Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes (aka 'Death Tolls Seven Times', 'Seven Notes in Black', 'The Psychic') (1977)

When a skeleton is unearthed at her husband's countryside manor, it becomes apparent a woman's visions of murder are not simply her imagination, in this excellent murder mystery for giallo fans featuring ghastly body horror set-pieces, opulent interiors, dread accompanied by Hammond organ, intrigue, and lots of luridly coloured blood.

★★★★☆

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Into The Labyrith (L'uomo del labirinto) (2019)

Author Donato Carrisi directs for a second time an adaptation of one of his own books and like the first effort (The Girl In The Fog) this is again an unrestrained nonsense, a murder mystery that plays out like a garish fairytale, so over-the-top with its allusions to witches and dungeons and masked killers, none of it ends up mattering or even making sense, least of all the grandiose twists that you'd have to be a real dummy not to see coming.

★★☆☆☆

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The Girl In The Fog (La Ragazza Nella Nebbia) (2018)

This twisty, turny and loooong and convoluted Italian mystery based on the novel by Donato Carrisi (and an adaptation directed by him) operates in a kind of exaggerated reality like a gothic fairytale which makes all that happens not matter much, but it will keep you watching as a Detective Vogel becomes involved in a teenaged girl's disappearance from a town in the Alps. 

★★★☆☆

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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The Stranger's Hand (1954)

The story behind Graham Greene's story is interesting (the author entered a competition to see if he could win second prize parodying Graham Greene's style) but this adaptation, unfortunately, a "noone believes her" thriller about a young boy who investigates when his father fails to show up to a family reunion in Venice, is dull despite some interesting locations and the post-war kidnapping plot.

★★☆☆☆

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The Wait (L'Attesa) (2015)

As Easter festivities approach, a grieving French woman living in Italy is visited by her son's girlfriend, in this slight but mesmerising film clip about love and loss and suspending disbelief.

★★★★☆

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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

The point of this intriguing psychological drama seems to be that film sound engineers are overlooked and should wave their fists and get violent and be heard and appreciated for their input into films such as the giallo horror that Toby Jones' sound engineer, Gilderoy, is helping to make here - we never see a single frame but everything about it, thanks to his watermelon, cabbage, and radish mashing, is visceral and real and when the movie-within-a-movie experiences a setback, we see how sound magic can alter everything.

★★★☆☆

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Perfect Strangers (Perfetti Sconosciuti) (2016)

The laughs in this timely comedy of e-manners quickly become awkward when dinner party guests, a likeable group of fortysomethings, agree to a game in which mobile phones are abandoned to the dinner table thereby granting everyone present access to all others' incoming communications, a game which reveals lies and secrets that threaten to eclipse the circle's good times.

★★★★☆

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The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) (Ladri di Biciclette) (1948)

With the aid of his young son, a man scours Rome for his stolen bicycle that is vital to his gainful employment and his family's prosperity in post-WWII Italy, in this must-see classic from 1948, simply told and full of non-actors but superior to many contemporary mega-budget Hollywood films.

★★★★★

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Sweet Dreams (Fai Bei Sogni) (2016)

This could easily have been pure melodrama - there's little light, not much gaiety and every scene tightly revolves around the core idea of mother-child love - but remind yourself this is an autobiographical Italian film about a real man who grew up minus a fundamental building block - the truth about his mother's death - and it becomes tolerable melodrama and more than that, an occasionally profound look at a successful war correspondent and newspaper columnist's happiness, success, and faith.

★★★☆☆

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