father suddenly disappears, she begins investigating and discovers disturbing truths about her family’s connections to organized crime.
Director Jonas Carpignano observes events largely from Chiara’s point of view, avoiding many of the conventions associated with Mafia films. The result is an intimate story about adolescence, loyalty, inherited identity, and the difficult possibility of choosing a different future.
Swamy Rotolo’s naturalistic performance gives the film its emotional power. A Chiara received the Europa Cinemas Label at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
4. The Inner Cage (Ariaferma)
Director: Leonardo Di Costanzo
An old prison is about to close, but administrative problems leave a small number of guards and inmates trapped inside. As they wait to be transferred, the normal routines and hierarchies of the institution begin to break down.
Toni Servillo and Silvio Orlando lead a remarkable ensemble in a film built around gestures, silences, meals, and cautious conversations. Rather than reducing its characters to jailers and prisoners, The Inner Cage gradually reveals the human beings behind their institutional roles.
It is restrained, tense, and unexpectedly compassionate—one of the finest Italian chamber dramas of the decade.
5. Marx Can Wait (Marx può aspettare)
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Marco Bellocchio turns his camera toward his own family in this profoundly personal documentary about his twin brother Camillo, who died by suicide in 1968.
Through conversations with his surviving siblings, home movies, photographs, and painful memories, Bellocchio examines the silence that surrounded Camillo’s death. The title recalls the director’s political priorities as a young man and his later realization that ideological commitment could not explain—or heal—a private family tragedy.
The film is both an act of remembrance and an honest examination of guilt, emotional distance, Catholicism, and the limits of memory.
Important Italian Movies Released in 2022
6. The Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne)
Directors: Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s acclaimed novel, The Eight Mountains follows the friendship between Pietro, who grows up in Turin, and Bruno, a boy whose life is rooted in a small Alpine community.
Their friendship develops over decades as the two men follow different paths. Pietro travels and searches for meaning, while Bruno attempts to preserve a traditional mountain existence that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi give beautifully understated performances. The film’s magnificent landscapes are never merely decorative: the mountains become expressions of memory, belonging, masculinity, and solitude.
The film shared the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and later won the David di Donatello for Best Film.
7. Nostalgia
Director: Mario Martone
After living abroad for approximately four decades, Felice Lasco returns to Naples to visit his elderly mother. His homecoming awakens memories of adolescence and of a childhood friend who has become a feared criminal.
Pierfrancesco Favino gives one of his strongest performances as a man who convinces himself that confronting the past will allow him to recover what he lost. Naples is presented as both a physical city and an emotional labyrinth—seductive, dangerous, sacred, and impossible to possess.
Nostalgia competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was selected as Italy’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
8. La stranezza
Director: Roberto Andò
Toni Servillo plays Luigi Pirandello in this intelligent comedy about the mysterious relationship between life and theatrical creation.
During a journey to Sicily, Pirandello encounters two amateur actors and undertakers, played by the popular comic duo Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone. Their chaotic theatrical production appears to anticipate ideas that Pirandello would develop in Six Characters in Search of an Author.
The story is fictional, but it cleverly combines Pirandello’s artistic world with Sicilian humor, popular theater, and philosophical questions about where characters come from. It became one of Italy’s notable box-office successes and won multiple David di Donatello awards.
9. Lord of the Ants (Il signore delle formiche)
Director: Gianni Amelio
This historical drama revisits the persecution of poet, playwright, and intellectual Aldo Braibanti. In 1968, Braibanti was convicted under an obscure Fascist-era law known as plagio, used to criminalize his relationship with a younger man.
Luigi Lo Cascio portrays Braibanti, while Elio Germano plays a journalist attempting to understand and expose the injustice of the trial.
Gianni Amelio approaches the case as both a personal tragedy and a portrait of an intolerant Italy in which the legal system, family pressure, psychiatry, and the press could be used against people who challenged accepted social norms.
10. Dry (Siccità)
Director: Paolo Virzì
Rome has gone three years without rain. Rivers have dried up, water is rationed, insects multiply, and an unexplained illness begins to spread.
