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Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Well-to-do, sophisticated couple, Elsa and Michele, have a 20 year-old daughter, Alice, and enough money for Elsa to leave her job and fulfill an old dream of studying art history. After she graduates, however, their lives change. Michele confesses he hasn't worked in two months and was fired by the company he founded years ago. Elsa overcomes her initial shock by pouring extra energy into facing the crisis while Michele, exhausted by an unsuccessful job hunt, lets himself go, alternating between vivacity and apathy. The growing distance between them eventually leads to a break-up. Only when they are apart will they realize that they risk losing their most precious possession: the love that binds them. (Film Movement) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 9
  2. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. A brave film simply for daring to portray a nightmare lurking in the minds of middle-aged workers, people who might fear a film that addresses their insecurities this bluntly.
  2. 75
    In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.
  3. Reviewed by: Bob Mondello
    75
    For Soldini, even bleakness has a poetic side, and his imagery is occasionally breathtaking here -- never more so than in the film's final tableau, which elegantly connects a Renaissance fresco Elsa had been working on before the couple's fall from grace with a strikingly similar real-life image suggesting the possibility of a renaissance in their marriage.
  4. 50
    It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

See all 9 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
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  2. Mixed: 0 out of
  3. Negative: 0 out of

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