Umberto D.

Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. opened in 1952, the third of his masterpieces with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini after Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves. The film was a critical success but a commercial failure; Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti famously denounced it for showing the country in an unflattering light, and the political pressure on Italian neorealism began to push the movement toward its end. Umberto D. sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll and is widely considered the most emotionally exact of the De Sica-Zavattini collaborations.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti, an actual retired professor of linguistics in his only film role) is an elderly civil servant in Rome attempting to live on a state pension that no longer covers his rent. His landlady is preparing to evict him; his only meaningful relationships are with his small dog Flike and the young pregnant maid Maria (Maria Pia Casilio). The film follows him over a small handful of days, on the brink of a decision he cannot finally make. The sequences in which Maria prepares to face her own crisis, and Umberto's attempt to find a home for Flike before the worst, are among the most patient and unsentimental observations of poverty in cinema.

De Sica's commitment to an ordinary protagonist (to refusing every dramatic crescendo, every musical cue, every redeeming twist) became a formal model for the post-Italian-neorealist tradition that runs through Pasolini, the Iranian New Wave, and recent socially attentive cinema like the Dardennes brothers'.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most quietly devastating of the neorealist masterpieces. Ozu admired it; few films honour a small life with comparable seriousness.