CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

kayaker36 Most of the positive comments posted here are as verbose as the movie! It takes a long-winded bore to appreciate a wordy and boring film, one supposes. Some have merely called the film "contemplative", meaning slow and devoid of plot, however, one Dutch reviewer hit the nail on the head: this is an important event turned into a dull film whose tone is set in the very first scene. Here a young couple is being shown an apartment by a Realtor who, predictably, talks non-stop and regardless of what else is going on. So does just about every other character!The only silences in this picture are dream sequences--1930's Soviet propaganda snippets--and they are also its most interesting parts. This tells you something about how watchable the rest of the movie is.The device of filming most of the scenes in extreme closeup--as if one were looking through a crack in the blinds--gets old fast.

Roland E. Zwick On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, the Prime Minister of Italy, was kidnapped by a group of Communist revolutionaries known as the Red Brigade and held in captivity for 55 days. Through letters and photos sent by the kidnappers, the authorities learned that Moro had been given a "trial" by the Red Brigade and sentenced to death for his crimes against the proletariat of Italy - and, indeed, on May 9th of that year, his body was found, riddled with ten rounds of bullets, in the trunk of an abandoned car.In "Good Morning, Night," writer/director Marco Bellochio takes the events and drains them of much of their sociopolitical significance, choosing instead to focus on the human drama at the story's core. Bellochio looks at the ambivalent feelings and conflicted motives underlying the kidnappers' actions, particularly in the case of an attractive young woman named Chiara (confidently played by Maya Sansa), who comes to question her commitment to "the cause" as the reality of what they are planning to do begins to sink in. It is largely through her eyes that we come to view the events and to see Moro less as an impersonal force to be manipulated for political purposes and more as a simple human being with all the fears, insecurities and desperate desire for life common to us all. Indeed, the political aspects stay largely in the background, relegated mainly to clips of stock footage showing us the principal players of the time dealing with the crisis.With its dreamy visions, fantasy sequences, and tendency towards wild speculation, the film may frustrate those who would have preferred a more historically accurate, documentary approach to the topic. But Bellochio, as an artist, is less concerned with the "facts" of the case than with exploring the dilemma of the revolutionary's mindset. And to that end, he has done an exemplary job in "Good Morning, Night."

noralee "Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte)" is an intriguing effort to understand terrorists.Loosely based on a novel, writer/director Marco Bellocchio specifically re-imagines the kidnapping of Italian party leader Aldo Moro in 1987, with heavy use of television clips. The quaintly naive Cold War rhetoric, emphasized with odd historic black and white newsreel interstices such as of Stalinist parades, may now be seen as an examination of a symbolic precursor for today's gruesome politics, though he was already working on the film at 9/11.The young idealists we are first introduced to seem as harmless as the radical pranksters in the contemporary "The Edukators (Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei)." While it's a jolt to gradually learn their connection to the violent attack, first revealed as they cheer at the initial TV coverage, they seem so bumbling and nervous (one takes leave abruptly for, as it were, a conjugal visit as he feels he's the one being imprisoned; another gets fixated on an overly symbolic pet caged bird), it's never clear if they personally committed murder or if they're just the guardian cell taking orders from those who stage the mock trial and pull the triggers or if that is a moral difference that is intentionally considered irrelevant. Real world politics do occasionally seep through in silent background commentary, through factory strikes and sarcastic graffiti, but the determined ideologues reject these actions as they see themselves as the true believers. Ironically, the drone of the TV coverage, with reports of related and unrelated violent acts around the country, they anxiously watch becomes as much a recitation as the opening pitch from the bored apartment rental agent.Their Red Brigade aims seem so diffuse about intending to set off revolutions and counter-revolutions, compared to the more direct motives of the terrorists in "Paradise Now" (let alone how kidnapping has devolved into a business, as in "Secuestro Express"), at least to those not intimately familiar with Italian political dialectics, that it seems more understandable than ludicrous that the negotiations draw on. A long side bar scene where one of the kidnappers joins her family in a memorial service for World War II partisans nostalgically singing an anti-Fascist anthem, inspiring her to read a collection of letters resistance fighters wrote before their executions instead of her usual Lenin or Engels reading, makes the dialectics even more ironic as to what fascist behavior is. Her internal struggle to resolve these pressures, including several confusing dream sequences, is the core of the film and Maya Sansa, with very expressive eyes, is captivating as "Chiara." The kidnapping itself takes on a "Ransom of Red Chief" feel as the Aldo Moro character, well-played by Roberto Herlitzka and the point of the film's dedication to the auteur's father, is much more of an eloquent, dignified, paternal humanist statesman than a typical politician. The kidnappers seem to be thwarted in provoking political crisis because he will only write personal, non-political notes to his family, particularly his grandson (even if does seem as if he's writing love notes to his mistress rather than to his wife). But his appeal to the pope and the pope's involvement in the negotiations and their aftermath seems as incongruous as an odd séance by political supporters or the kidnappers doing a blessing before eating. Compared to the director's earlier "My Mother's Smile (L'Ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre)," religion is only an ancillary issue. The auteur's voice, as an artist, seems to speak through a somewhat naive and flirtatious friend of "Chiara"s who has written a screenplay about radicals and quotes the Emily Dickinson poem that inspired the title. He argues that the imagination can be a powerful force in influencing people, though of course the authorities misinterpret his involvement. I saw it with a defective soundtrack, but other than odd musical commentary with bombastic selections from "Aida" and Pink Floyd, the film's strength is faces and looking into the eyes of deluded cogs in the wheel of historical forces, though the best sequence is given away in the trailer.

klauskind #spoilers?Bellochio seems to be on a roll, after making L'ora di Religione he came up with another excellent film the next year, Buongiorno, Notte. In both films he mixes what's real and what's imaginary in a way that comforts. It doesn't fool or numb, but it cleanses. Buongiorno, Notte is about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the conservative leader who 'threatened' the cold war settlement of the Italian state by favouring an understanding with the communist party. After Moro's kidnappers have carried him in a trunk into the flat, they find in one of his briefcases a screenplay called Buongiorno, Notte, which is the title of the film. Further on in the movie, a young would-be writer says he has written a screenplay titled, guess what, Buongiorno, Notte. Bellocchio is the director and also the author of the film's screenplay, so he slips himself into the plot, at least symbolically. But Bellocchio's alter ego has a life of his own and a thing for a girl who can be no other than the star, Chiara, one of the kidnappers. It is to Chiara that he confides the 'last-minute' changes he's made to the script and charges her with the responsibility to carry them out. Those changes can alter fiction but not history and symbolize what Moro should have been able to count on during those terrible days. Moro counted on nothing of the sort, he was murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. He was caught, the film suggests, between the murderers and the cynics. Chiara is an imaginary wedge Bellocchio drives into reality to settle old scores with a history about which he's unsparing. In an interview, Bellocchio suggested the young writer could be Chiara's conscience, which is perfectly reasonable, but who if not the author could give his character such a conscience? The author does all he can to restore his character her lost nobility, a task Maya Sansa, the actress who plays Chiara, with her intense eyes and anguished feelings, makes so easy to accept. Despite all this talk, the movie is very easy to follow, uses sound in a manner close to clairvoyance and has many remarkable scenes.Among those, Chiara's black and white dreams or one involving an elevator in which the director, by displaying a perfect use of expressive resources, shows the impact of terrorism on Italian society. It's something of a master's touch.