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If the slightly hurried third act and unlikely conclusion don't quite deliver on the brilliance of the first 75 minutes, it's a forgivable offense. This is a different sort of horror film, where the known is infinitely more frightening than the unknown.
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89By far the most gorgeous slice of sunlit sadism so far this summer, I’m Not Scared also manages to be oddly sweet: a boy’s life, with treachery.
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88I'm Not Scared is a reminder of true childhood, of its fears and speculations, of the way a conversation can be overheard but not understood, of the way that the shape of the adult world forms slowly through the mist.
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88A virtuoso piece of dark storytelling.
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88Like the best coming-of-age stories, I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) is, in part, a work of horror.
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88Worth seeing not only because it's a highly effective thriller, but also because it's a finely tuned evocation of innocence at the mercy of adult cynicism.
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88Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.
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88Think of how M. Night Shyamalan redefined the ghost story (The Sixth Sense), the superhero creation myth (Unbreakable), and the alien-invasion epic (Signs)--and you may get a sense of the genius behind this fascinating new horror film.
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83With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.
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83Above all, I'm Not Scared pays off our emotional investment. In the end, its elements come together with the kind of genuinely thrilling, deeply satisfying climax that even the better Hollywood movies just can't seem to pull off anymore.
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80This not being Hollywood, Michele and Filippo do not benefit from life lessons learned as exemplified in coming-of-age pap like "Now And Then." The sweet life, this ain’t.
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80With a graceful confidence Salvatores has made a movie in which good and evil flow into each other as easily as day and night.
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80Although the movie takes on many of the characteristics of a conventional thriller, it refuses to go for cheap, vicious shocks, and the adults are seen through the curtain of Michele's trust.
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80Deliberate disorientation keeps the audience constantly off balance, and it's brilliantly effective.
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80The film is remarkable for something besides its visual immersion in gold. The director, Gabriele Salvatores, has added his name to the roster of film-makers who have drawn remarkable acting from children.
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This extraordinary Italian thriller is a study in contrasts: light versus dark, youth versus maturity, the playful versus the lethal.
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75In the guise of a nerve-jangling thriller, director Gabriele Salvatores, an Oscar winner for "Mediterraneo," delivers a fierce, frightening and deeply moving study of childhood. It's a keeper.
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75It's hard to find a current release that so effectively teases the mind and emotions.
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75A plague of child kidnappings in Italy during the '70s provides the background for this chilling, deceptively simple tale of a rural boy who unearths terrible family secrets and rises to the moral challenge they present.
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75This satisfying adaptation of a popular novel is mostly an artistic reflection on youthful loss of innocence.
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75A tale of childhood innocence and adult corruption - and the point where the two intersect - I'm Not Scared is a lyrical thriller inspired by the run of kidnappings that befell Italy in the 1970s.
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75Beautifully shot and compelling blend of thriller and coming-of-age drama.
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75With its unique perspective on both the coming-of-age and thriller genres, the movie deserves to be seen by a wider audience than the one that normally frequents subtitled movies.
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70The young actors, all first-timers chosen in auditions in Puglia and Basilicata, are completely natural.
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70While another director might have imbued the story of a Sicilian boy awakened to his parents' involvement in child abduction with more emotional weight and thematic depth, Salvatores' classically illustrative treatment should open arthouse doors for the visually sumptuous production.
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70The fascination here is not so much the surface drama, though that is suspenseful and sometimes shocking, but Michele's inability to grasp the nature and extent of the evil that surrounds him.
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70Good but it SEEMS even better because of its evocative setting.
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70A lyrical throwback to such movies as René Clément's "Forbidden Games" (1952) and other works of the humanist European cinema of a half century ago. [12 April 2003, p. 89]
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63A film that appeared exceptional turns mundane.
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63I'm Not Scared presents an interesting picture of youthful innocence challenged, but not a truthful one
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60Salvatores draws strikingly unsentimental performances from his young actors, all making their film debuts, and juxtaposes the petty meanness of children with the calculated cruelty of desperate adults to haunting effect.
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60I’m Not Scared manages to convey a truthful approach to the beginning of the end of childhood.
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60Cinematographer Italo Petriccione gives the film a dramatic look, but that never compensates for the lack of actual drama; when so much of the conflict concerns Cristiano's reluctance to betray his father, it might have helped to spend more time on exploring that relationship than on capturing what light looks like when it pours in from a cellar door.
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40The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 8
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Mixed: 0 out of 8
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Negative: 1 out of 8
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va10Excellent!
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ShahidullaK.9
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AmurabiM.6