Recensioni de* critic*

A discerning comic take on modern womanhood, exposing the real trials faced by mothers and daughters at all stages of life.

Holofcener’s films are low-key and feel off-the-cuff, but the dialogue is well-honed and precise, and reveals more than just the writer’s cleverness... Holofcener’s gift is the way she can see these patterns of bad behavior—in other people, and probably in herself—and can give them form.

It’s impossible to summon even pity for the characters as each goes through some self-hating crisis about her body image... Goodwin, as a tragically funny 8-year-old conflicted about her weight and skin color, is the only one that rises out of this mental morass.

None of the characters' emotional lives is fully realised, or developed; the sex-life plots for both women are left hanging, and the central mother-daughter relationships are not illuminated or enriched by a forced crisis Holofcener contrives with Blethyn's post-operative complications... This is a frustrating, disappointing film.

Lovely And Amazing is not attempting a Woody Allen pastiche from a woman's perspective... The performances are an absolute joy... [while] Holofcener's script is sympathetic, cutting, achingly truthful and funny.

Here is a movie that knows its women, listens to them, doesn't give them a pass, allows them to be real... It has no message, other than to celebrate the lives of these imperfect women, and the joy of their imperfections.

What keeps all this from being trite and self-indulgent is Holofcener’s willingness to make her characters’ neuroses unattractive and self-destructive instead of cute and endearing.

[Holofcener] gives us characters that are distinct and quirky, yet instantly recognizable. And having shown them to us, she has a way of jerking us right into the center of their pain... "Lovely & Amazing" remains to the end a bit ragged, a bit ambiguous, a bit up in the air, and a lot like life.

Lovely & Amazing raises questions of racial difference in ways that few modern films even touch or ponder. Although the movie leaves the viewer with an incomplete sense of these characters and their story, it seems more the feeling you have when reaching the end of a good book: You simply want the story to go on and on.

[The film's] trio is like a looser, funnier version of the family of wrecks in Woody Allen’s ”Interiors,” though Holofcener, it must be said, is still a lot better at creating captivatingly screwed-up women than she is at figuring out new and improved ways for them to “grow.”

As smart and observant as it is, ''Lovely and Amazing'' doesn't really go anywhere. Ms. Holofcener's sharp, witty dialogue shows an ear acutely tuned to the edgy, competitive nuances of contemporary banter... But once family members have weathered their personal crises, little seems to have changed.

[Lovely & Amazing] is a small movie that doesn't feel small. It's mostly because Holofcener, who also wrote the script, clearly made the effort not just to develop her characters but also to listen to them and let them tell her where the story should go. It's a movie made with care and attention to emotional detail, and these days that can make a film seem priceless.