Critic Reviews

Marx Can Wait is a crucial and profound addition to the filmography of one of the greatest living filmmakers, and it ends with a loving reconciliation with the past that is so moving and so convincing because it is so hard-won; this is a movie that has a rare kind of final cathartic authority.

Straightforward in concept yet psychologically profound, the film draws the audience in with a lingering sadness made more potent by the director’s clear yet unspoken sense of guilt.

It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.

Even at its most emotionally awkward or loose, it signals a filmmaking sensibility where Bellocchio — whose nearly 60-year career has been built on a provocative rendering of the social and political fractures around him — is refreshingly averse to viewing his own past through rose-colored glasses.

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

Bellocchio’s motives for making the film are in part to make sense of the events, in part, one suspects, to exorcise a lingering sense of survivor’s guilt. Yet for all the laudable intentions, Camillo still gets slightly lost in the rambling anecdotes, padding and extraneous details.