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Italian for Beginners
Miramax Films
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for language and some sexuality
Starring
Anders W. Berthelsen,
Ann Eleonora Jørgensen,
Anette Støvelbæk,
Peter Gantzler,
Lars Kaalund,
Sara Indrio Jensen,
Elsebeth Steentoft,
and
Rikke Wölck
Follows the stories of six insecure singles whose lives interweave one dreary Copenhagen winter. (Miramax Films)
| GENRE(S): |
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Lone Scherfig
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Lone Scherfig
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: October 15, 2002
Video: October 15, 2002
Theatrical: January 18, 2002
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
112 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
Denmark |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
Danish and Italian (with English subtitles) |
Original Danish title "Italiensk for begyndere"
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
San Francisco Chronicle
Carla Meyer
Lone Scherfig, the writer-director, has made a film so unabashedly hopeful that it actually makes the heart soar. Yes, soar.
90
Newsweek
David Ansen
Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.
90
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
This is a woman's work in the best sense -- empathetic, inferentially erotic and delicately intuitive, as well as fiercely intelligent.
90
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
A delicious and delicately funny look at the residents of a Copenhagen neighborhood coping with the befuddling complications life tosses at them.
90
Time
Richard Schickel
The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.
88
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''
88
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.
88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
This is a movie that doesn't depend for its effects on star performers or stylized wish-fulfillment sexuality but on realism, sharp observation and honest humor.
88
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
It's the rare film, Dogma or otherwise, that keeps you smiling long after the lights come up.
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Don Irvine
Unlike Hollywood's starting point of hopelessly beautiful and yet inexplicably unentangled principal characters, Italian For Beginners'raw material is something of a more dirty-fingernail variety.
80
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
It's all done without special effects, soaring strings or manufactured sentiment. Now, that's entertainment.
80
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
These melancholy Danes create something sweetly sexy, funny and touching.
80
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
As they stumble, bumble and fumble their way to love, they get more charming by the minute. Which makes them more interesting than Hollywood-style characters, anyway.
80
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.
80
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.
75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Has a generosity of spirit and a wonderfully upbeat ending that makes it a nice little antidote to a bleak season.
75
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The film only wants to amuse. It's a reminder that Dogma films need not involve pathetic characters tormented by the misuse of their genitalia, but can simply want to have a little fun.
75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
An engaging romantic comedy that would have been better if the audience wasn't constantly being distracted by mediocre video quality and jerky camera movements.
75
USA Today
Claudia Puig
This charming but slight tale has warmth, wit and interesting characters compassionately portrayed.
75
Miami Herald
Connie Ogle
Dogme films don't have to be bleak to be effective. They can be -- imagine! -- fun. Scherfig may have taken the discipline in an entirely new and welcome direction.
75
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
Its low-key charm shows that Dogma filmmakers have yet to run out of ideas.
70
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.
70
Variety
Eddie Cockrell
The most nonconfrontational and thus accessible title in the Dogma lot to date, and will speak the international language of proletariat love to arthouse auds who go for such fare.
67
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Will be of interest for anyone seeking unconventional romantic stories as well as those curious about the development of the Dogme movement.
50
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.
50
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.
50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Paula Nechak
While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.
30
TV Guide
Steve Simels
None of this is any more fun as it sounds -- the cancer ward scenes are truly disturbing -- but to be fair, writer/director Lone Scherfeg (the first woman to make a Dogme 95 film) manages some black-humored laughs.
 The average user rating for this movie is 9.8 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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