"Director: Nanni Moretti"

• Mia Madre DVD | DVD | (07/12/2015) from £8.95   |  Saving you £7.04 (78.66%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Margherita is a film director who quickly finds out that her lead Hollywood actor (John Turturro) is rather difficult to work with. If his demands weren't enough, her mother's health has recently declined and Margherita struggles to find the balance and harmony between work and family life. Palme d'Or winning director, Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room, The Caiman), returns with another reflective, thoughtful and touching drama that highlights the everyday challenges of life and reaffirming the lessons we learn from overcoming them.

• The Son's Room | DVD | (27/01/2003) from £9.27   |  Saving you £13.71 (218.31%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Son's Room, which picked up the 2001 Palme d'Or at Cannes, marks a departure for writer-director Nanni Moretti. The films that made his name outside Italy, Dear Diary and Aprile, were both highly personal and politicised semi-documentaries, and a strong political sense underlies the half-dozen or so features he made before them. By contrast, The Son's Room is a subtle, intense study of a family cracking apart under the impact of grief, with no overt political element. For all that, it's the most moving film that Moretti's yet made. "It captured me" he says "more than any other [story] I'd worked on previously. It's a film in which the director shares his emotions with the audience, without imposing his own feelings." As usual, the director plays his own lead character. Here he's Giovanni, a successful psychiatrist in a provincial Italian city (Ancona on the Adriatic coast). He has a beautiful wife, happy in her own career, and two bright, good-looking teenage children, a son and a daughter. Then, out of nowhere, tragedy strikes and in its aftermath, the fissures begin to show in the idyllic façade. Giovanni in particular reveals the insecurities and neuroses lurking behind his tolerant, easy-going demeanour. Moretti homes in on his characters with clear-eyed compassion, never milking the tragedy for facile sentiment but sparing us nothing of the gut-wrenching grief they feel. Nor does he succumb to the temptation of a feel-good happy ending: we are left with a hint of hope for the future, but no more. This is intelligent, mature filmmaking that respects its audience. On the DVD: The Son's Room comes to disc with just the trailer--and the flabby US trailer at that. A commentary from Moretti would have been more than welcome. Still, the transfer, in the original 1.66:1 ratio, is impeccable, with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound to match. --Philip Kemp

• Caro Diario | DVD | (18/05/2009) from £28.05   |  Saving you £-8.06 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Nana Moretti directs himself playing himself in this wry look at life. Presented in three chapters Moretti uses the experiences of travelling on his motor-scooter cruising with his friend around a set of remote islands in search of peace to finish his new film and consulting a series of medical experts to cure his annoying rash and cast a humorous look at his life and those around him. 'Oh my Vespa' 'Islands' and 'Doctors' each create a visual and verbal atmosphere of despair humor and laughter through which hope emerges.

• We Have A Pope | DVD | (02/04/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  This Italian comedy from director Nanni Moretti opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. Disaster strikes the Vatican when Cardinal Melville, the newly elected Pope, suffers a panic attack just before addressing the people of Rome and is unable to face his public. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as a brilliant (but atheist) psychoanalyst is brought in to help the Pope confront his fears. With stunning imagery and an outstanding lead performance from Michel Piccoli, We Have a Pope puts a hilarious spin on the inner workings of this notoriously secretive order.

• Aprile | DVD | (13/08/2007) from £8.24   |  Saving you £9.75 (118.32%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Nanni Moretti's Aprile is a first person account of his experiences as chronicled in his diary from the day his wife announces her pregnancy. His delight at the news is soon supplanted by terrible fears of not being up to fatherhood or taking care of the future mother not to mention a general panic at the thought of attending the birth itself. Family work and politics mingle in a charming light-hearted tale equally blessed with generous amounts of introspection irony and humour. M

• The Caiman | DVD | (13/08/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  A Z-grade movie producer is given a second chance in this Italian comedy drama.

• Mia Madre BR | Blu Ray | (07/12/2015) from £4.66   |  Saving you £15.33 (328.97%)   |  RRP £19.99

  " Margherita, a director in the middle of an existential crisis, has to deal with the inevitable and still unacceptable loss of her mother. "