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02/09/06
Primo Amore (2005)
53 %
Reviews Counted: 19 Fresh: 10 Rotten:9 Average Rating: 5.8/10
Runtime: 1 hr 34 mins
Synopsis: Italian director Matteo Garrone (THE EMBALMER) returns with PRIMO AMORE, a harrowing psychological drama about a truly dysfunctional man. Vittorio (a striking Vitaliano Trevisan) is a goldsmith who has issues when it comes to finding a partner. A perfectionist at heart, Vittorio can't... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Vitaliano Trevisan, Michela Cescon
Director: Matteo Garrone
Screenwriter: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Vitaliano Trevisan
Producer: Domenico Procacci
Composer: Banda Osiris
Screenwriter: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Vitaliano Trevisan
Producer: Domenico Procacci
Composer: Banda Osiris
Reviews
1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Top Critic
Perhaps it's appropriate that a tale about the avoidance of food should be so unappetizing, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable to watch.
05/21/05
Top Critic
This is not a great date movie, unless you know your partner will let you have popcorn AND candy and not make you suffer for it later.
05/13/05
Primo Amore tunnels deeply enough into its characters' psyches to reach classic tragedy levels.
04/29/05
...never gets enough beneath the surface to justify [Vittorio's] eventual transformation into something out of a horror movie.
04/28/05
Top Critic
Could do with a bit more plot: It doesn't resolve so much as collapse in utter desolation.
04/28/05
It feels like a sketch for a larger work that would go beyond the well-worn insights of diet literature.
04/08/05
Connecting the tenuous expository scenes are hard-hitting moments as Sonia continues to starve herself, and Vittorio offers rewards and punishments.
04/08/05
While engaging, pic eventually betrays itself as having a trivial attitude to its chosen subject.
04/07/05
Top Critic
The scenario is ludicrous, yet it's filmed and performed in such a way that it creates unbearable tension.
04/06/05
Set in northern Italy and in the darkest recesses of a woman's heart, Primo Amore is a horror movie about desire and the toxic pursuit of perfection.
04/04/05
Top Critic
The atmosphere is once again black, creepy and unsettlingly elegant, lending this twisted tale of psychological dominance and submission a patina of anxiety and dread.
04/01/05
Probing the trust-based power games of a sadomasochistic dynamic, the movie is a reasonably thoughtful study of obsessive love.
03/29/05
An engrossing Italian psychodrama about a driven man's obsession with a warped vision of beauty and a woman's sad subservience to his efforts to make her over.
03/29/05
Primo Amore is as moody as Matteo Garrone's previous feature, The Embalmer, from which it seems to have pilfered much of its metaphoric import.
03/23/05
1 - 20 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Related Forums
PRIMO AMORE gets an East Coast premiere @ the New Directors/New Films festival in NYC
by: Darko, Donnie 7/25/05
by: Darko, Donnie 7/25/05
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