There's Still Tomorrow

Paola Cortellesi had been one of Italy's most popular comic actors for two decades when she directed her first feature, and it became the highest-grossing Italian film of 2023 — outselling Barbie and Oppenheimer domestically — before taking the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Rome Film Festival and the David di Donatello for Best New Director.

Shot in black and white and set in Rome in 1946, it puts Cortellesi herself in the lead as Delia, a working-class wife whose days are a sequence of jobs, chores and beatings administered by her husband, played by Valerio Mastandrea. The register is deliberately unstable: Cortellesi borrows the visual grammar of neorealism and then breaks it with anachronistic pop songs and a beating staged as a dance, choices that divided critics and delighted audiences.

What made it a phenomenon in Italy is the last act's reframing of everything before it, which is best left undiscussed. Nine million admissions, a national conversation about domestic violence, and 4.14 on Letterboxd from 134,000 ratings. For a catalogue with plenty of Italian canon and little contemporary Italian cinema, it is the most necessary recent addition.