| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Qualifies as director Giuseppe Tornatore's second full-fledged masterpiece. His first: "Cinema Paradiso."
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| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Malena 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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| 75 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Gives audiences something more than just a heart-stopping beauty to contemplate.
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| 70 |
Rolling Stone
Nothing new here except model-turned-actress Bellucci. To call her noteworthy would be an understatement.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
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| 70 |
The New York Times
What begins as a blushing, priapic opera buffa about coming of age turns into a verismo shocker, before softening into something mellower.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
It 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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| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
You wish that Malena's inner life had been given as much accent as her outer charms.
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| 67 |
Portland Oregonian
Intriguing, containing a truthful kernel of sweetness, rot and brutality that will shock many.
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| 63 |
Christian Science Monitor
Striking 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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| 63 |
New York Post
Too often seems like a slightly silly film.
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| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.
|
| 63 |
New York Daily News
If Mussolini had a Monica Bellucci to inspire his troops, we might still be trying to take Palermo.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.
|
| 50 |
Austin Chronicle
When 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.
|
| 50 |
Variety
David Rooney
Combining 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.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
There's definitely some paradiso in watching Malena walking, but not enough to sustain almost two hours of cinema.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Reader
Somewhere 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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| 40 |
Time
Things 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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| 20 |
Mr. Showbiz
Giuseppe 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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| 20 |
Washington Post
Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."
|
| 10 |
Film.com
In the end, Malena is an unlikable and foul farce, unworthy of Tornatore's previously gentle touch.
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