Emanuele Crialese won the Silver Lion at Venice for this impressionistic tale of an early-20th-century Sicilian family making the journey to the new world, which, despite being overlong and occasionally lapsing into unnecessary whimsy, manages through its sheer scale and lightly drawn yet memorable characters to lodge itself in the mind. Vincenzo Amato plays the young father with a blind faith in what America can offer, and Charlotte Gainsbourg a mysterious young Englishwoman who hitches passage, and with whom he makes a gradual connection. However, it is the ensemble sequences – the hundreds enduring the ghastly conditions of the voyage and the subsequent rigours of immigration at Ellis Island – that are the most involving and gently inspiring.

PG, 118 mins

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