The First Beautiful Thing

Comedy and poignancy weave together in Mr. Virzì's hands, but the maudlin meter only occasionally goes into the red zone. And Ms. Pandolfi gives such an exquisitely understated performance that you don't realize until the very end that the film was as much about her character as it was about Bruno and Anna.

The First Beautiful Thing is the kind of movie - that escapes the sick room to cavort at carnivals and eat cotton candy until the inevitable relapse.

Italian audiences are bound to like it and the broadness of plot and appeal suggests casual fans of foreign film should, too.

Spans four decades of a troubled family with enough gentle pathos and sly humor to compensate for a less than original storyline.

Virzì's delicate touch and the cast's uniformly captivating performances make that reckoning a lovely, charmingly melancholy thing to watch.

Occasionally affecting but unremarkable, the picture's emotional moments are designed to pluck local heartstrings.

This was Italy's official submission for Best Foreign Film to the 2011 Academy Awards (a red flag more often than not), and, sure enough there's little here that rises above middlebrow.