Alice Rohrwacher follows her beguiling The Wonders (2014) with the no less lyrical and even more fabulist Happy as Lazzaro.

| Aug 27, 2019

In the wide, green eyes of actor Adriano Tardiolo, Rohrwacher finds a gaze that sheds all cynicism, a guileless anchor for her devastating exploration of the false promise of progress and the elusive possibility of collective happiness.

| Apr 7, 2019

Rohrwacher's eye for gestures is revealing of class, pride, humour, and values.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 6, 2019

Although markedly less wispy than the director's award-winning The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro, like its elusive protagonist, is dreamy, lightly comic and unfailingly nice.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 5, 2019

Happy as Lazzaro could be a biting social commentary, a religious parable or a beguiling, supernatural tale. Perhaps it is all three.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2019

I found the film tendentious and sophomoric, and Lazzaro's Forrest Gump imitation inevitably tedious.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 5, 2019

Happy As Lazzaro is s-l-o-w and its narrative twist will alienate some. But this is deliberate, singular filmmaking, at once poetic and down-to-earth, from an unsung talent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2019

Like early Pasolini, Rohrwacher's films are on the level with their subjects - there's no swank or pretension. They seem to muck in with the communities they're about.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 4, 2019

Rohrwacher handles the shifts of tone gracefully, as she did in The Wonders, which also explored the tension between a rustic idyll and the modern world.

| Apr 4, 2019

This film is not a waste of your time, as it is also intriguing and beguiling and poetic (she says, still defensively). But the genre twist is far more audacious than successful. Alas.

| Apr 4, 2019

Rohrwacher strives to lighten the allegorising with bits of humour and antic surrealism. We still feel as if we are watching a Brecht play done by street buskers. The view into the kitchen garden of history starts to become pedagogic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Rohrwacher interweaves class discourse, the realities of poverty, and queer magical realism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Happy As Lazzaro... is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2019

It's in this same spirit of unchangeability that Lazzaro's goodness endures -not as a foil to the forces of exploitation, but as their instrument.

| Dec 13, 2018

Rohrwacher has something nimbler, kinder, than pure miserabilism up her sleeve, which is right in line with the great, longstanding tradition of Italian neorealism.

| Dec 4, 2018

Part of the movie's fun - and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms - is how it forces you to share Lazarro's go-along-to-get-along ebullience.

| Dec 3, 2018

So mind-bending is its big twist.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2018

It's so traditional that it feels decades old, at the very least, yet it's one of the freshest films of the year.

| Nov 30, 2018

Rohrwacher isn't interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the Brothers Grimm. She does not want to just show you pretty pictures, but a genuine vision.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2018

Tardiolo's silent radiance and his director's offhand audacity produce their own bewildering cinematic alchemy.

| Nov 29, 2018