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The Earth Trembles

La terra trema

1948

Luchino Visconti

Maria Micale, Sebastiano Valastro, Antonio Arcidiacono, Salvatore Vicari ...

8.0

2,203

Drama In rural Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and operate independently.

	Author	Review
United States	Jessica Kiang IndieWire	"The purest expression of the neo-realist side of Visconti’s dualism (...) the strikingly beautiful 'The Earth Trembles' is, in its way, as magnificent, epic, and operatic as any of Visconti’s later films."	POS
United States	Noel Murray AV Club	"[It] features a searing lead performance (...) 'La Terra Trema' suffers from Visconti's clumsy addition of a documentary-style narrator (...) Visconti scores when he films moments of life lived"	NEU
United States	Howard Thompson The New York Times	"Two minutes after the picture starts (...) we recognize it as the work of a born moviemaker (...) [Visconti] has taken his spunky protagonist and literally drowned him in woes"	NEU
United Kingdom	Tom Charity Time Out	"A masterpiece of neo-realism, a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means (...) The film is distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'."	POS
United States	Bill Weber Slant	"It's in the quiet domestic interplay of the principals (...) and through heroic images (...) that the tight-knit passions of a family on the economic edge of oblivion are so hauntingly portrayed (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Variety	"Ponderous (...) Artistically and technically the film is an important achievement. There is unnecessary caricaturization and certain lack of logic with which Visconti points up class antagonisms, plus a confusing fragmentary quality."	NEU
United Kingdom	David Parkinson Radio Times	"It still has an operatic realism, thanks to Visconti's rhythmic editing of Graziati Aldo's meticulously composed vistas (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Don Druker Chicago Reader	"In its lyrical grandeur and masterful compositions it's still an impressive achievement, a genuinely poetic social document."	POS

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