Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

a movie that's almost impossible to get out of your head.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2009

Un intenso y atrapante thriller con algo de melodrama que bien podra haber dirigido Brian de Palma.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 26, 2008

Tornatore, best known for Cinema Paradiso, has meticulously crafted a story that's at times so raw it hurts to watch. Its action blends piercingly lit flashbacks and dream sequences with a gray, prosaic present in an unnamed Italian city.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 24, 2008

Tornatore's instincts for crafting a stylish, nonlinear thriller are indisputable. But he's not yet a master, and at times you'll feel cheated even as you anticipate the next disquieting scene.

Full Review | Oct 23, 2008

The Unknown Woman falters when it falls into exploitation and fatal contrivance.

| Oct 23, 2008

The film has major problems blending the strong social theme of exploitation and white slavery with Tornatore's noirish screenplay, full of holes and improbabilities.

| Oct 18, 2008

[An] exquisite mystery thriller.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2008

It's the toast of the continent and once you've watched it, the reason why it is will be anything but a mystery.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 18, 2008

Plays like a cross between Hitchcock and tabloid feminism, a mix that shouldn't work and doesn't.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 19, 2008

Writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore ("Cinema Paradiso," "Malna") reveals a hitherto unknown side of his own with this dark jigsaw puzzle of a mystery.

| Original Score: B | Sep 11, 2008

A spellbinder with a lot of Hitchcock touches and an Ennio Morricone score to match.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 15, 2008

The whole movie hangs on the gradual unraveling of the central mystery and is made with the expectation that the audience is fascinated and hanging on every tidbit. But Tornatore overplays his hand.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 25, 2008

Everyday incidents trigger in Irena alternately sweet and horrific memories, and these become like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that is completed only when the film concludes, at last revealing its full meaning.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 27, 2008

It manages to be brutal, deranged, ridiculous and heart-rending, all at once.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 27, 2008

Postures as empathetic while getting its leading lady out of her skivvies -- there's nothing bold about taking a stance against human trafficking

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 27, 2008

Meet the filmmaker that [Tornatore] is today -- sadomasochistic fantasist, exploiter of women and cheesy Hitchcock imitator.

Full Review | Jun 26, 2008

An exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.

| May 30, 2008