The Italian Film Festival is distinguished once again by its thoughtful curation. New titles play alongside old classics and restored masterpieces, Federico Fellini shows up at least once, and the IFF’s programmers aren’t afraid to colour outside the lines of conventional good taste, making room this year for three fabulously overwrought samples of the giallo—a nasty genre where lowbrow meets high style, usually with a knife.

The festival returns for its seventh edition at the Vancity Theatre on January 3 with an opening-night gala presentation of The Champion, Leonardo D’Agostini’s guaranteed crowdpleaser about a talented if troubled footballer and the humble man assigned to knock him into shape. Other new flicks include an Italian reworking of Jack London’s Martin Eden and the cross-cultural romcom Bangla, in which a Bengali Muslim finds his will tested by a young Italian woman played by Carlotta Antonelli. Here are a few more of the Straight’s recommendations:

Blood and Black Lace

Director Mario Bava’s inestimable influence on subsequent generations of your favourite filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino and Brian De Palma among them) can be traced back to a handful of campy horror flicks, including 1960’s Black Sunday and this riot of murder and perverse eroticism from 1964, in which a black-clad stalker kills his way through a psychedelically lit fashion house. January 3 and 8

The Traitor

This year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival brought us Corleone, Mosco Boucault’s exhaustive look at the implosion (sometimes explosion, for the really unlucky ones) of the Sicilian mafia in the late ’80s. For those still jonesing for some post-Irishman gangster opera, here’s the epic treatment of turncoat Tommaso Buscetta’s story, courtesy of veteran director Marco Bellocchio and featuring a Q&A with consul general of Italy Fabio Messineo. January 4

Once Upon a Time in the West

In 2019 the IFF presented the full-length restoration of Once Upon a Time in America. In 2020 we get Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece, a towering summation of the spaghetti western by its greatest purveyor, featuring Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, a harmonica-playing Charles Bronson, and an astonishing Henry Fonda letting rip as the meanest son of a bitch who ever wore black. January 4 and 9

La Dolce Vita

It’s been 60 years since Jesus helicoptered over Rome and an enchanted Marcello Mastroianni watched as Anita Ekberg waded into the Trevi Fountain—while an equally enchanted world audience beheld one of the defining works of 20th-century cinema. It’s on the big screen. You really need any more encouragement? January 6 and 8

Tommaso

Willem Dafoe stars as a wild-man American filmmaker trying to maintain his sobriety and keep his young family together in Rome. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because Dafoe stars with the wife and child of wild-man American filmmaker Abel Ferrera in what amounts to a glorified home movie by the exiled director. (No really, it was partly shot at his house). Ferrara has never made a boring film—this semi-improvised effort, his first narrative feature in five years, will be no different. January 9