Paolo Virzì’s Typical Vibe
Signature vibe

Highest-ranked title
Highest-ranked title
Paolo Virzì has 16 titles in the CriticCrunch catalog across a career spanning the 1990s through the 2020s.
Recurring themes

Remember Me, My Love
2003
Drama · Comedy

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
2001
Drama

Bread and Roses
2000
Comedy · Drama

The Squid and the Whale
2005
Comedy · Drama

Me and You and Everyone We Know
2005
Comedy · Drama

Our Brand Is Crisis
2015
Comedy · Drama

American Splendor
2003
Comedy · Drama

Primary Colors
1998
Drama · Comedy

The film tells the story of the Michelucci family, from the nineteen-seventies to the present day: the central character is the stunningly beautiful Anna, the lively, frivolous and sometimes embarrassing mother of Bruno and Valeria. Everything begins in the Summer of 1971, at the annual Summer beauty pageant held at Livorno’s most popular bathing establishment. Anna is unexpectedly crowned “Most Beautiful Mother”, unwittingly stirring the violent jealousy of her husband. From then on, chaos strikes the family and for Anna, Bruno and his sister Valeria, it is the start of an adventure that will only end thirty years later.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Valerio Mastandrea, Micaela Ramazzotti, Stefania Sandrelli

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Golino

From childhood to fatherhood, Piero learns things the hard way while growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Livorno.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Edoardo Gabbriellini, Claudia Pandolfi, Nicoletta Braschi

Two mental patients with opposite personalities ditch their Tuscan hospital and embark on an unpredictable exploration of the real world.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Micaela Ramazzotti, Valentina Carnelutti

Guido and Antonia are a young couple with opposed characters and backgrounds. He works a night job as a doorman, while she works all day in a car rental service. This is the story of what happens when they decide to have a child.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Luca Marinelli, Thony, Micol Azzurro

A runaway couple go on an unforgettable journey from Boston to Key West, recapturing their passion for life and their love for each other on a road trip that provides revelation and surprise right up to the very end.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Christian McKay
Like every August, journalist Sandro, his family and acquaintances vacation on the island of Ventotene. This time, however, they find out the house next door has been rented to a lower middle class family, whose crass nature and values soon clash with their own intellectual and progressive background.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Silvio Orlando, Sabrina Ferilli, Ennio Fantastichini

25-year-old philosophy major Marta faces the ugly truth for many young Italians — a complete lack of career opportunities. While babysitting for single mother Sonia, she starts to work as a telemarketer, experiencing first-hand the fanatical and exploitative rat-race culture pushed on employees while quickly rising through the ranks of the company. Around her revolve people like delusional supervisor Daniela, her womanizing boss Claudio, fragile coworker Lucio "2", and well-meaning but inconsistent union rep Giorgio.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Isabella Ragonese, Massimo Ghini, Valerio Mastandrea

When her social-climbing father is relocated from a one-horse town to his native Rome, 12-year-old Caterina enrolls in his old school, finding herself adrift in an environment where eighth-graders form friendships based on social class and their parents' political affiliations.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Sergio Castellitto, Margherita Buy, Alice Teghil

Bruno Bonomo was a famous producer of B-movies in the ‘70s. After a long hiatus, Bonomo offers a screenplay to RAI centered on the figure of Italy’s prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, a subject so controversial that even the public television broadcaster refuses to produce it
Dir. Nanni Moretti · With Silvio Orlando, Margherita Buy, Jasmine Trinca
During a sun-soaked Sicilian summer, aimless filmmaking undergrad and back-seat radical Tanino has a fling with Sally, a dreamy American tourist from an upper background. When summer ends, Sally flies back home, without ever reaching out. Clueless, a smitten Tanino decides to pay her a surprise visit under the pretense of returning a camera she left behind. But when he gets there, he quickly realizes the reality of America—and his relationship with Sally's—is far from the idealized version his small-town boy imagination conjured.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Corrado Fortuna, Rachel McAdams, Jessica De Marco
Elba island, 1814. Martino is a young teacher, idealist and strongly anti Napoleon, in love with the beautiful and noble Baroness Emily. The young man finds himself serving as librarian to the Great Emperor in exile, whom he deeply hates, yet soon begins recording Napoleon's memoirs, getting to know and learning to value the man behind the myth. Among seductions and affairs, expectations and fears, he will craft a precise portrait that nevertheless will not manage to hide a final, inevitable, disappointment.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Daniel Auteuil, Elio Germano, Monica Bellucci

Rome, 1990. The night Italy's national football team is eliminated from the World Cup by Argentina on penalty kicks, a well-known film producer is found dead in the Tiber river. The main suspects for the murder are three young aspiring screenwriters, who–promptly taken to the police–start to tell their version of the story.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Mauro Lamantia, Giovanni Toscano, Irene Vetere
Altiero Molino is a twenty-six-year-old digital entrepreneur who’s returning to Ventotene with his model husband in order to gather his old friends together around his ailing father so as to treat him to one last holiday in this place which is so special to him. He didn’t expect to find the island all abuzz with Sabry Mazzalupi’s marriage to her partner Cesare. This young woman, who’s the awkward daughter of Roman shopkeeper Ruggero, has become an online celebrity and her wedding is a global event attracting the media as well as mysterious emissaries from the new political regime. These two tribes of vacationers, two seemingly irreconcilable sides of Italy, are destined to come together during the Ferragosto holiday for an ultimate showdown.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Silvio Orlando, Sabrina Ferilli, Christian De Sica
Checco is a young Apulian entrepreneur dreamer who has opened a sushi restaurant in his Apulia. However, after one month, the restaurant went bankrupt and he chose to emigrate to Africa to escape from debt. Here he adapts to being a waiter in a resort in Kenya, but at the outbreak of a civil war he decides to embark on a stowaway trip on a boat for migrants to Europe and chooses to do it with his African friends. However, he would not like to return to Italy, but rather to go to Liechtenstein where banking secrecy is in force and there is a lower tax burden than in Italy.
Dir. Checco Zalone · With Checco Zalone, Manda Touré, Nassor Said Birya

In Rome it hasn’t rained for three years and the lack of water is overturning rules and habits. Through the city dying of thirst and prohibitions moves a chorus of people, young and old, marginalised and successful, victims and profiteers. Their lives are linked in a single design, while each seeks his or her deliverance.
Dir. Paolo Virzì · With Silvio Orlando, Monica Bellucci, Valerio Mastandrea