Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

derrickluciano Life is an opera.. And so it seems..."the characters becoming prey to their own impulses..." This is the story of a married man named Matteo and his sexual longing for the young visiting hunk David. Would he give in to his desires? What consequences await them?Massimo Poggio who plays Matteo is an eye-turner even for his age. He is also one brilliant actor though I must admit I find him over the top when he got drunk at that party night.Film has some good sceneries spiced up with appropriate music. There are other subplots which may or may not move the story forward. Is there anything else going on between Uncle Leo and David.Don't miss the last 15 minutes. If you love drama and sexual tension, this is for you...

cabellwalter CONTAINS SPOILERS. Queer themed Italian cinema needs to grow up, this recent entry in the canon is all the further proof we need. Not nearly as god-awful as Ferzan Ozpetek's critically revered and homophobic HAMAM, DAVID'S BIRTHDAY is not immune to the sacrificial lamb syndrome. The "controversial" twist is all in on who will get butchered this time around, because we all know that homosexual desire is harbinger of doom. Slow paced and poorly written, often the case with publicly-funded Italian cinema, the film plays out as a cross pollinated low rent hybrid of Visconti's "Death in Venice" and Malle's "Damage". Such high influences are clearly stated over and over again, but high art - or even simple lyricism - are definitely out of reach for Marco Filiberti's fraudulent hands.

steven-222 This is an overlong Italian soap opera about two fortyish married couples sharing a beautiful beach home for the summer; when the long-absent 18-year-old son of husband #1 shows up, husband #2 falls hard. All sorts of complications might arise, but the film just flounders around for almost two hours, until it finally ends in (you guessed it!) tragedy. (All those shots emphasizing husband #1's wedding ring were a dead giveaway that this would end in tears.) There's some nice scenery, a little eye-candy, and lots of talking and eating and strolling on the beach. This movie offers a long, slow haul to a limp, contrived finish.

jm10701 I am somewhere between liking and disliking this movie, so I am giving it five stars. What I like is the lovely performance by Massimo Poggio as Matteo; if the rest if the movie had been on his level it would have gotten an easy eight stars. But it was as if he was working all alone in an otherwise uniformly mediocre undertaking.The story, the dialog, the pacing and all the other performances are more like a soap opera than any other movie I can think of, with overblown emotions, preposterous developments, a lot of yelling and crying, and almost continual minor crises of one kind or another - even convenient interruptions for commercial breaks (what another reviewer brilliantly described as fadeaways).I am a gay man, but I did not find Thyago Alves attractive at all, so the fact that Massimo Poggio made his obsession with the boy totally credible is part of his achievement. His is a stunning, subtle, restrained, and deeply moving performance. So I can recommend this movie highly for his work, but not for anything else.