Metascore

Universal acclaim - based on 24 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 19 Ratings

  • Summary: In Vincere, the closely guarded story of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's secret lover and son is revealed in fittingly operatic proportions. Thunderstruck by the young Mussolini's charisma, Ida Dalser gives up everything to help champion his revolutionary ideas. When he disappears during World War I and later resurfaces with a new wife, the scorned Dalser and her son are locked away in separate asylums for more than a decade. But Ida will not disappear without a fight. (IFC Films) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 22 out of 24
  2. Negative: 0 out of 24
  1. 100
    Setting aside, just for a moment, his general loathsomeness, there is a case to be made for a less apparent aspect of Benito Mussolini: He was once really hot.
  2. Reviewed by: Rob Nelson
    100
    Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema.
  3. Reviewed by: Natasha Senjanovic
    80
    The director also pulls career-high performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi that are, respectively, tragic and mesmerizing.
  4. There’s visual poetry here and haunted performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi -- who plays two roles, and is especially gripping as Dalser’s grown son.

See all 24 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 3
  3. Negative: 1 out of 3
  1. HuguesF.
    10
    Through the struggle of this woman, Bellocchio not only is critical of fascism and of the dictatorship of Mussolini.. It is too a real hymn to cinema as a medium conveying meaning in an alienated world. In this point of view,it is by itself an act of resistance, in a world invaded by advertisements, and whose Imaginary is colonized by the society of the spectacle. Bellocchio offers us an operatic tour de force. Performance by both actors is exceptional, but especially from Giovanna Mezzogiorno, amazingly inhabited in the role of her young career (A performance and a movie that would undeniably have deserved more prizes, had Cannes jury been fair, or had Italy selected it as the Italian candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Movie, instead of a more commercial one). Expand
  2. Con un vigor narrativo y una inventiva visual envidables, Bellocchio echa mano de un estilo diríase operático/futurista para contar la trágica historia de la primera familia del joven socialista Benito Mussolini, repudiada y aplastada cuando "Il Duce" cambió de bando para convertirse en lider del fascismo. Giovanna Mezzogiorno está extraordinaria. Expand
  3. JaneG.
    2
    Dark, impossibly dark, dreary and not worth the trouble. All the critics loved this but very disappointing.

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