Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi was a devout Catholic who wrote and directed a movie about devout Catholics at the end of the nineteenth century. These people are peasants, enacted by actual peasants living in Italy’s Bergamo province. Olmi’s rumination of them, in “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” (1978), is almost sentimental but Christianly kind and respectful too. Children are plentiful; most of the adults are true Christians, and the film’s religiosity, its spirituality, is real and felt.

The peasants seem mainly unconcerned with politics; they’re concerned about surviving. A widow with several children will be done for if she does not receive a miracle of recovery for her sick cow, and after praying she does receive it. The people here work and they love God. The film shows the real-life killing of a pig which is an act the peasants would do anyway for sustenance. It’s rather captivating: there is a God-man-animal hierarchy in “Tree.”

Olmi died in 2018, leaving behind a prodigious number of feature films and shorts. “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” is one of his best.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

In the 1950s, the New Jersey restaurant of two Italian brothers, Primo and Secondo, is failing badly. This—part of the premise of the 1996 movie “Big Night”—is sad, but also evident is that Secondo (Stanley Tucci) is failing badly morally. For one thing, he cheats on his girlfriend Phyllis (Minnie Driver). Secondo is an undeserving immigrant and businessman; not so Primo. Does it matter if he fails? On the other hand, his Italian-American competitor, Pascal (a perfect Ian Holm), is also undeserving, but successful.

The cast of “Big Night” is sapid and endearing. This includes Campbell Scott, who co-directed the film with Tucci. It is a very good food flick, like “Eat Drink Man Woman”—good because artistic, and not without the Right Music on its soundtrack: “Buona Sera” and “Oh Marie” by Louis Prima, “Tic Ti, Tic Ta” by Claudio Villa, “Don’t Take Your Love Away” by Keely Smith, etc. Delicious.