Mio Fratello È Figlio Unico|My Brother Is an Only ChildBrotherly amore April 23,
2008 5:06:34 PM
Elio Germano and Riccardo Scamarcio
|
“A Fascist in the family is always handy.” Unless it’s a family of leftists in a small Italian town during the turbulent “anni di piombo” (“years of lead”). Beginning in 1962 as young anti-hero Accio (first played by the scrappy Vittorio Emanuele Propizio and later by the talented Elio Germano) is thrown out of seminary and ending in 1978, Daniele Luchetti’s spirited adaptation (written with La meglio gioventú|The Best of Youth scribes Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli) of Antonio Pennacchi’s novel Il fasciocomunista pits the impetuous youth’s political awakening against the Communist convictions of his charismatic older brother Manrico (Gioventú’s Riccardo Scamarcio) as they fall for the same girl (Diane Fleri). Compared in the press notes to period classics like Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione|Before the Revolution and Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca|Fists in the Pocket, it also echoes Shane Meadows’s 2006’s This Is England, but political doctrines pale next to sibling bonds, at least for Accio, who’s blind to the hazards ahead. Italian | 108 minutes | Kendall Square + West Newton
|
|
-
Another faulty family film
-
Honoring independent cinema’s ‘tour guide’
-
Unforgettable direction
-
Hidden in plain sight
-
Ubiquitous Abigail Breslin in a mildly diverting adventure
-
A plot centered around one man's penis
-
Playing the facts against the fiction of 21
-
Not scary and a measly PG-13
-
Cold feet and Nikes
|
- A pint-sized Be Kind Rewind
- Pleasingly nuts
- Weird meets revelatory unsuccessfully
- Another faulty family film
- Scottish-related gags and other dumb stuff
- Israeli magic realism
- An Aegean tear-jerker
- Errol Morris checks the apples, not the tree, in Standard Operating Procedure
- Overplotted pregnancy flick
- Marianne Faithful dispenses handjobs in this unrealistic romance
|
|
|
|