(*** 1/2): [img]http://images.chrc4work.com/images/user/icons/icon14.gif[/img] Strange, fascinating, and well-acted.

Un interessante trattato sull'invadenza e l'ipocrisia della religione sulla nostra società. L'opera di Bellocchio mostra una personalità da vero autore e si divide tra regia minimalista e a tratti surrealista.

Excellent Italian film about family, the church, ethics and the eternal conflict between good and bad. It is slow and it commands sympathy to see it through. But i found it rewarding.

Conjures up images from Fellini's surrealist era, all the while pushing its plot forward with a more urgent sense of eeriness.

Un interessante trattato sull'invadenza e l'ipocrisia della religione sulla nostra società. L'opera di Bellocchio mostra una personalità da vero autore e si divide tra regia minimalista e a tratti surrealista.

Uno dei film...che ha fatto incazzare di brutto il papa e i cattolici....

castellitto nn è più un cane sciolto dimostra tutt le qualità di un attore maturo

quite an interesting idea but not very well handled...

Among the highlights of this original and stirring film are not only Sergio Castellito's jaded character and the controversial subject of canonization, but also the haunting Armenian music that echoes through the nocturnal and nightmarish spaces of the Vatican, and Arsenii Tarkovsky's poem "E' finita l'estate..." recited by the "religion?" teacher who claims in Tarkovsky's words, "e pure questo non basta"...Of course the original is in Russian, a poem by Andrei Tarkovsky's father, that mourns the lack of something transcendent and whispers a quest for something beyond casual and hapless existence...

A wonderful, surreal movie. If I could describe it, I would be Marco Bellocchio! Just watch.

A very good movie, though I'm not a particular fan of Castellitto. A journey through the process of santification of a regular person...not really that HOLY.

To me it was something difficult to keep up with. Quite entangled, perhaps the characters have not been developed thoroughly. Dunno.

super scenario, un beau complot et une question soulevee : la religion rend elle fou?

i love classic italian cinema -- paisan, la dolce vita, the bicycle thief, two women -- this doesn't hold a candle to any of them. the script is poorly paced and characters are thinly developed.

Speaking of Sergio Castellito, this is a fantastic movie directed by Bellocchio. A must see!!

Awful. The music saved it.

Une histoire qui parle de liens familiaux, de religion, de vraie conviction, de pardon... Le tout dans une Rome actuelle.

SPOILERS A superstitious atheist decides not to take the moral highroad, even though he seems to have been for most of his life. In doing so, he betrays his mentally ill brother, his estranged wife, and his own conscience. It is probably deemed blasphemous because after he betrays his own concepts of morality, his brother (whom he seems to have always stood by), and his wife and son, there is no resolution as he strolls away. Filippo Argenti represents the concept of the importance of title; in the Inferno, Argenti is infamous for his actions on earth. As his family attempts to convince him that an important title can go a long way in life (fame, fortune, a bright future for his son), the viewer expects him not to let the beatification of his mother go through since she obviously does not deserve it. But the epiphany does not come. Instead of coming clean with his morality and telling the truth about his mother, he lets people believe she was a saint. This man is a living example of how most people are. People don't always have epiphanies and learn something at the end. Sometimes they just give up and enjoy themselves. This man is disappointing to me: He is boisterous, has a false sense of what it means to be a man and honor (the duel scene, his comrades telling him to take the mistress and stop complaining), letting the audience, his son, and his wife down. True, he to a certain extent he does his family a favor by goign along with the lie; but there is little peace to be gained from a web of lies on which one builds his life. His superstition and paranoia (which are developed throughout the movie as he expresses worry about various conspiracies going on around him) seem to lead him to his final actions. The simple fact that he has the same wry, bitter, sarcastic smile that his mother wore -- the smile of a "failure" -- leads him to decide to be a failure. Which he seems okay with. The last scene of the movie shows him contemplating going in to see the woman again after he drops his son off at school. Instead, he smiles -- which he only does when something is not funny, but sad or painfully ironic -- and strolls away. This would have me believe that he, too, is disappointed in his actions -- which is even more disappointing to me. I really liked this movie. I really did. It is clear that he makes the wrong choices, since the right ones would have made him happy. As he turns away from the camera at the end, he does not look happy, but only more confused and unhappy.

It expresses author's idea about how could people use religious belief for a personal return. In this case are involved the Roman Catholic Church and a painter's family. The Catholic Church has deemed this film blasphemous so, don't watch it, if you are a religious extremist.

I was moved by Castellitto's performance. This movie is loaded with subtleness and intelligent beauty. Search for both!