Recensioni de* critic*

In The Macaluso Sisters, character development attempts to push against this confinement. Each sister seems forced into a detrimental stereotype or is stigmatized, yet they are each carefully crafted to work against the stigma of their assigned roles.

[Dante] has a fantastic eye for casting, as all of the actors portraying the five sisters in three different time periods are uniformly excellent.... The Macaluso Sisters [is] a beautiful bummer that is the perfect elixir of Aristotelian purgation, and a restorative for your soul.

An unconventional drama reflecting on grief and aging... any missteps [in The Macaluso Sisters] feel minor in comparison to the film’s most poignant moments.

[Dante]proves to be as masterful in dramaturgy for stage as well the screen... Touching without depending on sentimentality, [The Macaluso Sisters is] a sun-soaked odyssey presenting a fine ensemble of characters and performances from its female cast.

[Dante] imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.

When a tragedy occurs and the [Macaluso] sisters decline into bitterness and poor health, Emma Dante’s film takes a turn for the worse. It still has cinematic life, but it devotes this to pure miserabilism.

There are echoes here of other great sisters-in-peril movies such as Mustang and The Virgin Suicides, but Dante’s film, beautifully done, is never more resonant than when reminding us of the lingering impact of childhood drama and the devastating nature of childhood trauma.

Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically... [The Macaluso Sisters] is a touching story, expertly told.

The skill with which Dante adapts her own play, marshaling three sets of actors playing the same characters at three different phases of life, and brings it soaring to fully cinematic life is remarkable... Dante sets a firm seal upon her cross-disciplinary emergence as a director of unusually vivid empathy.

The Macaluso Sisters is never completely free from stage conventions. But it is much more open in terms of space and time [than its predecessor, A Street in Palermo].

[The Macaluso Sisters] rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

Despite her perspective being that of a playwright unconfined by the technical constraints of frames, Emma Dante successfully breaks away from [the] theatre play [of the same name] which the film is based upon... This isn’t an example of theatre brought to the big screen, it’s a film for the big screen, pure and simple.