Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

betty dalton A movie that lifted me off the ground into another world. Io Sono L Amore is one of those movies that just took my breath away and kept me floating for days. Still remember the sunshine on my face when I walked out the cinema. Really felt heavenly!Didnt know anything about this movie when I went into the movietheatre. I must admit that the story is too complicated to rewind, but "Io Sono L Amore" is all about the feelings that will rush over you once you get hooked. It is very slowpaced. Very delicate. Very European. So maybe you wont get hooked, because there is no other director that splits audiences in half as much as Luca Guadagnino does. If you are the moviegeek type however, who loves arthouse films, then I will strongly recommend this legendary epic too you. If you are the impatient type who wants fast plot turns then you might want to reconsider. But what the heck, I am not the patient type either, but I still loved it more than any other movie in years. Would be such a shame if you would miss out on one of the most delicate and wonderful epic movies of the last decade. What do you think? No dont think, take a chance!....So there I was, outside of the cinema afterwards, bathing in the sunlight, feeling glorious and dumbfounded at the same time. I had just witnessed one of the most emotionally intense movies in years. Oh how do I love "Io Sono L Amore" !!!

hou-3 The only good thing to be said about this overripe and vacuous melodrama is that we were spared the full 210 minutes of the original cut. I am astonished by the rave reviews some people give it and can only think 1. They are Swinton fans, and/or 2. They left their critical faculties at home when they went to watch it. Granted, it is full on in its depiction of massive wealth, and that's interesting enough for the first few minutes, but soon the wooden acting, intrusive direction and jarring music deliver the message that Guadagnino has nothing at all of interest to say. Everything about the movie is second hand. It reminds me of The Garden of the Finzi Continis, another vastly overrated rich Italian family extravaganza.

nja-24845 After seeing some glowing reviews for this film I decided to watch it. I am still wondering who could overlook all the flaws. From the very outset, the film sets itself up as an art house slow burner. The old fashioned opening credits move into bleak winter scenes, where all of the outdoor shots appear to be shot in monochrome, reverting to colour for the interior shots. You begin to think that this will become a clever code for the film, but after a few minutes the idea is abandoned. Either that, or the colour grading of the first few minutes was badly messed up or accidentally taken from an alternative cut of the film. We then move to a series of slow scenes that reveal snippets of information. As the meagre plot slowly unfolds, what becomes apparent is the number of terrible edits. There is one where the lead character jumps from a country idyll straight back to the dressing room of her city house (supposedly 2 hours away) without any establishing shot. I assumed she had taken a hotel room somewhere near the country house. There is also plenty of awful camera work, where the usually static shots attempt to pan from one view to another, get stuck somewhere nondescript in between, then awkwardly settle on their intended destination. If I were recording a home movie and got my camera-work this bad, I'd do it again.The potential intensity of the one major sex scene in the film is ruined. The constantly changing camera angles of their bodies, interspersed with multiple pointless shots of flowers, becomes a confusing mess devoid of all heat and passion. Most TV perfume ads are sexier than this.However, after all these unintentionally jarring errors, there is one crowning achievement that trumps them all - the score. From the very beginning of the film, the madly irritating and inappropriate score spoils almost every shot in the film! What should have been quiet, intense moments are obliterated with discordant plinky-plonk 'modern classical' noise. For example, the final few minutes of the film attempt to describe the culmination of the lead character revealing her love affair, against the painfully bleak backdrop of a funeral of a close family member. The scenes are set in the beautiful surroundings of ancient Italian buildings and the characters' palatial city house. So time for some total silence or the merest background hints of minor chords perhaps? But no! Let's turn up the infuriating racket to the max and let the pretentious chin-stroking moron who wrote this abomination of a film score have his moment, showing off his inability to write music for any purpose other than his own satisfaction.As the end credits blissfully arrived, I and others viewing the film were left either in stunned silence or laughing out loud at this dreadfully botched attempt at creating something oh-so-clever. How did they get it so wrong?

dromasca Io sono l'amore starts with an impressionist-like picture of a city in winter, reminding a painting by Renoir. Yet, we'll soon realize that we are not at the end of the 19th century but rather 100 years later. The next scene is a party in a very rich people mansion. A family gathers, three generations get together for the birthday of the founding father of the family. He has a big announcement to make about the family heritage, an announcement everybody waits for many years. The relations between the members of the family start to build up under our eyes during the dinner, the old man is obviously in control. Does this remind Coppola's The Godfather? What follows is however a film about the slow decay of the ruling class, a decay that starts from the degradation of the family fabric which does not allow any longer cohesion in face of the forces of economics and history. We are reminded the universe of another great movie – Visconti's Il gattopardo.All these comparisons may seem extremely ambitious for the work of a director, Luca Guadagnino, who is practically at his second feature film only (and the first one seems to have been an erotic teenage drama). Amazing as it may seem, Io sono l'amore is a very complex and daring enterprise that succeeds to compare honorably with the illustrious antecedents it is inspired from and also has a lot to say on its own. The Recchi family in the center of the story is led by strong men who built a textile empire (with dubious origins in the second world war industry, so the Godfather quote is not completely unjustified) and married beautiful women, not always in their own class of super-riches. One of them is Emma (Tilda Swinton), Russian at origin, married to the heir of the empire, leading the house, coordinating the social ceremonies, managing the house economy, raising the children and dealing with their growth and emotional problems. Is she happy? Can she keep together a family that lives in a different age than the one of the ossified bourgeois clans, with some of the younger people trying to break the walls of the conveniences in order to find their vocation or their ways of loving? When the occasion shows up it will be Emma herself who will let her true feelings overcome the conventions, but the way to personal truth may be paved with tragedy. The story of the family relations is carefully constructed and impeccably acted, but there is one moment when the story risks to fall into soap drama. This moment is overcome by the superb acting of Tilda Swinton. I realize now that I missed somehow how huge an actress she is. In one film she succeeds to be at turns high-class cool and passionate, attractive and ugly, young enough to love and fast-aging, in control and completely broken, and all these in one character around whom the whole movie is spinning. At the end, when tragedy had struck, and she has the courage to speak the truth and break the social conventions, she is told by the husband who was a minute ago swearing love and offering protection 'you are nothing'. It is actually the Recchi's who get nothing but emptiness in their lives, and this is the moment when Emma gains back her life and the chance to start again.There are so many beautiful moments of cinema in this film which make it stand on its own and worth remembering even beyond the story itself. There are some amazing moments of camera work, and some haunting fragments of musical score. There is a lot of good acting, and care to the social and relationship details, every corner of the screen is full with characters who live true lives in a realistic and exact composition. There is beautifully filmed nature and there is a lot of interesting food, actually food plays at some moment an important role in the action of the film, as the mean of communication between the characters (one of them is a very talented chef). Guadagnino's movie continues a tradition in the Italian cinema of using family stories to deal with social and political issues and tells again a story which will be worth telling as long as class differences exist and are challenged by history and by emotions.