Vincere [22 points / 2 votes]
"When Marco Bellocchio first emerged on the scene some forty-five years ago, with Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near, the critical consensus was that the most remarkable thing about him was the confidence, graceful beauty, and bravura scale of his visual style. He was also something of a wild man, but for a European director in his twenties making his first films in the 1960s, that was probably seen as something of a given. Bellocchio is in his seventies now, and Vincere, his tragicomedy about the wife and son who Mussolini whited out of his personal history for the sake of political expediency, is as bold as anything he's ever done, and considerably wilder than what 95% of the younger directors around the world have been up to lately. It's also a feast for the eyes and the sense, and a collaborative triumph for Bellocchio and the rest of his creative team, particularly his stars Giovanna Mezzogiomo as the doomed. wronged wife and Filippo Timi as both Benito Senior and Junior. Vincere takes an obscure footnote to history, filled with characters who many a smart, shallow director wouldn't be able to resist parading their superiority to ("I Married a Fascist! And Was Surprised to Find Out That He Wasn't a Nice Guy!") and turns it into something angry and emotionally overpowering... and he does it on a scale that reminds you why they made movie screens so big in the first place. It is a stern and pitying rebuke to any so-called filmmaker who can imagine people watching his work on an iPhone without retching." - Phil Nugent
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