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Italian for Beginners
Miramax Films


9.8

based on 28 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 8 votes
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Rate this movie

FILM:

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

MPAA RATING: R for language and some sexuality

Starring Anders W. Berthelsen, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Anette Støvelbæk, Peter Gantzler, Lars Kaalund, Sara Indrio Jensen, Elsebeth Steentoft, and Rikke Wölck

Follows the stories of six insecure singles whose lives interweave one dreary Copenhagen winter. (Miramax Films)

GENRE(S):	Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Lone Scherfig
DIRECTED BY:	Lone Scherfig
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: October 15, 2002 Video: October 15, 2002 Theatrical: January 18, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	112 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Denmark
LANGUAGE(S):	Danish and Italian (with English subtitles)

Original Danish title "Italiensk for begyndere"

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

Lone Scherfig, the writer-director, has made a film so unabashedly hopeful that it actually makes the heart soar. Yes, soar.

Newsweek David Ansen

Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

This is a woman's work in the best sense -- empathetic, inferentially erotic and delicately intuitive, as well as fiercely intelligent.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A delicious and delicately funny look at the residents of a Copenhagen neighborhood coping with the befuddling complications life tosses at them.

Time Richard Schickel

The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

This is a movie that doesn't depend for its effects on star performers or stylized wish-fulfillment sexuality but on realism, sharp observation and honest humor.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

It's the rare film, Dogma or otherwise, that keeps you smiling long after the lights come up.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Don Irvine

Unlike Hollywood's starting point of hopelessly beautiful and yet inexplicably unentangled principal characters, Italian For Beginners'raw material is something of a more dirty-fingernail variety.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

It's all done without special effects, soaring strings or manufactured sentiment. Now, that's entertainment.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

These melancholy Danes create something sweetly sexy, funny and touching.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

As they stumble, bumble and fumble their way to love, they get more charming by the minute. Which makes them more interesting than Hollywood-style characters, anyway.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Has a generosity of spirit and a wonderfully upbeat ending that makes it a nice little antidote to a bleak season.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film only wants to amuse. It's a reminder that Dogma films need not involve pathetic characters tormented by the misuse of their genitalia, but can simply want to have a little fun.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

An engaging romantic comedy that would have been better if the audience wasn't constantly being distracted by mediocre video quality and jerky camera movements.

USA Today Claudia Puig

This charming but slight tale has warmth, wit and interesting characters compassionately portrayed.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Dogme films don't have to be bleak to be effective. They can be -- imagine! -- fun. Scherfig may have taken the discipline in an entirely new and welcome direction.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Its low-key charm shows that Dogma filmmakers have yet to run out of ideas.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.

Variety Eddie Cockrell

The most nonconfrontational and thus accessible title in the Dogma lot to date, and will speak the international language of proletariat love to arthouse auds who go for such fare.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Will be of interest for anyone seeking unconventional romantic stories as well as those curious about the development of the Dogme movement.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.

TV Guide Steve Simels

None of this is any more fun as it sounds -- the cancer ward scenes are truly disturbing -- but to be fair, writer/director Lone Scherfeg (the first woman to make a Dogme 95 film) manages some black-humored laughs.

The average user rating for this movie is 9.8 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Drew J. gave it a 10:
Magical experience, you can not come out unaffected.

Mike G. gave it a 10:
Media reviewers seem to have missed the fact that it takes place during Advent, and is about the effect of a man of faith.

Richard P. gave it a 10:
One of the best movies I have ever seen.

Dana F. gave it a 10:
Such a delight that in the midst of falling in love with it and its characters, I wept unabashadley while grinning like a fool.

Ron G. gave it a 10:
Lone Scherfig makes you smile, laugh, cry and feel good after you watch this exquisite film.

Chad S. gave it a 10:
Dogma for beginners is more like it. Films shot on digital video are not known for its warmth and can sometimes be a test of viewer endurance. "Italian for Beginners" shocks you with its gentle humor and tenderness. That's not to say there isn't the requisite existential angst either, though. There's gobs. But this film is not unrelenting in its grimness like "The Celebration" or "Dancer in the Dark" were. Seeing these characters at Venice on vacation, and the physical Venice itself, through the digital video format make these Danes really look like tourists, and Venice, a tourist destination. There is a moment here, involving the Italian girl in love with an older man, that belongs in the canon of great romantic comedy moments. You may clap. It is so winning like so much of this amazing movie.

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Italian for Beginners Miramax Films

Italian for Beginners
Miramax Films