Italian for Beginners

Lone Scherfig, the writer-director, has made a film so unabashedly hopeful that it actually makes the heart soar. Yes, soar.

Unlike Hollywood's starting point of hopelessly beautiful and yet inexplicably unentangled principal characters, Italian For Beginners'raw material is something of a more dirty-fingernail variety.

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.

An engaging romantic comedy that would have been better if the audience wasn't constantly being distracted by mediocre video quality and jerky camera movements.

Will be of interest for anyone seeking unconventional romantic stories as well as those curious about the development of the Dogme movement.

None of this is any more fun as it sounds -- the cancer ward scenes are truly disturbing -- but to be fair, writer/director Lone Scherfeg (the first woman to make a Dogme 95 film) manages some black-humored laughs.