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Il ciello é Rosso (The Sky is Red) is a dreamlike recounting of the lives of several orphaned adolescents at the end of World War II who set up house in an abandoned, quarantined section of a bombed out Italian town. The overall tone is much closer to Carne's poetic realism than to anything I would normally associate with neorealism. The film stars an actress named Marina Berti, whom I'd never previously heard of (though it turns out she has a long list of credits in mostly obscure Italian films). She does an impressive job of taking a somewhat stereotyped, melodramatic character and somehow making her completely natural and convincing.

The film is a fascinating experiment, and I've never seen anything else quite like it. Absolutely worth watching if you ever get the opportunity.

Exceptionally effective emotionally and visually. Strange Days Diary NYC is a small film; it focuses on life in one New York community during 2020, the year of the pandemic. But it's the details that tell. The physical changes that occur on one block as first the city shuts down and then the racial justice protests erupt. The ways in which people struggle to adapt to those changes. The ways in which life eventually starts returning to normal - but what's normal? As the title says, it was a strange time...

The film itself is simply made and refreshingly gimmick free. No flashy graphics, no unnecessary music, no manipulative cutting. It lets the images and circumstances speak for themselves, and that's what gives the film its power.

Director Giuseppe De Santis, a committed leftist, was apparently stung by criticism which he received from the Communist Party for the commercial compromises he had made on Bitter Rice, and he resolved to make a properly socialist realist film for his next project. Of course, he ended up making an ITALIAN socialist realist film. Both the characters and the situations are intentionally two-dimensional and archetypal, but everyone throws themselves into it with such passion and emotional conviction that the result is hugely operatic and occasionally mesmerizing.

Lucia Bose, in her first role (immediately before Antonioni starred her in Cronaca di un Amore), is ravishing and almost convincing as a peasant girl forced to her disgust to marry the sadistic local land-owner while her true love must hide in the mountains trying to rustle sheep. Plus, De Santis was clearly intrigued by Hollywood westerns and he repeatedly sets up strikingly archetypal western scenes. I suspect Sergio Leone was inspired by this film when he started the whole spaghetti western craze a decade later, but No Peace Under the Olives plays at a different level altogether.