The Italian.

"You could say that The Italian does not offer many surprises," admits Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "It's based partly on a newspaper account of a real case, in which a Russian boy ran away from an orphanage in search of the mother who had abandoned him, and partly on David Copperfield. But it's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming."

"He runs and fights and schemes and, during a ferocious eruption of pity and terror near the end of the story, he just about breaks your heart into pieces," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "There's a touch of directorial sadism at work here, I think. But the last shot of a child's face lighted up with hope also seems to me like something out of a film by Roberto Rossellini, which is very high praise indeed."

At indieWIRE, Jeff Reichert calls it "a remarkably restrained film..., rendered lovingly and realistically by young [Kolya] Spiridinov, that could please those folks who found something like Kolya charming, as well as those who didn't."

"[H]e gives a performance of such natural beauty that it would make child actors of the American variety bow their heads in collective shame," writes Matt Singer for IFC News.

"A film more fully committed to its subject (and to the moody ecstasy of Russian fatalism) might have explored the shattered fantasies of reunification that are the fate of most kids dumped by an underclass itself broken by want and drink," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice, LA Weekly and so on. "Lured, perhaps, by the promise of international markets, [director Andrei] Kravchuk instead opts for routine uplift, and once the heroic journey is set in motion, the rest is ballast."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "For all its sly appraisals, grouty surfaces and hard-luck situations, The Italian is underneath it all a fairy-tale, though the thought doesn't crystallize until later."

"I think The Italian is supposed to be A.I. without robots," suggests David Edelstein in New York, an association you can be damn sure wasn't lost on Armond White, either. "How did a plot this humanistic ever get imported to the US?" White wonders in the New York Press.

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "While The Italian is a nice little movie, it is also as wispy and insubstantial as cotton candy, but not quite as sweet."

"The Italian is an aesthetic gem, but a moral muddle," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "It marshals considerable filmmaking and acting prowess in service of a message that - if I understood it correctly - practitioners of international adoption may find bluntly offensive."

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2007 2:08 AM