Rohrwacher's recreation of the monotonous rhythms of low-tech farm life is every bit as attentive and diligent as the film's heroine. But the director's impressionistic approach to narrative does get a little frustrating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 7, 2016

What's worth wondering at is the way writer-director Alice Rohrwacher illustrates the private world of an authentic and genuinely loving family.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 4, 2015

A prize winner at the Cannes film festival, this naturalistic Italian drama presents a warm and credible portrait of a modern beekeeping family in the Tuscan countryside.

| Dec 3, 2015

"The Wonders" is one of those films that's easier to experience than explain, which is almost always a good thing.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 3, 2015

Terrence Malick comes to mind, too, in Rohrwacher's approach to storytelling - but without the American's sense of the symphonic and supernal.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 27, 2015

Structurally, "The Wonders" suffers from awkward bulges and sags, especially toward the end. Still, it's a beautiful, richly imagined ride that doesn't end as much as evaporate into a dreamlike puff of smoke.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 25, 2015

A story that frames a familiar conflict - the collision of modernity and tradition - in intriguingly off-center ways, alive with piercing detail.

| Nov 25, 2015

An exceptional tale of family dynamics and a fading way of life, grounded with a sense of physicality and the primacy of nature that eventually takes on spiritual overtones.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 24, 2015

It offers a slice of family life - tumultuous, conflicted, yet bound by circumstance and history - that is thoroughly unique and awfully colorful.

| Original Score: B | Nov 13, 2015

It provides an incomplete portrait of lives strained by the urgency of keeping up with a honey-maker's schedule.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 5, 2015

"The Wonders" evokes many other films, but is utterly unique. It is like being privy to a marvelous story that Rohrwacher is telling herself.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 5, 2015

A throwback to different kind of filmmaking: smaller, more emotionally intense, more tactile.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 30, 2015

Ms. Rohrwacher's strengths here are the tender intimacy of the performances, particularly those of the older child actors, and her gentle meandering, both narrative and cinematographic.

| Oct 29, 2015

Rohrwacher handles her material with a richly detailed naturalism and a keen eye for the risks posed by Wolfgang's Promethean grandstanding to his children.

| Oct 29, 2015

A charmingly naturalistic slice of life ...

| Original Score: B | Oct 29, 2015

[It] takes a long while to pick up steam, but its tactile feel for the dirt and labor of a farm, and tender regard for the young protagonist, are immensely endearing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 28, 2015

The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.

| Oct 27, 2015

Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2015

Without any of the self-importance, maudlin sentimentality or winking reflexivity that characterises most coming-of-age tales, Alice Rohrwacher's second feature is a patient argument for, and quiet toast to, a rapidly disappearing way of life.

| Jul 23, 2015

The episodic storytelling style can seem haphazard but the writer-director Alice Rohrwacher succeeds wonderfully well in capturing the richness of the kids' lives in their own remote and often brutal world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2015