Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco and His Brothers (1960) is Luchino Visconti's sweeping family drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A widowed mother, Rosaria Parondi, drags her four sons off the poor Sicilian south to a cold and unwelcoming Milan, where a fifth brother already waits.

The family takes whatever work it can find. One son climbs into the boxing ring, another scrubs at a laundry, a third lines up at the factory gate, and for a while the north looks like a fresh start. Then a woman comes between two of them. Nadia, played by Annie Girardot, is loved one way by the gentle Rocco (Alain Delon) and another by the hot-tempered, brutal Simone. That love splits the household from the inside, and the price keeps climbing.

Running nearly three hours, the film is built like a novel in five chapters, one per son, and shoots Milan with the hard documentary eye of neorealism. It features a young Delon, Claudia Cardinale and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. Long censored for its frankness, it now ranks among the peaks of Italian cinema. Stream Rocco and His Brothers (1960) online on iFILM.