Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

lasttimeisaw This is the opening film of the 7th edition of The Panorama of the European Film in Cairo, watched it in Zawya cinema, HUMAN CAPITAL is this year's official submission for Oscar Foreign Language Film from Italy, after freshly winning the coveted award for Paolo Sorrentino's THE GREAT BEAUTY (2013, 8/10) earlier this year. Interestingly, both film are released in 2013 in Italy, so during their face-off in David DI DONATELLO AWARDS (Italy's equivalent of Oscar), HUMAN CAPITAL was the biggest dark horse, defeated THE GREAT BEAUTY in the BEST FILM competition (with a total 7 wins, including BEST ACTRESS, SUPPORTING ACTOR and ACTRESS, SCREENPLAY and EDITING), although the latter also swept 9 awards including BEST DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR, CINEMATOGRAPHY and so on. Thus basically it is an unforeseen win-win game. This is my second Virzì's film after HARDBOILED EGG (1997, 7/10), and now Virzì has establish his reputation as a master of storytelling, naturally the film is radically dissimilar from the nostalgic élan in Sorrentino's showpiece, adapted from the American eponymous novel of Stephen Amidon, Virzì ambitiously transposes the story to the Northern Italian town Brianza, at the foot of the Alps and not far from Milan. Two families, one rich and one ordinary, are involved in a hit-and-run accident in the night before Christmas, the film is evenly divided into four chapters, the first three each focuses on one character's storyline, all mingled together until we would finally get a clue of this whodunit, then the final chapter, details the aftermath of these two families and ends it with a matter-of-fact annotation of what "human capital" literal means in the scenario, and leaves audience a bitter smack of its figurative connotation - how a human being's self-worth and morality is lost in the rapacious capitalism. Three chapters, first is from the prospect of Dino (Bentivoglio), a middle-aged real estate agent, remarried with Roberta (Golina), a public psychiatrist for delinquents. He takes the advantage of his daughter Serena's relationship with rich boy Massimiliano (Pinelli) to get closer to the his affluent family, eventually loans money from bank (with a false pretense) and invests it all with his own savings to the hedge fund through Giovanni (Gifuni), Massimiliano's father, for the sake of rapid profit. Even Roberta's pregnancy cannot deter him from the gamble. But, things will never be that easy (a pipe dream to good to be true), soon Dino is snubbed by Giovanni and the investment turns out to be a fatal failure. Second chapter concerns Carla (Tedeschi), Giovanni's wife, getting bored idling away her time, she recollects her passion as a thespian and requests Giovanni to reconstruct a dilapidated theater and tries to run it. Yet, it also turns out to be a castle in the air, out of frustration and disappointment, she seduces Donato (Lo Cascio), a theatrical professor, into a one-night-stand (the same night the accident happens), the next day, she regrets it and ends it with ugly ramifications. A drunken Massimiliano is the main suspect of the accident, but he denies that he was behind the wheels and claims it is Serena who drove him home. So the third chapter is about Serena (Gioli), with whom Massimiliano is one-sidedly infatuated, but in fact she is romantically attracted to a young offender Luca (Anzaldo), and sees his true color under his notorious criminal record and outlandish appearance. Their untainted love is the last unpolluted place before entering the unsavory adulthood, but it would undergo a big test, since one must pay for the crime, however unintentional it is. In the final chapter, after all the melodramatic bedlam, Virzì levelheadedly rounds off the ending with a plausible denouement, Dino cunningly retrieves back his investment (with the promised profit and a detestable request for a kiss), Carla is back on stage as the perfect wife archetype with Giovanni as if nothing has happened as long as money can clear off any blockade in their way and Massimiliano's charge is dropped, whereas Serena and Luca remain inseparable and hopefully their devotion is stronger than ever. HUMAN CAPITAL is robustly engaging, the story is carefully organized, predictable nonetheless, there are certain moments are faintly stagy or off-putting. Rapid editing manages to leave no tedious repetition although we have to experience the same story three times, but the wobbly camera mobility may cause some fatigue and dizziness, especially in the last chapter. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Fabrizio Gifuni are the MVPs upstage the rest of the cast, it is utterly riveting to watch Carla transits her emotional arc from the convivial pretentiousness to the swearing outburst; and Gifuni's Giovanni, never under the spotlight, but he sparks each scene with sharp astuteness and daunting callousness, validly counteracts the hammy nuisance from Bentivoglio's Dino. Golino, if anyone remembers her from RAIN MAN (1988, 8/10), subtly conveys a good-natured persona without ostentatious glamor, it is also reassuring that she has made quite a splash with her director debut HONEY (2013) last year. At any rate, I am not quite rosy about its Oscar journey, a nomination seems to be a long- shot presently, but personally I always welcome those films with potent plot-development and a strong ensemble. Only if HUMAN CAPITAL could be more resiliently challenging to ridicule and censure its own soil of an unjust reality.

