The Wedding Director.

"Marco Bellocchio has rejuvenated his career and his world-class reputation in recent years with a series of visually classical yet thematically absurdist moralist parables," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "The feisty 68-year-old Italian tackled Catholicism with My Mother's Smile in 2002, and revisited the Red Brigade's assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro with Good Morning, Night in 2003. Next to these projects, his 2006 film The Wedding Director, which begins a one-week engagement at the Museum of Modern Art tomorrow, seems like a lighthearted change of pace."

"While a step-by-step plot summary suggests comedy, or even farce, Mr Bellocchio mischievously scrambles the tone with suspenseful music, funereally elegant scenes and the occasional throb of melodrama," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The result is unpredictable and sometimes confounding, but the movie is pulled into beguiling coherence by an odd and effective combination of absurdism and sincerity.... The liveliest aspect of The Wedding Director may be its cynicism, which is directed at sex, cinema and nearly everything else that matters in modern Italy."

"For a film confronting mortality, it's an astonishingly exuberant expression of the will to live," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

"The Wedding Director is truly complex; but that's also its delight," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at June 5, 2008 7:00 AM