This film is one of a few prime candidates for being mistreated. All over IMDb there are these sinister little, absolutely not intellectual, parasites. When will far more people allow films to escape their expectations, (read moronic projections). People, baby steps. I project too, that is very human. "Are these animals, aliens, is that planet earth? . . ." BUT HOW FANTASTIC that the film will not deliver what I may have already started imagining, shock horror, my mummy of a film won't give me what I am wanting from it. SICK PEOPLE! You are bad lovers, I won't even say "I guess" or "you must be" - YOU ARE BAD LOVERS. You are mean and most likely, projecting without any conscience. You are stupid and a danger to the environment and people around you. This film is NOT!It is rich. It enriches. I have seen many hundreds of good or great films, and only in the last year or two or three. This film was a fantastic surprise, a gift whose wrapping kept unfolding, more and more, the people becoming more beautiful as their horror deepened. The humour, more absurd and funnier. I could not pick a fantasy that better echoes, so truthfully, life experience, as Nuovomondo does. Even if all facts happened to be wrong, you certainly shouldn't fix this film in historical context - of course it's incredibly relevant today. AND did I say how incredibly funny it could be.And many other fine things I could mention but I've run out of late night, early morning, steam. Just let some things be magic, silly. Don't let post modernity turn you into another dissector of everything that's good. PS. something I rarely do - I read an interview with the Director, bless him. He said the valid thing that many things are supposed to be mysteries, but gave away this generous piece when asked why the statue of liberty wasn't shown / seen: "They never see it because they never properly arrive in the USA". BRAVO. Beautiful. If the (somewhat obvious, still) allegories don't appease your feeble mind, ruminate on that, whether you arrived or not. (Don't call me Coolio - I don't wanna see you when you get there, if you ever get there).

An interesting look at the immigrant experience, told as a fable with some very weird imagery.I got drawn to this movie because it tells of immigrants from Sicily who traveled to America. I imagine much the same as my Grandfather did at that time. Travelling in steerage to provide ballast for the ships, I cannot imagine it was very comfortable, as shown in this film.Laws restricting immigrants existed. I would guess that these laws were more strict on those who came from the Mediterranean and Africa. Immigrants had to be free from contagious diseases or hereditary infirmities. In the film, we see physical and mental exams, the latter because of the view that low intelligence is heritable. Single women could not enter the country, on the presumption that they would become prostitutes, so most married single men already in the country, as arranged beforehand, at Ellis Island before entry.This is the story of a British immigrant (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who arranges to marry a poor Sicilian (Vincenzo Amato). He is trying to get his family through with a son that is mute and a mother (Aurora Quattrocchi) that is considered feeble-minded. She was fantastic in the role, by the way.You will also see character actor, Vincent Schiavelli, in his next to the last appearance. I don't know if his last film has been released. He plays a matchmaker, and is also very good.It was a strange, but enjoyable film. It's not for everyone, as I imagine those who don't have some interest in the immigrant experience would find it rather slow.

Stranger things have happened than the director of 'Respiro' seeing the well-worn and much-loved opening credits sequence for Monty Python, and allowing his memory to resurface in the opening of this epic as two young men, now in close-up, now tiny and lost in the aerial microcosmic pattern of hill rocks, pieces of stone jammed in their bleeding mouths, struggle to the holy cairn at the top to ask a vital question. Simultaneously two girls, bearing promises of marriage to (perhaps) rich foreigners and photos of giant vegetables and American streets paved with gold, are persuaded to throw the photos away; the pictures are taken by a dumb lad to the cairn just as the eldest, Salvatore (Amato), begs the Gods to tell "us" if "we" should stay, or leave. Salvatore, his family, which gradually grows as the story opens out, are joined by a lost and rootless English lady (Gainsbourg) who decides to join the family if she can, to gain entry into the Promised Land. The story right from the start looks like a coat hanger for the visuals, and it is a treat throughout for the eyes. The great break as the ship leaves home is handled in a completely unconventional way: A God's-eye view shows the heads on board and the heads remaining on shore slowly separating as the ship moves out, as if the crowd is a 'people cake' that has been sliced. The sheer brutality of the situation these people have to live through is leavened by this kind of camera-work, and by the occasional magic dream, as when the no-longer brooding Salvatore's face is showered by coins. The tensions, though, coming out of the struggle to leave the Old Country, survive the voyage and pass into the New Country, and the simple efforts of strangers to cope with each other, keep it fascinating. Whenever Aurora Quattrocchi, 'Mama', is on screen, it seems to shift round to her point of view, yet another layer. The episodic structure, too, adds to the illusion of it's being shorter than it is. There are as many apparent links to the coming century as to the past here - the scenes on the mountain look like Pasolini, and the three males could almost have been the Marx BrothersAfter the nightmare of travelling 'steerage', a storm in mid-Atlantic and the interminable and humiliating selection process and 'aptitude' tests at Ellis Island (lack of intelligence has been scientifically proved to be genetically inherited, and we do not want these people amongst our citizens), it remains ambiguous whether everyone has got through to the Land of Milk and Honey, or the Mean Streets. I would say on the strength of this, that if anyone has the guts to put up the money for a film of 100 Years of Solitude, Crialese must be your man. CLIFF HANLEY

The Golden Door is the story of the Mancuso family's journey to America at the turn of the last century. The movie can be thought of in three distinct segments: the life the immigrants left behind in "the old country," the Atlantic passage to America, and the processing through Ellis Island.The opening scenes, although they take place a mere 100 or so years ago, conjure up the Dark Ages. For all the superstition, illiteracy and darkness that pervaded peasant life in Italy at that time, it might very well have been that era.Once the family decides to depart (only after receiving a "sign" from a saint to whom the patriarch prays), the horrendous conditions in steerage make it hard to imagine that these poor souls took on this voyage voluntarily. But they went. They went seeking out a life in a new land where money grows on trees and rivers run with milk (two of the more surreal themes in the movie).The processing on Ellis Island – which could end in forced return to the old country – included every kind of indignity, including communal showers, medical exams en massed, intelligence testing that today would be denounced as "culturally biased," and brokered engagements held in an almost auction-like public setting. When it is inquired why all this is necessary, it is pronounced that America does not want the taint of inferior people.Running as a subplot to the story of the Mancuso family is the story of Salvatore Mancuso and Lucy Reed, an English gentlewoman on board the ship who proposes to him as a means of gaining her admission to America where sponsorship is required of immigrant women. Although she claims that this will be nothing more than a marriage of convenience (and "not for love"), her eyes tell a different story, whereas Salvatore is clearly smitten with her.This is a gritty and richly detailed movie. One scene where an elderly grandmother holds her grandson's hands in hers focuses on the dirt embedded under their finger nails.The soundtrack is great, although not appropriate to time or place, alternating between too modern (the music playing over the credits) and more Middle Eastern-sounding than Italian (the folk music played by the immigrants while on board ship).To witness the hardships that our forebears forbore to pass through "the golden door" is to be jolted out of our American complacency and to appreciate what they endured to pave the way for the lives we enjoy today.Laura L.