rooee In the closing moments of this intricate drama, "Human capital" is defined as an insurance industry term, referring to the way damages payouts are calculated upon death, partly dependent on the individual's "emotional bonds". But the phrase more broadly refers to the way that the productivity and creativity of people can be converted into economic value. These definitions tell us everything we need to know about the themes at hand in Paolo Virzì's deconstruction of the Italian upper middle.Human Capital is Italy's entry for next year's Academy Awards, and it's not hard to see why. It's a handsome, solid, complex, character-driven drama with an already award-winning performance from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi at its centre. She plays Carla Bernaschi, the wife of a businessman on the cusp of ruin. She persuades him to buy her a crumbling theatre – a pet project – as a gift. But it quickly becomes apparent that the theatre isn't economically viable. It'll have to be converted into flats instead.The film is full of such soul-crushing moments. One needn't look far for metaphors. The various subplots revolve around a car crash (The Crash), and the fallout which threatens to ruin those at the bottom of the social ladder, leaving those at the top untainted. One needn't, also, look far for comparisons: Paul Haggis's award-friendly Crash, and the work of Alejandro Iñárritu, in the way that chronologically concurrent stories are shown one after another.But Virzì's film is less aggravatingly worthy than the work of Haggis and less laborious than Iñárritu's English-language work. Indeed, the first of four "chapters" plays out with wicked dry humour, as Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) desperately claws at the deal of a lifetime in order to break into the business elite. He's trying to seduce that wretched husband of Carla's, Giovanni (Fabrizio Gigfuni), but he only recognises the capital, not the humanity. It leaves Carla bereft; searching for meaning and affection. Meanwhile, both the Ossolas and the Bernaschis are bound by their kids. Serena Ossola (Matilde Gioli, resembling a younger Eva Green) knows something about the car crash, and the cost of keeping or revealing the secret is where the real meaning of the film's title will become known.Virzì's style starts out dead pretty; all fairy tale lighting and wintry wonderlands, mirroring the illusory worlds the wealthy (or would-be-wealthy) inhabit. But as the cost of these characters' decisions become known, the camera leaves the tripod and the style gets grittier. Virzì is clearly aware of the inherent humour and horror in seeing the same events from multiple perspectives. While comedy gives way to tragedy, the twists and turns don't feel manipulative, and ultimately this is a story imbued with hope. In part this is due to the villain of the piece – the apparently heartless Giovanni – never being reduced to a mere monster.The structure does mean that at times the chronology of events becomes muddled. It's not always completely clear how much time is supposed to have passed between scenes, leading to some false impressions of certain relationships. And, inevitably for such a tightly woven story, narrative contrivance and convenience is never far away. But then, what does one expect from a morality play? And a thoroughly modern one at that. This is an intelligent, accessible film, wise to focus on the most interesting characters in the room: those on the margins; those with most to lose. A fine contender.

timlin-4 This movie is about the intersection of two families, one very rich and one merely middle-class, due to the relationship between their kids, and a mystery surrounding a car crash. It's mostly about family tensions and frustrated aspirations, but you've seen it all before, and and you probably were bored then. There is some nice footage of high-class Italian living, and Tedeschi in my opinion is generally worth watching, but many scenes are also ruined by Bentivoglio's bumbling character and the other revolting males in the cast. Even the nude scene with the young actress barely livens things up. That sounds blasphemous, I know, but that is just how dismal the romance subplot is. And the whole pile of rubbish collapses under the weight of the obnoxious timeline, as if telling a story out of order is enough to add cleverness to a dull and unoriginal plot.

simona gianotti I went to see this movie mainly because it was shot in surroundings I know very well (the surroundings of Varese, in the north of Italy)and was more curious than interested. In the end, I had to say I saw a good movie, with a good photography but also a convincing story, based on an American novel, but fit for a movie which lies between a thriller and a social portrait, showing some evils of contemporary Italy. The splitting of the story into four chapters, seen from the point of view of three characters, plus a final chapter, may not be that original but works effectively and keeps the viewer's attention alive for almost two hours. So, considering the mediocrity of Italian contemporary cinematography, it is a good product and I also appreciated the performances of the whole cast, with Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Fabrizio Gifuni at their best. In my country the movie was criticized for pointing the finger at the north of Italy as the source of contemporary decadence: on the whole, besides its ideological orientation, I found it more entertaining than socially committed or politically sided.