Luana Giuliani: Last News

What a knotty task, to detach instinctive overtures of motherly love from the traditional structures that perpetuate the restraining of gender roles, offering love freely without conforming.

Premiering earlier this year at the 2022 Venice Film Festival was Emanuele Crialese‘s celebrated “L’Immensità,” a family drama starring Penélope Cruz. The film is about the story of love between Clara (Cruz) and her children, set in Rome in the ’70s.

Penelope Cruz turned heads in two amazing looks at the 2022 Venice Film Festival this weekend!

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz.