Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

badajoz-1 I read the book in my late teens (I was completely unaware of the closet gay theme, or that's what the critics say!) and was singularly unimpressed. I saw the DVD in my sixties and was even less impressed! The theme is buttoned up Brits in sunny, laid back Italy, and how they are unable to adapt or cope. We see it all in the first twenty minutes and thereafter the film has nowhere to go, but to re-emphasise the production values, the costumes and the scenery. And, as with 'Avatar' it is not enough to make a film. The characters are uninteresting or over the top, and lack any depth. Various crucial character motivations are left unexplained, the acting is stilted or over the top (both Helen Mirren and Judy Davis), and the crucial plot elements like the death of a baby barely make a mark (I don't count the silly, presumably homoerotic, punching of the Rupert Graves character by the grieving Italian father!). As with other Foster adaptations - why has he got the reputation as a leading English novelist? It is grindingly stilted and of its' time (or is it the one we've been brainwashed into accepting - eg buttoned up middle class Brits?). There were the social changes and the Boer War during Edwardian times!!! Poor, I've dumped the free DVD in the Carity Shop!

T Y Nearly unbearable chronicle of condescending, British, henpecking shrews in Italy. The point seems to be about watching people transpose their freakishly uptight values onto a different culture, but it's played so broadly that one "gets it" in the first scene and there seems to no point to the rest of it. These insufferable, condescending, moralizing, determined-to-be-miserable know-it-all martinet/harridans are incapable of realizing that the screeching incivility they deploy to uphold propriety is a much greater offence.Judy Davis is a complete lunatic both in the role and in her performance choices. Why anyone would want to assay the "most evil, screwed-up, shrew ever depicted on film" escapes me. She rages like a dry drunk until a viewer would be overjoyed to see her pushed from a cliff, or kicked in the face by a horse. It's unfathomable why viewers have been asked to identify with these insufferable prigs or to consider their dilemma.

Robert I believe I've seen every film adaptation of Forster's work, and I have to say that this is probably the worst of the lot. It has none of the charm of "A Room With a View", and none of the poignancy of "Howards End". Instead, it's a long, slogging story with shrill characters that I could not muster a shred of empathy for. Many of the characters (particularly the elderly Mrs. Harriton and Harriet) are played so far over-the-top that they border on farce. The character of Gino is underdeveloped, which makes the way some characters come to feel about him ring utterly false.Forster was a homosexual, an Italophile, and scornful of Edwardian British mores and (perceived) hypocrisy. I have no problem with any of those things, but in this, his first novel, it's as if his main intention was to telegraph these things to the audience, and he sets his characters up to that end, but it's never convincing as the natural actions of real humans. If you must watch it, enjoy the Tuscan scenery while you can, but you may want to fast forward through the second-half. For completists only.

Framescourer 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' said Alexander Pope, which helpfully explains the subject of the title. The fools are an absurd English party looking to 'rescue' a baby from its Italian father (the party bound to its mother by the tenuous association of inheritance and acquaintance).'Foolishness' also becomes a euphemism for repression in this disarmingly light period drama, a repression buried almost beyond scrutiny by the impressive Rupert Graves. His is the key, poignant role although his character is matched in script and execution by Helena Bonham Carter's slow-burning Caroline Abbott and the outstandingly dysfunctional Judy Davis. Helen Mirren is miscast, but luckily is little more than a trope - Giovanni Guidelli is also alien to this company but actually that's rather more to the point.The film is described in a number of reviews as being 'sumputously filmed', or the like. This is not the case: it's rather simply filmed but in taking in the beautiful Tuscan town of San Gimignano both at a distance and close up cannot fail to seduce the characters and viewer alike. It also has one of the most succinct yet comprehensive sequences about the true nature of opera in a movie. 7/10