The bitter Delta of Borghi and Lo Cascio, the return of John Wick and 8 other films not to be missed at the cinema or in streaming

Set on the Po between Ferrara and Rovigo, in the cold winter of floodplains, mists, pink flamingos, Delta more than a simple drama about the river and its harshness: hatred is like an evil whirlpool, the ferocity of opposition, the wrong ideals. On the Delta everything flows dragged by the current and nothing stays forever. The theme is the duel between two men crushed by fate: Elia (Alessandro Borghi) ended up in the east of the Adriatic, on the other side of immigration, but soon retraced his stepsand the environmentalist Osso (Luigi Lo Cascio).
Elijah is a rather wild poacheran ace of illegal fishing: Italian, strong manners and few words, was adopted by the Florian family from Romania. Osso instead a fish guard, a volunteer for the protection of the ecosystem and foreman of the locks, therefore the one who regulates the balance between earth and water. A quiet, methodical man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless like all myths he’s exasperated: his reason for living to protect the rugged nature of the delta and his younger sister, Nani (Greta Esposito), who accuses him of being too good, to turn the other cheek too often, to face common battles in a tenuous way.
When Elia and Osso collide for an event reminiscent of a small bourgeois, a fierce fight ensues. Fatally, the two cancel each other out: too different, yet also too similar. Subsequent events are the death of the fence boss, Elia’s escape with the bartender – lover Anna (Emilia Scarpati Fanetti), the manhunt in the woods, the redde rationem the final.
Produced by Matteo Rovere’s Greenland, Delta a visceral and disturbing western filmed in extreme climatic conditions, with the trimurti freezing, mud, wind. Around the Great River gathers a population of marginals, outlaws and borderlines abandoned to the underworld. Michele Vannucci (The biggest dream) expresses a naturalistic cinema and works on bodies and masses. It describes brutal contacts and outlines a shivering and suggestive fresco thanks above all to the landscape.
You can’t escape the past. Elia and Osso know that theirs is a path of no return: they face it as an atonement. Borghi and Lo Cascio, on two opposite sides also in acting, are very good at integrating, at mending the network of psychologies and at making history not just a settling of scores but broadening its meaning on a universal level.

DELTA by Michele Vannucci
(Italy, 2022, duration 105′)
with Alessandro Borghi, Luigi Lo Cascio, Emilia Scarpati Fanetti, Denis Fasolo
Rating: *** out of 5
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