Al Rodbell Confusing, unable to follow the plot, too many people pop in and out....yes, exactly like a child feels watching a world he or she barely understands. This is not to everyone's taste, as a matter of fact the people who saw this with me at the local college mostly didn't get it, couldn't make sense of who the people are-and the early character transition between the child who sees his mother win the prize of most sexy mom to the professor who needed constant drugs to ease his adult existential pain was not clear. So, for those who have the good fortune to see the film, read the synopsis first, but don't worry about all the people who pop in and out.There is a boy and his little sister, first seen when his mother is thrown out of the apartment by their violent father. But they had each other, even though he called her "dummy" it was with love, something that sustained her even in the flash forward when the mother was dying, but even in her last days the mother never lost a joi de vive that was always a part of her, never knowing how it hurt her son so deeply.This may be representative of Italian films, Italian culture, where there is a vitality, from the pinching of a sexy women's ass to laughing in the face of terminal illness, that is strange to American viewers. But oh what a relief to see it represented so beautifully in all its sensuous chaos.

dpernice Having gone through most of Virzi's movies, I thought I was about to see a nice and elegant comedy as previously seen in "My name is Tanino" or "Caterina goes to the city". Instead, the film is drama lacking any type of perspective beyond the elementary and stereotyped Italian postcard of a '70s middle-class family. Characters are so much stereotyped that by the end of the movie I was feeling nosed. The plot is poor and predictable, and apart from the second husband, the other actors are simply unfitted. I'm afraid that Virzi wanted to assert new directing ambitions, but that these have finished to be widely disappointing. 3 for the effort, but subject, plot, direction and acting are a mess to a point that we ended up laughing at the scene of the mother's death.

stensson Most people agree that the Golden Age of Italian movies started with Rosselini's "Rome-Open City" and ended about 15 years before Mastroianni's death. What's the cause of that, we can't be sure of.This film about the drug depending teacher, who remembers his mother during the last decade of that era and how she involuntarily destroyed the lives of him and his sister. They really haven't begun yet. His mother another example of the common Italian film theme "Too beautiful for her own good".But that theme would have been done better in the hands of the golden Italian directors and good acting really don't make that much difference here.

Matt Kies I live near director's town of birth, the town where this movie is set, too, and I had, last summer, the great opportunity to see how this man works, and I can say he's so nice and he tries to be calm, even when the actors (the younger ones, in particular) couldn't do that he wants.But I've noticed an other thing: production was very very rich (in economical terms), and maybe my judge could be partial, but when I've seen this movie, I've seen a beautiful story, rich of messages and themes (family, and the incapability to repudiate that; impossibility to escape from past and nostalgia; against the drug, even if it could seem the opposite etc..), so great job as regards the screenplay; acting is good, although many actors were very young, and "for first time on screen"; photograph is quite good (some scene have a big and quite bad using of color correction), and sounds are right.I think (joking) Virzì is happy whenever he reaches to export his accent in the world, and his own crusade includes, in my opinion, the justice for the speaking, which before him it was the same for Florence and Tuscany's Coast. In this way, actors like Mastrandrea and Pandolfi show their great capability to give a great interpretation even with a different accent (both come from Rome).But the worst side of the movie I think it's the shoots. They aren't bad, but probably I believed Virzì's work had a greater attention for originality, and I asked me why, with the big quantity of entourage and money he had, he forgot the attention for the originality in shooting. The shoots are many times ordinary, far from other great movies, like Fellini's Amarcord, which the review Ciak had compared with this.With an other kind of shoots (or maybe is just the video editing, I hope) which gives to movie that "ordinary taste", breaking a little part of amazing magic of the movie, this could be one of the greatest works of Virzì, because is a personal and introspective work, like Italians know to do very well.Although this, "La Prima Cosa Bella" is able to move the spectator, and it's a good movie, but just a little better than the standard of the genre. My final vote is a 7,5.