Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Spoonixel Amateur movie with Big budget

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

filmalamosa This film as other reviewers have noted....starts out powerfully and then kind of loses its appeal.The problem is Ida Dreslar's life in an insane asylum is just not that interesting and it starts to lose you. Once Mussolini discards her the rest of her life is boring. But also her character is disturbing her fatal attraction to Mussolini and her inability to keep her mouth shut and live a normal life. She was insane seems to be the right answer.Beautifully filmed -- the actor Timi is far better looking than Mussolini... Mezzogiorno is attractive and plays the mad role well... although the mad house scenes were mostly camp.

Andres Salama Veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio films this (for the most part) entertaining if tragic story of Benito Mussollini's alleged first wife, one Ida Dalser, punctuating the story with a bombastic operatic score and another over the top flourishes. Dalser had a torrid affair with Mussolini just before World War I, when he was a socialist firebrand. According to the movie, the then penniless future dictator was able to fund his revolutionary newspaper from the money Dalser gave to him. When World War I erupted, Mussolini felt the Italian people national solidarity was much stronger than their class solidarity and decided to move to the right and support the war. During that time, he left Dalser for another woman who became his wife (the movie implies that Mussolini not only betrayed Dalser but also his revolutionary ideas). Dalser claimed that Mussolini had married her (she had a son by him she called Benito) but no marriage certificate has ever been found (assuming she was not lying, the certificate was presumably destroyed when the Duce was in power). Since Dalser wouldn't shut up, she was closely watched and harassed by his former lover's secret police. Eventually she is put under the care of the Catholic Church (the atheist Mussolini having decided after coming to power that the Vatican could be a good ally of his regime). Her fate as well as that of her son ends up in tragedy. While the movie shows that Dalser was clearly mistreated by the Duce, she's not a very sympathetic character, unstable, vindictive and unable to let the past go. As a result, while the first part of this film is very entertaining and gripping; the second part is far less compelling: the magnetic Mussolini leaves the screen and we are mostly left with the increasingly crazy ramblings of a scorned woman (however, later in the movie there is a great real footage included of the Duce rambling about Italy's becoming a sea empire). An interesting if not perfect movie.

lance24 Despite the inexplicable gushings from other reviewers, this is simply a bad movie; the directing, writing, acting, photography and music all bad in their own way. The first 45 minutes of the movie are confusing with no purpose; the movie jumps back and forth from different years making it almost impossible to get rolling and impenetrable to understand. By the time, Giovanna Mezzigiona is confined to a mental hospital (the last half of the movie) we just don't care, and nothing is added to the film. The film could have worked much better as a chronological story; how she met Mussolini, their subsequent relationship and should have ended with her confinement. The end credits could have told us that she never saw Mussolini again. There was absolutely no drama in the hour of the story during which she is confined. The movie tried (and failed) to do too many things: History, world wars, journalism socialism, Fascism, romance, betrayal, to name a few, and did them all poorly. The movie starts chaotically and never gets into any rhythm. The beginning was so bad that it resembled a student film. I hated the idea that the first part of the film was shot in such dark colors (it wasn't as if this was about a journey to light); in fact, it would have been better to start with a lighter palette and grow darker as both Mussolini rise and Mezzagiona's commitment follow. The music was way too intrusive and only added to the pain of watching this movie. The acting was also poor. (Mezzigiona is a major Italian actress and yet has a persistent habit in recent films of failing to connect with the audience and getting us to care about her character) Fellow IMDBers beware! This is a big whiff.

Eternality In competition for 2009's Palme d'Or, Vincere is a new film by Marco Bellocchio. It is set in the early 20th century in Italy, during a dangerous time of oppression and political revolution, which cumulated in the evil that was Fascism. The story is not about the horrors of Fascism per se or how it rose to become an ideology matched in its ghastliness only by Nazism, but of its dictator Benito Mussolini and his private life.Vincere tells the true story of Mussolini (Filippo Timi) and Ida Dalser (Giovana Mezzogiorno), his secret lover whom he had a passionate but somewhat sordid affair with. In the film, Dalser gives birth to a son who is taken away from her. She is also sent to a mental institution for claiming that she is the "rightful wife" of Mussolini; the latter is married and denies the affair with Dalser.Much of Vincere revolves around Dalser, whom is portrayed as a sympathetic figure, a person who loved and trusted Mussolini with all her heart, but ended up suffering the ignominy of being a "prisoner of a vile dictator". Mezzogiorno's performance is noteworthy. She switches effortlessly from a seductive woman who oozes sexual allure (she appears completely nude in a number of shots) to a frustrated person devoid of the freedom to pursue personal justice.Timi also plays Mussolini with a fierce affection. But he fizzles out in the second half of the picture after Bellocchio rightly gives more screen time to Mezzogiorno. Even though the core of Vincere rests upon the relationship (or lack of) between Mussolini and Dalser, the political themes of the film remain in the consciousness of the viewer throughout.Bellocchio inserts old black-and-white footages of history into the film, drawing our attention to the fervent and violent political and nationalistic attitudes of that era. The shouts of "Italia! Italia!" and the real Mussolini giving a powerful speech about war are, at the very least, disquieting. Matched with a loud, rousing score with lots of brass and choir, the film is quite strong in creating a mood of paranoia.Vincere somewhat ends too quickly. Even for a film that is slightly longer than two hours, it seems like more exposition is warranted and would have been greeted more positively than not. Thus, the film feels incomplete but it is still a well-made film with its cinematography, in particular, an aspect to appreciate.It may seem ironic but in Vincere's most emotional sequence, Bellocchio uses clips from Chaplin's The Kid (1921). In The Kid, Chaplin's character is devastated when his young son is taken away from him by the state. Dalser, who watches the film in an open-air screening, draws strength from it in the hope that she will one day see her son again.Bellocchio's Vincere is a decent entry into the Palme d'Or selection, but it is by no means a stunning piece of cinema. The private story of Mussolini (or rather Dalser's) is compelling enough to last the two hours, though it would have been better received with a more complete approach.SCORE: 7.5/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!