Let's Hope It's a Girl

Since his comic heist movie Big Deal On Madonna Street in 1958, it took Italian director Mario Monicelli almost 30 years to gain another world-wide success. This rather sprawling but entertaining semi-comic family saga with feminist undertones was helped by an excellent international cast, led by Sweden's Liv Ullmann. She plays an impoverished countess struggling to keep the family's decaying property, and rules over its inhabitants, who are mostly women. When the film sags occasionally, there is always the beautiful Catherine Deneuve and the ravishing Tuscan settings to distract one.