A little wooden at times - particularly early on - but tasteful and elegant in its focus on familial relationships, romance & memory, and social exclusion. A marvellous sense of impermanence and realism.

Elegant and elegiac, a movie about death and the passing of time. A true triumph that avoids sentimentality but still manages to trascend the medium.

Beautiful and tragic (in the classic sense of "tragic")

Sad, haunting film boosted Sanda to stardom and won an Oscar as Best Foreign Film.

An underappreciated De Sica film that chillingly depicts the stark, brutal reality of the Holocaust for an upper-class Jewish Italian family.

The main themes are all obvious from the beginning, and don't get explored during the course of the film to any satisfaction. Instead we have a predictably melodramatic love story, awful music and too much makeup. The cinematography is nice, although De Sica does nothing very interesting with it. There's just nothing to the story, and no emotional weight or investment in the characters. It was hard to sit through because it's so incredibly dull and banal.