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100Qualifies as director Giuseppe Tornatore's second full-fledged masterpiece. His first: "Cinema Paradiso."
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90Malena the film is as beautiful and seductive as its heroine, with its ravishing Lajos Koltai cinematography and sweepingly romantic Ennio Morricone score.
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75Gives audiences something more than just a heart-stopping beauty to contemplate.
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70It differs from American films about the period in its evocation of day-to-day passion. The power of beauty is often dealt with in films, but not so often its powerful curse.
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70Nothing new here except model-turned-actress Bellucci. To call her noteworthy would be an understatement.
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70A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
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70What begins as a blushing, priapic opera buffa about coming of age turns into a verismo shocker, before softening into something mellower.
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67You wish that Malena's inner life had been given as much accent as her outer charms.
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67Intriguing, containing a truthful kernel of sweetness, rot and brutality that will shock many.
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63No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.
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63Striking photography, period detail, screen-filling crowd scenes, and veteran composer Morricone's score make this one worth seeing, but the sheer nastiness of the town's people drags it down.
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63If Mussolini had a Monica Bellucci to inspire his troops, we might still be trying to take Palermo.
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63Too often seems like a slightly silly film.
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50There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.
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50There's definitely some paradiso in watching Malena walking, but not enough to sustain almost two hours of cinema.
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50When the film changes gears from light coming-of-age comedy to ex-post-facto war parable midway through, it loses its focus and suddenly becomes a much darker beast.
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50Combining a coming-of-age story with the sad odyssey of a woman punished for her beauty, the film ultimately has too little depth, subtlety, thematic consequence or contemporary relevance.
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50Somewhere in writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's overstyled movie, about a 12-year-old boy (Sulfaro) during the Italian fascist period who has the hots for a mistreated war widow (Belluci), is a pretty good short story about the fickleness of community and the cruelty of gossip struggling to get out.
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40Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."
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20Giuseppe Tornatore has long been a master of cheap sentiment ("Cinema Paradiso," " The Legend of 1900"), but his latest film is his most shallow, reprehensible exercise in nostalgia to date.
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20Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."
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10In the end, Malena is an unlikable and foul farce, unworthy of Tornatore's previously gentle touch.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 20
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Mixed: 2 out of 20
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Negative: 0 out of 20
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R.L.10A truly extraordinary film! I loved every minute of it.
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sathyav.10
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ChrisS.9What a great movie. Excellent performances with a spectacular score and striking images. You won't forget this one.