Monica Bellucci’s four favourite movies
If you were to look for a definition of Hollywood glamour, then staring you in the face would be the supreme talent of Monica Bellucci.
The consummate star has worked with some of the greatest filmmakers Hollywood has to offer and has consistently delivered time and time again. Able to make audiences weep, star and laugh, Bellucci’s is a career few could hope to achieve.
You would think, with that kind of résumé, that she would be more inclined to flex her arthouse muscles when asked by Letterboxd for her four favourite movies of all time. Instead, she decided to pay homage to the director of her latest movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and a tribute to her Italian heritage.
Speaking to Letterboxd during the press run for 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – in which she co-starred and was, at the time, romantically linked with the director – Bellucci listed her top four flicks as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and La Strada, and Burton’s earlier masterpiece Edward Scissorhands. A curious quartet at first glance, but dig a little deeper, and it makes perfect sense for a performer who’s spent her career oscillating between high art and dark fantasy.
Despite being known as one of the most striking women on the planet, Bellucci’s attraction to the macabre isn’t so unusual. Taking on a role as one of Dracula’s undead brides in the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola adaptation, a few years later, she would also appear in the blood-soaked Brotherhood of the Wolf. For Bellucci, the gothic is less a phase than a permanent undercurrent. Her love of Burton’s off-kilter worlds is simply the logical extension of a career drenched in shadow, lace, and the occasional werewolf/murder mystery.
Take Corpse Bride, for example. Burton’s 2005 stop-motion musical about love, loss, and skeletal matrimony isn’t your average Sunday comfort watch, but perhaps for Bellucci it’s pure poetry. The film’s delicate balancing act – whimsy threaded through with death – echoes the sensibility of an actor who’s never shied away from exploring eros and thanatos in equal measure. That’s life and death, FYI.
Similarly, Edward Scissorhands may be dressed in pastel suburbia, but it’s a gothic fairy tale at heart: a loner with blades for hands trying to find tenderness in a world that fears difference. Bellucci’s affinity with such stories feels inevitable.
Then there’s the Italian side of her list. The homegrown gems. La Dolce Vita and La Strada are classic Fellini films that are rammed full of humour, heartbreak and the undulating beauty of life’s chaotic moments. It is easy to understand how Bellucci may connect with the stars of the movies as they deliver grounded and emotional performances. These films celebrate the messy, contradictory side of being human. The joy and sadness, beauty and pain, all tangled together.
It should be noted that when Bellucci picked the movies in question, she was actually in a relationship with Tim Burton and heading up the sequel to his Beetlejuice release. So you might be forgiven for thinking she paid an extra heap of tribute to the director.
But what the choices do show is that, despite being a powerhouse of European cinema, Bellucci is not concerned with promoting herself as a cinephile, but as a lover of movies. And there is a distinctive difference. Her picks are part gothic indulgence and part Italian realism. The two halves of her screen identity are bound together.
