Mia Madre

A return to the wry family dramas that director Nanni Moretti aimed solely at home audiences before becoming an art house export, this semi-autobiographical exploration of loss is often sweet, too sentimental and rather slight. Moretti muse Margherita Buy plays the director shooting a movie about workers' rights who has to deal with issues on set - like her insecure American star (John Turturro on fine form) - and romantic breakdown, while coping with her mother's fatal illness. Cross-cutting the director and the emotional crises of her inconsolable brother (Moretti), performed in typical Italianate upper register, with the obvious light-relief of insecure Turturro, who swears he worked with Stanley Kubrick, makes for a distinctly variable tone in what is, by Moretti's standards, an understated and lethargic exercise in irony. Confusing dream sequences aren't much help either. Clearly sincere in intention, this is an unfocused rumination on stress, guilt and grief in today's diminishingly matriarchal Italian society.