Il Futuro
A teenager finds solace in a mark’s embrace.
Directed by Alicia Scherson
(Not Rated)
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
This “excitingly unclassifiable” foreign import takes turns you never expect, said John Oursler in The Village Voice. In a story set in Rome and based on a Roberto Bolaño novel, a teenager is forced to care for her younger brother after the sudden deaths of their parents, and grief clouds her judgment as she allows two hangers-on into the family’s flat and agrees to assist them in a bid to fleece an elderly blind man. “What feels at first like a coming-of-age story takes on apocalyptic and noirish undertones,” then shifts mood once more. The blind man is a former Mr. Universe, and the great Rutger Hauer “plays him like lightning sans thunder: When he moves, he is a force of nature,” said Gabe Toro in Indiewire.com. Hauer and Manuela Martelli fall together like animals, and Chilean director Alicia Scherson makes those scenes erotic but not vulgar—“something of a novelty in today’s art-house cinema.” One could complain that Scherson’s style “values mood over information,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. Still, that style is “the perfect vehicle” for a portrait of damaged souls in crisis.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
5 weather-beaten cartoons about the Texas floods
Cartoons Artists take on funding cuts, politicizing tragedy, and more
-
What has the Dalai Lama achieved?
The Explainer Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader has just turned 90, and he has been clarifying his reincarnation plans
-
Europe's heatwave: the new front line of climate change
In the Spotlight How will the continent adapt to 'bearing the brunt of climate change'?