Against this unsettling background, Paolo Virzì follows an ensemble of characters whose stories gradually intersect. The cast includes Silvio Orlando, Valerio Mastandrea, Claudia Pandolfi, Monica Bellucci, and Tommaso Ragno.
Although the premise is dystopian, the film remains recognizably Italian in its humor, social observation, and attention to human weakness. Its vision of environmental collapse also feels uncomfortably plausible.
Important Italian Movies Released in 2023
11. Io Capitano
Director: Matteo Garrone
Matteo Garrone follows two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, who leave Dakar hoping to reach Europe. Their journey takes them across the Sahara, through detention and exploitation in Libya, and eventually onto the Mediterranean.
Rather than beginning when migrants arrive in Italy, the film concentrates on the experiences that European audiences rarely see. Seydou Sarr’s central performance brings innocence, terror, compassion, and determination to a journey inspired by accounts from real migrants.
Garrone won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, while Sarr received the Marcello Mastroianni Award. The film was subsequently nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
12. There’s Still Tomorrow (C’è ancora domani)
Director: Paola Cortellesi
Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut became a genuine cultural phenomenon in Italy. She stars as Delia, a wife and mother living in working-class Rome shortly after the Second World War.
Shot primarily in black and white, the film begins like a tribute to Italian neorealism but gradually incorporates comedy, stylized movement, music, and a quietly suspenseful narrative. At its center is domestic abuse, yet Cortellesi does not define Delia exclusively through victimhood.
The story connects one woman’s struggle for dignity with a crucial moment in Italian history: the first national election in which Italian women were able to vote. Its enormous popular success showed that a socially engaged film could also become a mainstream event.
13. La Chimera
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
British archaeologist Arthur returns to rural Tuscany after a period in prison and rejoins a group of tombaroli—grave robbers who search for ancient Etruscan artifacts.
Josh O’Connor plays Arthur as a figure suspended between worlds: England and Italy, the living and the dead, romantic longing and physical reality. Isabella Rossellini, Alba Rohrwacher, and Carol Duarte appear in the supporting cast.
Alice Rohrwacher combines folklore, comedy, archaeological adventure, and magical realism to explore the difference between appreciating the past and possessing it. The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and confirmed Rohrwacher as one of the most original voices in contemporary Italian cinema.
14. Kidnapped (Rapito)
Director: Marco Bellocchio
In 1858, representatives of Pope Pius IX removed six-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family in Bologna. A domestic servant claimed that she had secretly baptized the boy, and the authorities insisted that a baptized child could not be raised by Jewish parents.
Marco Bellocchio transforms this historical case into a powerful drama about religious authority, family resistance, antisemitism, and the declining temporal power of the papacy.
Visually controlled and emotionally forceful, Kidnapped avoids turning history into a museum piece. Its central conflict—between institutional certainty and personal freedom—remains disturbingly relevant. The film competed at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
15. A Brighter Tomorrow (Il sol dell’avvenire)
Director: Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti plays Giovanni, a filmmaker attempting to complete a movie about the Italian Communist Party’s reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
At the same time, his marriage is collapsing, his producer is facing financial trouble, and the film industry appears to be changing around him. Moretti blends political reflection, self-criticism, musical interludes, comedy, and frustration with contemporary filmmaking.
The result is not simply a film about making a film. It is a characteristically personal examination of compromise, aging, lost ideals, and the stubborn belief that stories might still imagine a better ending. It was selected for the main competition at Cannes.
Important Italian Movies Released in 2024
16. Vermiglio
Director: Maura Delpero
Set in a remote Alpine village during the final months of the Second World War, Vermiglio follows the family of a local schoolteacher whose carefully ordered life changes when a Sicilian deserter arrives.
The film observes family relationships, marriage, religion, education, and village customs with exceptional patience. Its snow-covered landscapes and carefully composed interiors evoke a world that feels distant but emotionally immediate.
Maura Delpero avoids melodrama, allowing everyday details and unspoken tensions to reveal the cost of war far from the battlefield. Vermiglio won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and later the David di Donatello for Best Film.
17. Parthenope
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Named after the mythical siren associated with Naples, Parthenope is born into a wealthy family and grows from a curious young woman into an anthropologist searching for knowledge, independence, and a clearer understanding of herself.
