Not a single believable emotion in this movie, which is a real problem for a movie that really wants you to feel its beating heart.

It's hard to tell at this point if Soderbergh's heart is really in the filmmaking thing, but there's a wry bemusement in MMA star Gina Carano that seems to match her director's temperament. As she puts one man after another down, the look on her face seems to say, "Oh, so this is what you actors do all the time? Don't take yourselves too seriously."

A sweeping epic. It's the longest I've sat in one theater to watch a single piece (though it was originally released as a four-part series on Italian TV), and after six hours, I couldn't leave the theater for ten minutes, I had to come down off an emotional ledge. It's a tale of Italian history told through the story of one family, and by the end of the movie, you'll know and love them the way you do your own family.

See enough documentaries, and you'll appreciate how Kapadia crafts this one entirely from archival footage, with no talking head interludes, the classic documentary cheat. It's the difference between reading a narrative unfolding in the present tense versus feeling like everything is a look back, with judgment already rendered.