Good Morning, Night

Combining a thoughtful script with splendid acting -- especially by Sansa -- Bellocchio has fashioned a tense thriller that is both understated and powerful.

Numerous filmmakers have attempted to dramatize the terrorist activity that gripped Italy in the 1970s, but few have done so with the unsettling power of Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night.

It's a thoughtful and ultimately chilling take on a tragedy that still has the power to disturb and divide.

At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.

Bellocchio's film, which enlivens the grim realities of months in a stuffy apartment with striking bursts of lyricism, is often a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming a slave to ideology.

Though he doesn't possess the dangerous confusion of his tragically misguided heroes, veteran director Marco Bellocchio does share their capacity for raising thought-provoking points that end in an ineffectual tangle.

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.