✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Italy, Switzerland, Germany · 2014
1h 50m
Director Alice Rohrwacher
Starring Maria Alexandra Lungu, Alba Rohrwacher, Sam Louwyck, Sabine Timoteo
Genre Drama
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Disrupted by the arrival of a juvenile delinquent and a TV show competition offering glamorous prizes to the "Most Traditional Family", a clan of beekeepers in the Tuscan countryside is thrown into disarray as the unconventional nature of their familial structure is threatened to be exposed.
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
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.
Superb star turn from Maria Alexandra Lungi but this doesn’t grip as it might.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Wise beyond its years, like the teenage protag Gelsomina, Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) is a wistful but no-tears swan song recounting the disappearance of traditional rural life-style in Italy.
Slant Magazine by Elise Nakhnikian
Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.
An appealing yet oddly insubstantial work, like an early impressionist sketch in need of a little more focus, and perhaps a more suitable frame.
The Wonders is a complex and nuanced illustration of a family trying to live by their own standards - whilst only partly failing. Rohrwacher's vision is tactful and restrained, with so much we don't ever know. The characters' histories are there to be guessed rather than spelled out.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
If the film fails to deliver wonders, it does offer substantial pleasures.
The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton
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.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
The film comes and goes without commotion, but its magic settles on you as softly and as steadily as dust.
Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek
The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.
Subservience can be deadly.
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