Stephan Hammond
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
simona gianotti
This is the typical movie which you end watching by saying: it could have been much more. There are good, perhaps too many, starting points: the father-son relationship, the interaction folly-creativity, an editorial world impossible to enter, together with the reflection upon a mediocre Italian cinematography belonging to the past, but still living in the present. Unfortunately, they remain suspended, only hinted at, and are also devalued by a sometimes banal script. As far as acting, the cast seems subdued: Scamarcio is a little monotonous, Sharon Stone proves once again how she is ageing splendidly, but her character is penalized by a terrible dubbing, which stresses more her innocent rather than manipulative nature, and some characters are either unexplored (the student) or useless (the girlfriend). The only exception is Giovanna Ralli playing the mother, offering a very heartfelt interpretation. What remains is a sense of incompleteness, which could be interesting if it left material to think about, but this is not the case, where it looks more like the result of a sort of tiredness by the director, who can't soar to great heights or at least to an expected higher level.
