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There's a wonderful surreal character to Mario Monicelli's comedy La Ragazza con la Pistola (The Girl with a Gun), particularly in his fanciful depiction of the strict moral codes of life in a little Sicilian village which exiles a young woman for spending a night with a man. The remainder of the film as Assunta travels across Scotland and England in an effort to track down the terrified Vincenzo with a pistol in her handbag to restore her lost honour, is somewhat episodic and variable, but retains its colourful character and comic touch. Principally however, it's only able to remain as engaging as it does thanks to the irresistible presence of Monica Vitti.

The spectacular opening scenes are actually filmed not in Sicily, but Polignano in Puglia, the geometric structures of its white buildings perched on a crumbling rocky cliff face that seems to be on the verge of toppling into the sea. It does give the surrealism of life in the village an almost Kafkaesque edge that the director exploits marvellously. Despite strict segregation of the sexes and a tight guard, Assunta is abducted by men from Vincenzo's all-male dancing school. Assunat believes that Vincenzo has been watching her through her window, but Vincenzo tells them they got the wrong girl, that he was more interested in Assunta's larger-sized cousin Concetta. "Could be worse", Vincenzo reckons however, and doesn't see any reason why he should let the operation go to waste.

Vincenzo however gets more than he bargained for, as Assunta seems a little more experienced and not as retiring as he might have liked. Knowing that the potential consequence of spending the night with Assunta is marriage, Vincenzo packs his bags and flees the country. Assunta, abandoned, is greeted with wails and laments from the entire village, who come out in numbers to bemoan her lost honour. She is cast out from the town, but not without a pistol in her bag and an address in Scotland where Vincenzo might be found. The strict codes of Sicilian honour demand nothing less.

Vincenzo soon gets wind of Assunta being on his tail, and skips out of the Capri Italian restaurant in Edinburgh fairly quickly and flees across the length of England. Assunta, an avenging angel dressed in black - particularly fetching in sunglasses and black plastic Mac - is however never far behind, always on his tail. Along the way, Assunta meets various men who fall in love with her and experiences all the colour of England in the swinging sixties as well as the industrial greyness of Sheffield, and even ends up on an anti-Vietnam protest in London. La Ragazza con la Pistola eventually runs out of steam in Brighton, but there are plenty of moments of comedy and glamour along the way.

Like the ground-breaking Best of Youth, My Brother is an Only Child (Mio fratello è figlio unico) covers a key period of political turmoil in Italian history seen in a relatable context from the perspective of an ordinary family. Daniele Luchetti enlists the screenwriters of the earlier successful TV mini-series Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli and manages to bring the same sense of passion and urgency to Antonio Pennacchio's original novel and the autobiographical elements that inspired it.

My Brother is an Only Child covers a more condensed period of political turmoil from 1962 to 1977 that had an intense impact on a generation not only in Italy, but in many parts of Europe and the USA. There's something about the Italian experience however that manages to bring the swirl of forces at work into even greater focus, particularly in the way that they impact on the Benassi family, living significantly in the recently built town of Latina, founded by Mussolini in the fascist style. Developed entirely in eight weeks, the cracks however are now beginning to show.

The times they are a-changing and the former adherence to authority - mainly religious in the Benassi family - is being challenged by their two sons Accio and Manrico. The older brother Manrico has already developed left-wing revolutionary tendencies, and it doesn't take more than a revealing photo of actress Marisa Allasio to cause a crisis of faith in his younger brother Accio who has gone into a seminary in 1962. Accio however also has a crisis of faith in the Communism following the Cuban missile crisis, and turns instead to Fascism, recognising or believing that the ideals and achievements of Il Duce weren't all bad.

That's quite an ideological split in the Benassi family and it's compounded by the fact that they are quite a bunch of headstrong hotheads. Particularly the young Accio, who is still thrashing around for something to believe in, leading him down some very dark alleys, but Manrico also takes his activism to extremes. As dissatisfaction spills over onto the streets in the late sixties in mob violence, this results in some pronounced family tensions, but there are also romantic complications that reflect the film's treatment of the theme of loss of innocence.

Daniele Luchetti's pacy direction holds the wide dynamic of the film together well, getting right to the heart of the Italian passions and its fervour for life. Avoiding any kind of artificial 60s/70s period recreation (of the kind seen for example in Bertolucci's The Dreamers), and eliciting engaging performances from a young cast, My Brother is an Only Child has a wonderful naturalistic freshness and immediacy that speaks about love and youth, about ideals and disillusionment that speaks about life rather than making any political points specific only to Italy.

Mario Martone's biographical film about the early 19th century poet, philosopher and philologist Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is handsomely shot with lovely period detail and good performances based around an intriguing central character. Highly regarded as a major literary figure in Italy, Leopardi is however not as well-known elsewhere and if you're not familiar with the philosopher, Il Giovane Favoloso doesn't give you much more than a broad sense of the nature of his ideas and his writing and little sense of the scale or importance of his achievements. It does however give a compelling portrait of the man.

In the broader sense of the nature of Leopardi's poems and philosophy however, you certainly get the impression that it's deeply pessimistic, pondering the nature of living, love and death with a wistful melancholic tone, if not even rather grim and bleak in its outlook. Although Leopardi denies it in the film, some part of that outlook must derive from or be in reaction to his upbringing and the ill health he suffered all of his life. Il Giovane Favoloso shows the strict upbringing endured by Giacomo and his sister under their father in the reactionary environment of Reconati in the Papal States, where ideas of liberty and progressiveness that were being explored in the rest of Italy were not encouraged.

In such a restrictive environment, denied any contact with unwelcome outside influences and even the possibility of any close personal or romantic relationships - although Giacomo's self-conscious of his own physical shortcomings don't make such matters any easier - it's no wonder that Giacomo's youthful writings and poems, expressed in his 'Small Moral Works' display such a negative view of the world and the nature of mankind. Even when he finally breaks away from his father's influence, inspired by Pietro Giordani and striking up a friendship with Antonio Ranieri, Leopardi's unconventional views may be widely admired, but prove to be far too bleak and despondent for academic circles seeking to promote a more optimistic view that contributes to the betterment of mankind.

Travelling to Florence, and then to Rome and eventually Naples certainly broadens Leopardi's views, but the world for him still remains a hostile place full of anguish. Even falling in love only causes him more pain, his failing health and increasing deformity ruling out any possibility of a romantic attachment. Martone brilliantly captures a sense of Leopardi's Romantic inclinations as well as his darker perspective in a few brief fantasy-like dream scenes, and particularly has a real feel for his own home town of Naples, full of life, death misery and fervour, but stricken by cholera during this period. It's near the slopes of Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii, shortly before the poet's death, that the director captures best this sense of life and works coming together in Leopardi's concluding meditation on the destiny of man in 'La ginestra'.