Mezzogiorno

• Lukewarm Romance Lacks Latin Passion

'Only God knows how much I have loved you," declares one of the characters in this handsome but pallid costume drama. That's true, at least. The audience certainly hasn't witnessed any passion. Set in a South American port city as the 19th century gives way to the 20th, the story concerns Florentino Ariza (played by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, currently killing his way through No Country for Old Men). Florentino sees the young Fermina (Italian star Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and falls instantly and irrevocably in love. The young couple engages in a passionate exchange of letters, until Fermina makes an abrupt, pragmatic decision to marry the well-respected physician Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), a kindly, devoted but somewhat fastidious man. (And even that tone isn't consistently ...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 21, 2009

• Film Critics Weigh in with Pre-Oscar Top Picks

... honour, naming Italian star Giovanna Mezzogiorno for her role in Vincere. The film follows the rise...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• January 10, 2011

• Movies with Alison Gillmor

Denzel Washington plays a gangster who quietly corners the heroin trade in '70s Harlem, while Russell Crowe is the outsider cop who goes after him. With a prestige cast and crew, this is a big film -- but not in the way you'd expect. Director Ridley Scott and scripter Steve Zaillian offer the long view of crime and punishment, and the drama is slow, steady and cumulative. HHHH When a guilt-ridden lawyer (Tom Wilkinson) suffers a nervous breakdown and sabotages a high-profile lawsuit, the designated fixer of the title (George Clooney) suffers his own moral crisis in Tony Gilroy's handsome legal thriller, augmented by terrific performances by Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton as a corporate legal counsel driven to extreme measures. Clooney may be outshone as an actor, but at least conscience ne...

... a love for a neighbour (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) over the course of 50 years in this adaptation of...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 21, 2009

• Movies

Garden City, Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. 14A This third interpretation of Richard Matheson's novel of the same name (previously filmed as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man) pits Will Smith's extremely lonely virologist, living in a deserted New York City, against the remainder of cannibalistic/vampire mutants who live in the city's dark recesses. Before the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence published an earlier version of the scandalous story, titled Lady Chatterley and the Man of the Woods. It was this version French filmmaker Pascale Ferran adapted into a film, starring Marina Hands (Barbarian Invasions) as Constance Chatterley and Jean-Louis Coulloc'h as Parkin, the gamekeeper who tempts her into sensuous infidelity.

... cast includes Italian star Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Benjamin Bratt and a miscast Javier Bardem.) H. T...

• Winnipeg Free Press
• August 21, 2009