Celeste Dalla Porta leads a cast that includes Silvio Orlando, Stefania Sandrelli, Luisa Ranieri, and Gary Oldman. The film is filled with the sumptuous compositions, enigmatic characters, and philosophical dialogue associated with Sorrentino.
More than a conventional biography, Parthenope is an elusive meditation on beauty, desire, mortality, and Naples itself. The film competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
18. Gloria!
Director: Margherita Vicario
Set in a Venetian musical institution for orphaned girls around the beginning of the 19th century, Gloria! imagines a group of talented young women discovering new ways to compose and perform music.
Galatéa Bellugi plays Teresa, a quiet servant whose extraordinary musical imagination emerges after she encounters a newly invented pianoforte. Together with the other women, she challenges the institution’s male authority and its rigid ideas about respectable music.
Margherita Vicario’s energetic debut combines period drama, comedy, feminist history, and a deliberately modern musical sensibility. It is lively, accessible, and refreshingly different from the solemn historical dramas often associated with Italian cinema.
19. The Time It Takes (Il tempo che ci vuole)
Director: Francesca Comencini
Francesca Comencini revisits her relationship with her father, director Luigi Comencini, in this intimate autobiographical drama.
Fabrizio Gifuni plays Luigi, while Romana Maggiora Vergano portrays Francesca as a young woman. Their relationship unfolds through filmmaking, political upheaval, addiction, conflict, and affection.
Rather than presenting an exhaustive biography of an important director, the film concentrates on the emotional language shared by a father and daughter. Cinema becomes more than their profession: it is the space through which they understand, disappoint, and ultimately attempt to rescue one another.
20. Berlinguer: The Great Ambition (Berlinguer – La grande ambizione)
Director: Andrea Segre
Elio Germano portrays Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist Party during one of the most turbulent periods in postwar Italian history.
The film concentrates on the years when Berlinguer attempted to develop an independent form of European communism and pursued the controversial Historic Compromise. Against a background of political violence, Cold War pressure, and national uncertainty, he tried to reconcile ideological conviction with democratic responsibility.
Germano avoids simple imitation, creating a restrained portrait of a political leader defined by seriousness, personal austerity, and moral purpose. The film offers international viewers a valuable introduction to a figure who profoundly influenced modern Italian politics.
What These Movies Reveal About Contemporary Italy
Taken together, these films show a national cinema continually negotiating between memory and change.
Several return to unresolved episodes in Italian history: papal power in Kidnapped, Fascist-era persecution in Lord of the Ants, postwar patriarchy in There’s Still Tomorrow, and Cold War politics in Berlinguer. Others examine contemporary questions such as migration, environmental instability, organized crime, and cultural displacement.
Place is equally important. Naples, Rome, Calabria, Tuscany, Bologna, and the Alps are not interchangeable backgrounds. Each landscape carries a distinct history and shapes the characters who inhabit it.
The period also brought increased recognition for women directors. Alice Rohrwacher, Paola Cortellesi, Maura Delpero, Francesca Comencini, and Margherita Vicario created some of the era’s most original and widely discussed films.
Where to Watch Italian Movies
Availability varies considerably by country. These films may appear on Netflix, Prime Video, MUBI, Apple TV, or specialized services, while others can be rented digitally or purchased on DVD and Blu-ray.
Search using both the Italian and international titles, as streaming platforms frequently list a movie under only one version. Subtitled editions are generally preferable to dubbed versions because they preserve the actors’ performances and the regional accents that give many Italian films their identity.
Readers looking for more recent releases can continue with Italia Mia’s guide to the best new Italian movies.
External Sources
- David di Donatello – Official Website
- Venice International Film Festival – La Biennale di Venezia
- Festival de Cannes – Official Website
- Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
Final Thoughts
The years from 2021 to 2024 did not produce a single dominant style of Italian cinema—and that is precisely what made the period so exciting.
Directors worked across historical drama, fantasy, political biography, comedy, documentary, and magical realism. Some revisited national traumas, while others examined families, friendships, landscapes, and private memories. Together, these films demonstrate that Italian cinema remains capable of honoring its extraordinary heritage while finding new forms through which to describe a changing country.
