Journey to Italy

One of the most quietly revolutionary works in the history of cinema, Roberto Rossellini's third feature starring Ingrid Bergman (his wife at the time), from 1953, turns romantic melodrama into intellectual adventure.

You might not want to bring along someone you love, because you could end up leaving the theater alone.

Rossellini stealthily ushers us towards a sense of heady affirmation so primal that 'romance' isn't a strong enough word for it.

Voyage to Italy is the kind of movie that makes those unhappily in love feel understood. And even if that's not you (congratulations), it's still possible to groove on Rossellini's stranger-in-a-strange-land psychodrama.

Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.

Journey To Italy is a searing portrait of love turning sour under the Neapolitan sun and a bold adventure in a new kind of filmmaking.

If one accepts the narrative simplicity and that the journey is both physical and spiritual, the film offers many rewards.

Rossellini's bitterly acute account of the death throes of bourgeois marriage in general and his own marriage to Ingrid Bergman in particular.

In the end the film magnificently justifies its classic status as an affirmative statement about relationships.

There is real greatness in this movie.

An influence on everyone from Michelangelo Antonioni to Jacques Rivette, this brave work still stands as a watershed.

Befitting a filmmaker who defined as well as challenged the definition of Italian neorealism, it unfolds simultaneously as thorny narrative and profoundly personal documentary.