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The Past Is a Foreign Country

A run of films that reach back through memory — lost summers, vanished friends, the golden light of a place you can never return to — best watched in a row when you're in the mood to ache a little.

Mostly beloved arthouse touchstones: a couple (Call Me by Your Name, Cinema Paradiso) are easy crowd favorites, while 8½ and Tarkovsky's Nostalgia ask real patience, and Au Revoir les Enfants and The Virgin Suicides are best saved for when you can take a gut-punch.

  • Cinema Paradiso (1988)
  • Call Me by Your Name (2017)
  • Amarcord (1973)
  • 8½ (1963)
  • We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974)
  • Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)
  • The Virgin Suicides (2000)
  • Nostalgia (1983)
  • The Go-Between (1971) — The film that gave this thread its name — L.P. Hartley's line spoken over a golden Norfolk summer of 1900, an old man circling the childhood errand that broke him; if the ache of Au Revoir les Enfants stayed with you, this is the one to finally pull down.
  • The Best of Youth (2003) — The six-hour Italian epic you never made time for, opening in the summer of 1966 and following two brothers as decades of lost friends and vanished selves accumulate — the long-form cousin of We All Loved Each Other So Much.
  • El Sur (1983) — Erice's hushed masterpiece of an adult woman sifting her childhood for the mystery of her father — pure reaching-back-through-memory, the elliptical Spanish rhyme to Nostalgia's patient ache.
  • The Postman (1994) — The wistful island idyll of Neruda and a shy postman on a 1950s Italian coast, all golden light and poetry and quiet loss — the overlooked one that sits right beside Cinema Paradiso.
  • Fireworks (2023) — A Sicilian summer of 1982 and two boys falling into a first love the town won't allow — the under-seen film that rhymes hard with Call Me by Your Name before it turns to a gut-punch.
  • The Hand of God (2021) — Sorrentino's autobiographical Naples of the mid-'80s, Maradona and adolescence and sudden devastating loss — the Amarcord-lineage memory piece that's been waiting on your list.
  • The Great Beauty (2013) — Sorrentino's elegiac night-walk through Rome, a man haunted by one lost youthful love beneath all the party lights — the direct heir to 8½ that aches exactly the way this thread wants.
  • Just an Illusion (2026) — If The Hand of God and Amarcord landed, this is the recent one to pull down next — a boy's twelfth year in a 1985 Paris suburb, recalled as that vanished country of drifting brothers, first friendships, and parents' quarrels as permanent weather.