The Wonders

The film comes and goes without commotion, but its magic settles on you as softly and as steadily as dust.

Letting questions remain unanswered and silences go unfilled, Rohrwacher offers lovingly crafted glimpses of an enterprise we all engage in, regardless of whether we've ever been near a beehive: extracting sweetness from the materials at hand.

Rohrwacher draws us into this unusual world with the ease of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about, neither judging nor celebrating and, at her best, just looking with tenderness and a winning sense of humour.

There's something refreshing, at times remarkable, about the sureness of the acting, and the filmmaker's touch.

Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.

Though there's an admirable sense of messiness to the scenes of family life, the screenplay itself is rather neat: one has a fairly solid sense of how things are going to play out from the early stages, and for the most part that's how it goes, ticking off a checklist of rather familiar beats along the way.

An appealing yet oddly insubstantial work, like an early impressionist sketch in need of a little more focus, and perhaps a more suitable frame.