Viva Italia!

This year, Lincoln Center's "Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" series rides the crest of a recent Italian cinema resurgence. Among its many stars is Kim Rossi Stuart, whose performance in Gianni Amelio's 2004 Keys to the House was one of the most moving of recent years. Rossi Stuart has a directorial debut in the series (Even Free is OK) as well as an acting job in Crime Novel, an interminable gangster epic.

But Italian cinema has shown more creativity than Crime Novel's Michael Mann imitations. The best way to approach Lincoln Center's dedication is to pace it with recent DVD releases that are in themselves grand occasions. Tops is Antonioni's 1975 The Passenger (Sony Home Video), in which Jack Nicholson literally connects the ethos of '70s American movies to their European art-film precedent. Next, catch up with last year's fantastic Marco Bellocchio comeback: Criterion offers Bellocchio's 1968 debut film, Fist in the Pocket, while his 2005 releases, My Mother's Smile (New Yorker) and Good Morning, Night (Wellspring), return Bellocchio to the new millennium's summit.

In Lincoln Center's premiere of The Goodbye Kiss, Alessio Boni (tragic hero of The Best of Youth), returns in a film that connects to Italian cinema's great past-a heritage that is beautifully represented in the Children Are Watching Us, Vittorio DeSica's essential 1942 directorial debut brought back by Criterion in a crystalline transfer. Synching with the new Morrissey album's references to Pasolini, Visconti and Magnani, it's best to know where you're going at Open Roads by paying attention to where Italian cinema has been.