The New York Times by A.O. Scott
It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Italy · 2021
1h 36m
Director Marco Bellocchio
Starring Alberto Bellocchio, Letizia Bellocchio, Marco Bellocchio, Maria Luisa Bellocchio
Genre Documentary
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In 1968, Marco Bellocchio lost his brother, Camillo, to suicide. This heartrending documentary is the filmmaker's deeply personal account of that devastating loss. Filmed over the course of a few years, Marx Can Wait consists of conversations between Bellocchio and his surviving siblings, as well as their spouses and children, as they attempt to make sense of Camillo's death.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
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.
Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.
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.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
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.
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.