Review: Alice Rohrwacher's Unique And Admirably Personal 'The Wonders' Featuring Monica Bellucci

This is a reprint of our review from the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Recent years have seen the Cannes Film Festival take an increasing amount of heat for its paucity of female directors, and rightly so—the last couple of years saw either zero or one woman with a film in the Official Competition, with directors like Sofia Coppola and Claire Denis reduced to the sidebar sections. Festival head Thierry Fremaux has remained bullish, claiming that anything else would be tokenism, but he does seem to have paid some degree of attention: this year, female helmers in Competition have doubled, to a whopping two. The first (with Naomi Kawase's "Still The Water" to come in a few days) is "La Meraviglie," or "The Wonders," the latest from "Corpo Celeste" helmer Alice Rohrwacher. A gentle and textured coming-of-age story, it's undoubtedly one of the stronger competition films to date, and could well find favor with Jane Campion's jury, but we found...