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

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

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

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

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

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

[A] baroquely lurid and undeniably fascinating exercise in pulp with a political angle.

| Original Score: B | May 30, 2008

An unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.

| Original Score: C+ | May 30, 2008

It gets more and more ridiculous and unbelievable as it goes along, and the final scene is shamelessly manipulative.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 30, 2008

Just under two hours, sumptuously photographed in noirish shades and slathered in spine-tingling music by Ennio Morricone, it twists every which way to sustain suspense until the final frame.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 30, 2008

The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping.

| May 28, 2008

Rappoport is the movie's saving grace.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 9, 2008

This is a case where style has not only trumped substance, but negated it as well.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 9, 2008

The Unknown Woman begins the same way director Giuseppe Tornatore's last film, Malena, operated throughout: by ogling a fine female form.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 31, 2008